What we’re looking for from Online Community platform developers in 2014

Image By: cesar bojorquez

We’re on a first name basis with dozens of online community platform developers, we constantly attend their product demonstrations, and from time to time we get sneak peeks into their roadmaps. At the same time, we’ve spoken and consulted with hundreds of community managers over the years to better understand their needs. We’ve got a good handle on what’s currently on the market, and what direction it needs to head in to keep up with organizations’ needs.

As 2014 is now upon us, most online community technology vendors have locked in their 2014 roadmaps. From our experience and vantage point, here’s what we’re hoping to see from online community platform developers this year:

1. Round Out Existing Features: Organizations are asking too much of their community platforms, and for many community software developers, this has led to a very looooooong list of features, many of which are half-baked and unfinished. An online community needs only a few core things to drive engagement and collaboration. Generally speaking, we’re looking for vendors to double-down on their existing features and perfect them, not add a bunch of new features this year.
2. Simplify Existing Features: Related to the above, some communities’ features have become bloated, often requiring dozens of clicks to complete what should be a simple process, which stifles community engagement. In 2014, we’d like to see developers ask “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?” and give community administrators more options to suppress fields or parts of the application that overcomplicate the user experience.
3. Workflow Automation: Driving community engagement is a process. If you can automate basic community management tasks, you can focus on higher-level tasks and community strategy. A few vendors are beginning to recognize this and have begun developing workflow automation features. Some of the better examples we’ve seen on this front are granting a user additional permissions/privileges after a certain engagement threshold is passed, and configuring a workflow that automatically kicks off community alerts to various stakeholders, issues a badge, and automatically issues an admin-configured welcome message when a user joins a group. We’d like to see more of this.
4. Mobile-friendly Pages: It’s a mobile world. Online communities need to be mobile friendly. Having a native mobile app is nice to have, but this assumes that the user will take the time to download and install the app and be able to remember their username and password in order to log in. Mobile friendly pages require nothing more than a mobile browser. When paired with an auto-login feature, your community is ready to travel.
5. Engagement Reporting: Most online community developers preach the gospel of Return on Engagement (ROE), so your organization should demand sophisticated engagement reporting features so that you can understand your ROE. Ideally, you want to be able to run reports out of your CRM database to determine if your active community members more likely to renew, attend events, volunteer, evangelize membership, make voluntary contributions to a PAC or foundation, and other revenue-generating actions.
6. Comparative Analysis: Wouldn’t you like to know how your community is doing compared to others on the same platform? Imagine if, when you logged in as the community admin, you could see that your community has 10% more engagement than every other community on the same platform. What if the platform developer showed you the top five most engaging communities on their platform so that you could emulate their techniques? Granted, you’ll never get a true apples-to-apples comparison, but this would be better than the status quo.
7. New Pricing Models: Online community software vendors have a vested interest to see your community succeed. If your organization is successful, you’re more likely to renew your contract, right? But we’d like to see vendors more directly tie their success to your success. What if a vendor introduced a pricing model based on active monthly users? You’d pay only for users who actually engage in the community. This is probably a pipe dream, but it sure would incentivize the developers to focus on developing features that drive engagement.

What’s on your wish list for your online community vendor in 2014?