Why and how to deactivate groups

In the lifecycle of every community, eventually you will need to slough off the underperforming ones, especially when you allow members to set up their own groups. Groups with little to no activity negatively impact engagement because, on the whole, users prefer to engage in the most active or successful discussions. Ideally you should have a policy for whether groups can stay active or if they should be deactivated (I’ll cover things that should be in that policy in a future post), but few organizations have done this.

I recently worked with a client to clean up their group structure. The client had allowed members to create their own groups. The number of communities had swelled to 70, and they had no policy to deactivate dormant groups. It was spreading the engagement around too thinly, so I worked with the client to develop objective criteria for deactivating the dormant groups and communicate to group owners and members about the changes. Here’s how I did it, step-by-step:

• I downloaded a group activity report that contained the number of members, number of views, and number of discussion posts since inception.
• I created three tabs in an excel spreadsheet and put each of these sorts into a separate tab.
• I reviewed them with the client and recommended 6 core groups that should be retained. The rest were put on the list of groups to be deactivated.
• I sent a message to everyone in the community describing the changes that were coming. Here’s an excerpt: “We’ve learned that users prefer to engage in the most active groups. So we’re going to focus discussions into a smaller number of groups. We’ll soon deactivate (not delete) groups that haven’t seen much recent activity so that we can concentrate discussions into some of the more popular groups. If you’re the owner of a group that’s being deactivated, the community manager will be contacting you to let you know when that’s happening. Group members will also get advance notice of the changes and tips to help them retain any content they’ve created or contacts they’ve met.”
• I then sent a message to the owners of groups that were about to be deactivated. Here’s an excerpt of that message: “As we studied user behaviors in the community, we learned that activity leads to more activity, so one of the changes we’re making is to concentrate discussion posts into the most popular groups. Activity in your group hasn’t been as high as in some others. As part of our next phase of development for the community, we’ve decided to temporarily deactivate your group, while we focus energy in the most popular groups. In choosing which groups to focus on and which ones to deactivate, we considered the number of group posts, members, and views. I wanted to give you plenty of advance notice that we’ll be deactivating your group on or after June 10th. Your group won’t be deleted, but it will be temporarily ‘hidden,’ so to speak.”
• Then I messaged all members of the group, letting them know that their group was being deactivated. Here’s an excerpt of that message: “Activity in this group hasn’t been as high as in some others. As part of our next phase of development for the community, we’ve made the decision to temporarily deactivate this group, while we refine our approach on a targeted list of six core groups. In choosing which groups to focus on and which ones to deactivate, we considered the number of group posts, members, and views. This group will be deactivated on June 10. So what’s next? We encourage you to join and participate in one of the six core groups that we’ll be focusing our efforts on going forward. Invite your colleagues to participate too. If you’re interested in helping to moderate one of the groups, let me know! And as the core groups become even more successful, we can then reactivate this group.”

We also invited the people who created groups to become Community Ambassadors, which helped soften the blow some felt. Only one group owner asked us to reconsider, and after she agreed to abide by a job description for group owners, we agreed to allow her group to continue.