The following is a guest post from Socious, a sponsor of the 2015 Online Community Software Selection Guide. Attend our joint webinar, How to Sell Your Association’s Online Community Strategy to Your Board and Executive Team, on Wednesday, September 30, 2015 at 2pm EDT. Click here to learn more or register.
When most association executives think about how private online community strategies can increase member engagement, discussion forums come to mind. While peer-to-peer discussion board features in your online community platform are a central part of your engagement plan (and often the most used part of the community), they are only one of the ways that members can participate in your community.
The most active online member communities offer members a variety of engagement opportunities that community managers can roll out over time. Discussion forums (including those with built-in email listserv functionality) are the most obvious way to engage, so they are usually the first place that community mangers send members. However, over time the novelty of peer-to-peer discussions can wane. That is why it is important to incorporate a board range of engagement features into your long-term community-building strategy.
By adding calls to action to do things like comment on videos and documents or take an instant poll in the community, you’ll see higher contributions in all of your available engagement opportunities.
Associations that run their member engagement programs on the Socious online community platform often start small, as they should. However, over time they introduce a diverse set of ways that members can engage each other and the organization online.
Due to the focus on discussion forums and sheer number of engagement features in the Socious platform, association leaders rarely make plans to utilize all of the tools in the initial strategy. Even some current Socious customers don’t fully get their hands around all of the engagement opportunities that they can provide to their members until one or two years after their online member community is live.
Engagement Tactics You’ll Find in the Socious Online Community Software That May Surprise You
To help you look beyond your community’s initial launch and make a sustainable plan to grow member engagement over time, I’d like to give you a peek into some of the less obvious tools at your disposal. Below are five things that you probably didn’t know that you could do in the Socious online community platform.
Manage Your Surveys and Member Research
Why pay for an additional survey tool when you can send and process surveys directly from your association’s online community platform? The Socious online community platform gives you the ability to identify any group – from your entire membership to a specific chapter or membership to a small board – and collect information via online surveys.
Having your survey integrated into one of your primary member-facing systems helps you avoid the added cost, people-hours, and potential for human error that comes with exporting a survey target list from your membership database and importing it into another platform to send the survey.
Due to the security and the granular segmentation capabilities of the Socious online community platform, many associations even use the built-in survey tool for committee and board voting.
Collect Ideas from Your Membership
Whether you’re crowdsourcing ideas for your next conference or prioritizing the issues that your association will advocate for with legislators, you can leverage Socious’s built-in idea center.
This features allows you to open up a crowdsourcing space to all members or a subset of members (e.g. a committee, specific member type, or work group) to submit ideas. Then, other members can comment, rank, and vote on each item.
Aggregating the voice of your members on an ongoing basis enables your association to create more market-driven products, programs, and events.
Manage Your Association’s Chapters
Private online communities are a great way to keep your membership engaged. However, simultaneously building community among chapter leaders and members can be difficult. Some associations even chose to dissolve chapter structures because they are too expensive to manage.
The Socious online community software platform makes chapter management easy for your association. Whether your association’s components are autonomous, they align closely under the umbrella of the parent organization, or some hybrid of both models, Socious help you handle complex chapter structures.
While most association community software lets you segment your content and conversation in a way that chapter members can participate in both general membership discussions, as well as get all of the chapter information, within the same platform. However, Socious takes it several steps further.
Chapter leaders can have access to micro-versions of the full Socious platform. This means that, along with standard social collaboration features, chapters can manage their websites, run events and process registration financials, manage dues, send surveys and email campaigns, and more much.
The parent association can play the hero because they are giving their chapter leaders a comprehensive toolset for managing their chapters, while also having the necessary control and reports to support their chapter structure.
Turn Ordinary Web Pages into Engagement Engines
Every association is different and so is their member engagement strategy. For instance, the people involved, their target audience, and the maturity of the community vary greatly.
This reality can result in simple online community software alone leaving holes in your member experience. You can avoid this by using your online community platform’s built-in content management system (CMS) to create content that fills in the gaps.
However, static content alone does not always raise engagement. Socious has a proprietary library of easy-to-use code snippets that allow your association to drop interactive community features onto ordinary CMS web pages. With these dozens of simple codes, you can pull in external content, like YouTube videos and Twitter feeds, as well as expand the reach of your private online community features, like listing the hottest files in your community, adding a search bar, or displaying all of the connections in your social network.
The idea behind this flexibility is you break out of the mold of traditional community software and give your members a custom online experience to increase engagement.
Save Time by Being Smart About Your AMS Integration
Like most association online community platforms, Socious has pre-built integrations with all major association management software (AMS) platforms. This allows member information, including committee and board membership, to stay in synch between the two platforms. Having the data match ensures that people have access to the right parts of your private online community depending on who they are.
However, AMS software and online community software are two very different types of systems. Your association’s community platform is usually a big part of your member-facing web experience, while your AMS is largely a backend system. This means that not all data in your AMS will be piped into your online community software.
To help you make sure that your members have the type of experience in your community that is relevant and keeps them engaged, the Socious platform has built-in business logic to translate membership data from your AMS or member database into an outstanding online community experience.
Along with standard chapter, committee, and group permissions, the Socious implementation teams analyzes your AMS data to determine if other member data could trigger a change in the members’ experience. Examples of this include past event registration, member type, and partner status.
Association Management Takeaway
Before you implement an online community software platform for your association solely based on the forum/listserv functionality, take time to think about your long-term community strategy.
Effective online community management involves a lot of mass and one-on-one outreach to members to bring them back to the community to participate. When you only offer opportunities to contribute to discussions, like you see in LinkedIn groups, your organization runs the risk of blending into the noise that your members encounter online and in their inboxes every day.
Mix it up. Get to know the range of features in your association’s community platform. More engagement opportunities leads to higher member engagement.
