chapter 10

Building your community strategy

In 2018, I ran a simple poll asking community leaders at large brands if they had a community strategy. The results were stunning. Over half the respondents didn’t have a community strategy!

If you don’t have a strategy, you’re flying blind. You don’t know where you’re going or how to get there. There’s a good chance you’re showing up each day and responding to what’s happening without ever proactively driving what’s happening. That’s not community leadership.

If you don’t have a strategy, you’re probably repeating the same activities every day, week, or month without any idea if (a) they are the right activities or (b) that they’re having the intended impact. Without a strategy, it’s unlikely you have the full support of your colleagues or agreement from the senior leadership team on what you’re doing.

If you don’t have a strategy, you probably haven’t dug deep to discover what your audience needs and desires. You might not have identified what technology you need and what your requirements will be as you grow. You might not even know what skills you need, when you need to recruit more staff, or what the cost of your community will be.

But perhaps the biggest sign of not having a good community strategy is feeling overwhelmed. This feeling of being overwhelmed comes from trying to do too many things at once and not making any progress. A strategy is essentially how you allocate limited resources to achieve the biggest impact. Creating a strategy forces you to prioritise and ensure you’re not trying to do too many things. A really good strategy zeros in on the handful of things which really matter to you and your audience and aims to do those things really well. Most importantly, a great strategy takes your community to the next level. If you haven’t seen much progress in your community over the past year, or if you’re still doing the same tasks as a year ago, it’s time to create (or revamp) your community strategy.

This chapter is going to pull together everything we have learned so far to create a clear and coherent community strategy. I’m going to help you develop your community strategy from scratch and ensure it’s aligned to every possible best practice.

What’s in a community strategy?

A community strategy is structured into the following sections:

1. Executive summary
2. Defining the problem or opportunity
   1. a)Community analysis (existing only)
   2. b)Internal analysis
   3. c)Audience analysis
   4. d)Summary SWOT analysis
3. Creating the community concept
   1. a)Guiding principles
   2. b)Value statement for the brand
   3. c)Value statement for members
4. Short-term strategic plan: 0–3 months
5. Near-term strategic plan: 3–9 months
6. Intermediate strategic plan: 9–18 months
7. Long-term strategic plan: 18–36 months
8. Technology requirements
9. Measurement
10. Mitigating risk factors
11. Appendices

Creating a strategy for an existing community is slightly different from creating a strategy for a new community. There are some sections of this chapter which only apply to existing communities. If you haven’t started your community yet, you can skip these sections. But try not to skip any other section. Each phase logically leads into the next. If you skip a phase, you’re probably taking a ‘leap of faith’.

Leaps of faith are great for Indiana Jones movies, but they’re not so great when it comes to strategy.

1 Executive summary

Every community strategy should begin with a summary for the busy people who won’t have time to read the full strategy. While this section appears first, you should write it last (otherwise what are you summarising?)

Your summary should outline:

1. The problem this strategy is trying to solve (or opportunity it will seize).
2. How the strategy will solve it.
3. Key discoveries from research.
4. Key value of the community to you and the audience.
5. Required resources.
6. Key challenges to overcome.

This should be no more than two pages. I often include a simple one-page overview graphic showing the community strategy. If you’re working in a large organisation, you probably also want to create a short presentation of five to ten slides here which can be easily shared around and understood.

Your goal in the summary is to make it easy for someone to grasp what you’re trying to do and the implications of what you’re trying to do, and say ‘Yes, go for it!’

2 Defining the problem or opportunity (ref: Chapter 2)

Your community should always solve a problem (or seize an opportunity) for you, your audience, and your organisation. Before you can do that, you need to define this problem or opportunity by undertaking background research we covered in Chapter 2.

This section should summarise what you’ve learned from your research. Try to keep this brief. Selectively use one or two key charts, graphs, and quotes that best support your findings here and drop everything else into the appendices.

This section will usually include the following:

a) Community analysis (ref: Chapters 1 and 9)

If you have an existing community, begin by analysing how it’s doing today. Don’t simply publish graphs showing metrics going up or down, but explain why these are going up or down. We covered this in detail in the last chapter.

