Photo by: Matthew Watson
In a forum I contribute to, someone recently asked this question:
“We are interested in allowing our non-members to create and maintain communities as a way of creating awareness around our association and as an opportunity to engage potential members. Are any of your organizations looking at this as an option as well?”
If we look at the theory of social communities, this tactic is likely to disappoint. Two basic reasons:
- What is the non-member’s incentive to create a group in the community for an association they don’t belong to? Creating a group is a high bar to pass anyway, but even if they’re going to take the time and expend the effort to create a group, they are more likely to do it on Linkedin or similar where they have exposure to millions of users.
- We already know that on an ongoing basis, user-generated communities perform poorer than staff-created communities. We should expect groups set up by non-members to perform no better than a member-generated communities. Because members have paid dues to the organization, they are invested in it, and will be more likely to nurture the group than a non-member.
It’s said Wikipedia doesn’t work in theory, it only works in practice, so your mileage may vary.
There are other tactics that are supported by the theory of social communities which are more likely to succeed. This is where you should be focusing your efforts for maximum return on your investment of time and your organization’s investment of funds.
