Let me be brutally honest. The root causes of most online community problems usually aren’t software issues. Online community troubles can almost always be traced to organizational shortcomings. Your organization shouldn’t launch an online community if you haven’t laid the groundwork to be successful with an online community.
Image by: Taber Andrew Bain
How can you tell if your team is ready for community? Well, here’s good start: Today we’re introducing the FREE Online Community Readiness Assessment. It’s a six question quiz that in less than five minutes gives you a good indication — formatted to a green, yellow, red light in a traffic signal — of how prepared your organization is to be successful with an online community. It’ll even identify which areas your organization needs to improve on to get community-ready.
Based on our experience working with and observing hundreds of organizations’ communities, we’ve identified six hallmarks of organizations that predict community success. From these six hallmarks, we’ve distilled this six question assessment that helps you determine whether or not you’re ready to launch a community.
The anonymized assessment data will also be part of a panel discussion I’ll be leading at the 2014 digitalNow conference on how leaders set the tone for successful communities. (Check out the full list of my speaking appearances)
The Online Community Readiness Assessment is free, but keep in mind that you shouldn’t consider your results as the end-all-be-all final answer on whether or not your organization should launch a community. Click here to complete the assessment, and contact us if you’d like to talk more about your organization’s community readiness.
By the way, the assessment is powered by a very cool tech tool called Decisionaire. Give it a look.