You should endeavour to anticipate and answer questions you’re likely to get. These questions will usually include:

1. Is the number of people visiting the community rising or falling? Look at the overall number of visitors to the community and where your visitors are coming from. This gives you a good indicator of the overall level of interest in your community and where the interest is coming from. Now use the principles from the last chapter to explain why the number is rising or falling. What’s changed about the community or its audience?
2. Are members finding the community engaging? Look at your total contributions divided by your total number of visitors (or active participants). This shows you if members are finding the community more or less engaging when they do visit. Now find out why. What else has changed during this time period?
3. Are members performing behaviours that are useful to us? This is your value and impact metrics. Are members doing the things you need them to do to achieve your goal? If not, then why not?

You can find our measurement spreadsheets at www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity to help.

A quick word of warning. In many communities, traffic rises and falls on a seasonal basis. Some communities become noticeably busier or quieter during festive periods and summer holidays. It’s usually best to use year on year (YoY) data instead of trends over the past few months. This means it’s usually better to compare March 2021 to March 2020 as opposed to, say, March 2021 to January 2021.

Comparing how well you’re doing today against three months ago often just reveals seasonal trends. Comparing how well you’re doing compared with the same month last year gives you far more useful information. Use this research to write one to three concise problem statements (see box).

b) Internal analysis (ref: Chapter 1)

In the internal analysis you’re aiming to assess whether you (or your organisation) have the right goals and the resources (skill, money, and time) to achieve those goals. During this process you want to surface any potential problems or concerns stakeholders might have.

When working with a larger organisation, I try to host a workshop to bring together key stakeholders for a few hours to identify the goals of the community, build relationships, and provide an opportunity for everyone to voice their opinions, objections, and recommendations. Getting two people discussing an issue in the same room is the ‘stitch in time that can save nine’ later on.

If you can’t host a workshop, then interview each stakeholder individually (you can find our interview templates at www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity). These interviews should uncover the fears and desires of stakeholders. I typically rank needs and fears by aggregate mentions. You can find an example below:

Your goals for the community should come from this research. Often the goals which pop up most frequently become the goals for the community. Limit your goals to between one to three to get started.

Resources check

During this phase, I also recommend assessing whether your organisation has the skills and resources to execute its plan. For example, many organisations trying to launch a new community from scratch hire community leaders who have managed large communities but never launched one themselves. This is a completely different skillset.

If you want to review the skills of you or your community team, you can use our community accelerator tool: www.feverbee.com/accelerator. You can list any skill or resource gaps in this section too. For example, if you want to launch a superuser programme and no one has done that before – it’s a good idea to learn that skill first.

We’ll come back to resources later.

c) Audience analysis (ref: Chapter 2)

Now we need to figure out what our audience truly desires.

Remember all the research we did in Chapter 2 to find out who our audience are and what they want? This is where you summarise the results of that research. You should be able to identify the different segments of your audience, who they are, why each segment visits (or doesn’t visit) the community, and what they want.

Broader sector changes

You should also use your data to look at broader changes in the sector here. Are more or fewer people interested in your topic? Are you likely to see newcomers drying up or increasing? What specific niches and new trends are emerging? What technologies are rising and falling in popularity? Use a typical PEST analysis (political, economical, social, and technological) if you need a framework to think about trends.1

Your community should always be swimming with the tide, not holding out trying to fight current trends. It’s best to incorporate new trends as quickly as possible rather than dismiss and fight against them. Be a leader not a laggard!

List any major trends in this section. For example:

d) Summary SWOT analysis

Now you can summarise all the research above into a simple SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis.

SWOT analyses have been a classic feature of business school strategy classes since the mid-1960s. In a SWOT analysis, you list your community’s (or organisation’s) strengths and weaknesses at the top and the opportunities and threats at the bottom.

The strengths and weaknesses should only cover internal factors already present in the community and the organisation. The opportunities and threats are external factors that come from outside the community. Some of the typical aspects of these are included below:

You should be able to list all your key findings into a SWOT analysis. It’s a good idea to share this document around and solicit feedback in the process. Remember the more input people have had into defining the problem, the more likely they will own the solution.

By this point you should know:

1. The problem(s) you’re trying to solve.
2. What your colleagues (or you) want.
3. Who your audience(s) are and what each segment desires.
4. Broader industry and sector trends.

The research is the foundation upon which you build the rest of the community. When a community effort goes wrong, I can usually trace the problem back to a failure to do great research (or worse, ignoring great research).

3 Creating the community concept (ref: Chapter 2)

Now you’ve done the research, you can start to craft the vision for the community and its value to both your members and your organisation. This is what I call the community concept.

If the concept is right, it becomes the magnet which draws members in and keeps them returning to generate incredible results for both themselves and your organisation.

If the concept is wrong, your community will have flickers of life but never quite catch fire. Typically the solution to a failing community is to relaunch it with a better, more powerful community concept.

Creating a community concept isn’t a ‘spark of genius’ act of creation. It’s simply following your research to its natural and logical conclusion. The community concept you are creating (or, for an existing community, refining) should take advantage of your organisation’s strengths and opportunities while mitigating its weaknesses and threats.

There are three parts to your community vision: (a) your guiding principles, (b) your value statement for the brand, and (c) your value statement for members.

a) Guiding principles (ref: Chapter 2)

Your guiding principles are a set of five to seven constraints which narrow the scope and focus of your community to a few specific areas. Your principles should identify who the community is for (and not for), the value to the organisation, the value to members, what makes the community unique, and possibly a key challenge to overcome.

This is where your SWOT analysis really helps. The purpose of this stage is to deliberately close off areas your community could pursue to concentrate all your efforts on a handful of areas you can do extremely well. I would recommend the principles covering the following.

• Principle 1: Decide the target audience. Outline who the community is for and who it isn’t for. It should be for a specific segment of your audience. If it’s for everybody (‘all of our customers’), then it’s really for nobody. You can always expand later, but start focused on just one or two audience(s) for now.
• Principle 2: List the unique, powerful value to members. Explain why this community is satisfying urgent, relevant daily needs members have (which they can’t satisfy anywhere else). If the need isn’t urgent or relevant to their daily lives members won’t visit very often. Again, use your member profiles to answer this. You shouldn’t have any competition for satisfying this need.
• Principle 3: List the value to you/your organisation. What is the indispensable impact your community offers your organisation? You need to be super specific here. What is the urgent problem that only your community can overcome? Is this an urgent, immediate, relevant need for you and your colleagues?
• Principle 4: List what you need members to do to achieve this value. As succinctly as possible, identify the key behaviour(s) members must undertake. This is the critical battle of persuasion you must win. What has prevented this from happening so far? What is your unique, new approach to overcoming it?
• Principle 5: Explain how this will be future proof. Using your opportunities and threats from above, explain why your community will survive in a world of constant change. What is the sustainable competitive advantage the community will create which will keep people coming back? This might be a unique asset the community creates, a specific focus on the audience, or a philosophy of following the audience whatever platform they may use.

You can add more than five principles if you need them, but try not to go above seven. Your principles restrict your efforts to a few core areas while still allowing plenty of freedom for the strategy to emerge and evolve. These principles serve as the guardrails for the rest of your community strategy.

As these principles will guide everything else you do in your strategy, make sure you get support for them before proceeding any further. You can do this in a collaboration workshop with colleagues or go through each of them in turn to present why decisions have been taken and address any concerns your colleagues might have.

b) Value statement for the brand (ref: Chapter 1)

Now you can get more specific about how your community helps you or your organisation. You should identify your short-, medium-, and long-term goals for the community along with the key metrics you’re tracking. We can look at our roadmap we put together earlier here to create this section.

This is a process. You’re not going to be able to do everything you want from day one. Instead focus on slow, iterative improvement. It’s a lot easier to get it right over time than the first time. You’re not going to be able to answer every question or recruit a small army of supporters on day one. But you might aim to answer 25% of questions and recruit 5 superusers within three months.

We can now create a simple value statement based upon this roadmap. I always try to make this value statement inspirational. Anyone who reads this should be pumped and excited to help make this happen.

c) Value statement for members (ref: Chapter 2)

Now you need to clearly identify why members will join and participate in your community. What is the value for them? This should come directly from the audience research you’ve undertaken already.

It’s common at this stage to list every possible benefit members could want. But that’s not strategic, that’s wishful thinking. You need to ignore the majority of benefits to zero in on the core few that you can deliver on. Don’t try to do everything, just do three to five things extremely well.

4 Short-term strategic plan: 0–3 months

Now you know the kind of concept you’re trying to create, you can start putting together your plan to achieve it.

a) Strategic plan (ref: Chapters 5–8)

At the beginning of each phase of your strategy, create a simple overview of your strategic plan (see box). Some organisations prefer using ‘objectives and key results’ framework. This begins with a broad objective (i.e. create a scalable customer support model) and then lists specific activities which must be achieved during that time period (i.e. develop and launch a community, attract 200 active participants, answer 50% of questions organically).2

You can see a completed example below:

b) How to select your tactics (ref: Chapters 5–8)

It’s pretty easy to come up with dozens of tactics to achieve any objective (you can find 260+ tactics in a resource on www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity). The real challenge is narrowing them to the core few which will have the biggest possible impact.

You can use three-step criteria for thinking about the right tactics:

1. How many people will the tactic reach? The best tactics are those which reach the maximum possible percentage of your target audience. By reach, we mean they have not just received a message but opened it and are able to recall it. A mass email, for example, might technically land in the inboxes of everyone but few people will both open and be able to recall it. Changing the homepage might have more reach as members are more engaged with what they’re seeing.
2. To what extent will it change a member’s behaviour? Will the tactic profoundly change a member’s behaviour within the community in a positive way? Again, a mass email is far less likely to change behaviour than direct, personal messages from the community manager. Often reach comes at a cost of depth; you may need to find a balance between the two.
3. How long will the change last for? Some tactics are novelties which wear off quickly. Others lead to prolonged changes in behaviour. Sometimes you won’t know the answer to this question until you’ve tried it and seen the longevity of the impact.

We can use these criteria to make assumptions about the best tactics for our needs. For example, creating a blog post in the community probably won’t be seen by a large number of members, is unlikely to change behaviour much, and whatever change does happen might not last for long.

However, other tactics, such as creating a superuser programme or a detailed newcomer journey, are likely to fare better in all three categories. Use your judgement initially to select the right tactics. As you begin getting data, you can prune the ones which aren’t working and test new ideas.

c) Identifying resources

For every tactic you aim to undertake you should be able to answer the five key questions below:

Example 1: Create a journey for newcomers

This is an example of a tactic. It includes the target audience, desired change in behaviour, a brief description, the individual steps, and required resources:

I can’t stress enough how important it is not to just come up with a tactic but to break it down into distinct steps and estimate how long each step will take. Often things that seem simple ‘let’s send out an email to promote the community’ actually take a lot more time if you need to get approval from marketing, hire a designer, and have it proofread beforehand.

In fact, if you want to execute this really well, you might spend time researching which tactics have been most successful in the past, run split-tests, and create a more personalised experience based upon what information members might have already given you.

Now you can see how executing this tactic at a world-class level takes a lot more time and resources. Fortunately, we’ve gained the time to do this by reducing the number of tactics down to just a core few.

a) Resources and budgeting

It’s easy to brainstorm a list of all the things you want to do, but that’s not strategy, that’s wishful thinking. Strategy is recognising your resources are limited and deploying those resources to achieve the biggest possible impact. For each phase of your strategy, list the time and budget required. Distinguish between those which are ‘one off’ activities and those which are ongoing. You can see an example below:

This is a good summary, but it excludes the technology and staffing costs. To estimate staffing, we first need to average our one-time hours over the space of 12 weeks and add it to the repetitive weekly activities.

This comes to 25.6 hours per week.3 If we consider a community manager is likely to be called into other meetings and have the occasional holiday, we can assume this project needs a single community manager at this stage.

Let’s estimate a community manager costs $75k per year. We can add this to an estimated platform cost (let’s say, $85k per year) to get the full figure.

Now you have a fully budgeted community programme. You know roughly how much the community will cost and what skills and resources are needed to achieve it. Perhaps more importantly, once you have a budget, you can make requests for more staff based upon the extra activities that it will allow you to do. Being able to properly budget your community is a tremendous skill to have.

5 Near-term strategic plan: 3–9 months

Once you know how to complete one phase, completing the remaining phases isn’t too difficult. You simply replicate the same process for each phase. Next you can do the short (3–9 months), intermediate (9–18 months), and long-term community roadmap (18–36 months).

As your community grows, the benefits of the community should become increasingly apparent. Therefore, you should anticipate being able to invest more resources in the community. I typically assume an increase in resources in the region of 15%–25% for each phase (or per year). Over time, you can use these resources to satisfy more of the goals identified by stakeholders above.

At this stage you may also begin growing a community team to work with you. Make sure you include what the community team structure might look like, the skills of each team, and what each person will be responsible for. Once you begin to build a community team, you should also include what a team structure looks like and the skills they will need.

There are plenty of tools you can use to put together your team structure. My preference is to use Lucidchart, which has a handy add-on if you’re developing your strategy in Google Docs.

P.S. You can find our community team template structures, skill recommendations for each role, and job descriptions at: www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity

6 Intermediate strategic plan: 9–18 months

Now you can drop in your longer-term plans in the same format as listed above. At this point you should assume you have 30%–60% more resources than you did at the beginning. If you are looking to move platforms, this might appear in the intermediate term rather than the near term.

Sometimes projects such as a big technology platform migration might take a lot longer than nine months. In these cases a tactic might be mentioned in several phases of the plan. Make sure recruitment is listed as a tactic with a clear list of the relevant skills and resources required. If you’re working for a large organisation, you should also spend considerable time in this phase building and sustaining internal support.

Remember, use the same structure as in phase one and update your tactics as necessary.

7 Long-term strategic plan: 18–36 months

Now it’s time to think about the big vision for the long term. What will this community look like in three years’ time? What is your community at its full potential? After three years you might also assume your resources for the community have increased by 100%–300% and things are beginning to develop quite quickly.

Try and tackle as many of your goals as you have the resources for. Consider what the community team might look like, what kind of skills you need to recruit for, and what kind of systems you will need to put in place to make this vision a reality. Consider the technology implications too. If you have a big technology change in mind, it’s best to start seeing the idea and scoping it out over a year in advance.

8 Technology requirements (ref: Chapter 3)

Writing up the technology requirements isn’t the most fun part of the strategy, but it’s important to do it well. A failure to write good technology specifications can cause innumerable problems later on. Taking the extra time to do this well here will pay off many times over.

If you’re launching a new community from scratch, you should go through the same process we went through in Chapter 3. Remember to identify who in your organisation (if you’re working for one) needs to be included and bring them along in the journey.

List the category of platform you’re using (and why), create your membership projection, and use the objectives you’ve listed at each phase of your strategy to create your use cases. You should list your technology needs for each phase of the strategy. And remember, each use case should be converted into a specific platform requirement.

Finally, identify the design priorities. Which features and calls to action should be prioritised within the community? These should be the ones which best support your goals. You don’t need to develop the entire web specification at this point (that’s a separate strand of work), but you do need to have broad agreement about the look and functionality for the community you’re creating.

Remember you can find the community experience templates at www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity

9 Measurement (ref: Chapter 1)

Great, you’ve created your strategy! But how are you going to know if it’s working?

The next step is to build your measurement framework.

Online communities hoover up a colossal amount of data. You can track almost every click and action in your community. It’s easy to become lost in the sea of data flowing through your fingertips. Should you measure how much time members spend on your community? How many visitors register? Or the demographics of participants?

Don’t gather copious amounts of data just because you can. Look back at your strategic plan and decide which metrics best reflect if the plan is working. If you’ve done the strategy well, this shouldn’t be too difficult. You should have already set your targets.

Here is an example:

Notice now we’re only measuring the things that reflect whether our strategy is succeeding or not. We’re being clear what the targets are before we begin and we’ll notice very early on if we’re falling above or below this line.

How you gather the data and calculate each metric will vary by the platform, but the precise metric you’re using should be consistent regardless of the platform you’re using.

10 Mitigating risk factors (ref: Chapter 9)

In this section you should identify and mitigate the risks involved in launching a community. You can use our table from the previous chapter here to drop these in and your efforts to mitigate each risk factor. Remember to assign a person responsible.

This section of the strategy is a great place to address the concerns stakeholders have raised and assure them you’re taking it seriously. You’re far more likely to get the support of your colleagues if you first take the time to truly understand their concerns and ensure you have a plan to resolve them.

11 Appendices

Finally you can add in your appendices which contain the research, background information, any important models or philosophy and further reading. This shouldn’t be a data-dump to prove how hard you’ve been working. It should be a carefully curated set of supporting information to answer most of the likely questions that might be raised.