Auditing what works & doesn't in your community
You don't always need to reinvent the wheel to bring more value and ROI
“If it ain't broke, don't fix it”
I bet a lot of us have come across this phrase at some point in our lives. While I do value letting things that work continue to do so, I also think there is a big flaw with this phrase that can seep into the work that we do.
Just because something isn’t broken, doesn’t mean it is performing at its best. It also adds to the mindset that there are no improvements necessary which we all know hurts our overall growth.
So, I’d like to reframe this phrase into “If it ain’t broke, still revisit.”
And this is what this newsletter is all about. Auditing what works and doesn’t in your community.
Back to the basics
Community builders are in charge of a lot, especially if you’re on a small team or a team of one. You’re often building out the onboarding program, and event strategy, collaborating with cross-functional partners, and the list goes on.
Because of this, we often keep adding more and more onto our plate without really taking the time to review what we’re currently doing in the community and if it’s working.
While new initiatives can often drive growth, if we’re not focused on refining our current strategies then it doesn’t matter how many people come into our community because they’re not going to stick around.
So what do we do? It’s time to go back to the fundamentals and refine, refine, refine
Revisit your current programs
When in doubt, sometimes the best move that you can make for your community is to go back to your current programs and audit. This can include:
Revisiting your new member onboarding program
Are members finding the resources that they need to find? Are members going through the onboarding program and engaging/being active in the community? One great tip from Shannon Emery is, “One of the things my first team did was to create different accounts at different levels to review the experience regularly. Granted, this may mean a few weird emails but the outside testing is crucial. You get to see what you're missing, what needs to be added, etc.”
Going through your community engagement rituals
Another good idea is to revisit your current engagement rituals. Are these content series still providing value? Are members engaging with them or are the numbers declining? Do members even like these anymore or want something different? This is all-important to revisit before building more programs on top of it.
Auditing your events
I think we can all agree that online events saw a huge spike since 2020 and while having events is a great part of your community strategy, it’s smart to audit. Members can easily get overwhelmed by the amount of content and events that there are now and if your numbers have been dropping or if you’re simply not getting the reach that you once had, maybe it’s time to revisit your event programming. This could mean running fewer events per month, quarter, etc., working with new speakers, and so on.
Just because something worked before, doesn’t mean it will always work the same.
Build upon what’s working
Now that we’ve audited our current programs it’s a good time to build upon what’s working to scale it even more.
When I used to work in advertising, a big thing that we did was optimize our ad campaigns until they got a point of diminishing returns. In short, is this ad as good as it can be? If the answer was no, we kept optimizing.
I think the same can be done for programs that are currently working well in community. For example, if you have high-performing community rituals that take place with a lot of engagement and good feedback, are there opportunities to get these seen by more members? An idea that comes to mind is including these in a weekly round up that you send to members to encourage more participation. Adding it to your community newsletter or even creating a blog series with these to push out to the wider network.
All things can be improved upon, and sometimes it makes a bigger impact by expanding what’s already working versus starting from scratch.
Tl;DR: Audit and optimize before adding. Go back to your current programs and see what needs to be changed before simply adding more to what you’re currently doing.
The important thing to remember is not to feel like you have to reinvent the wheel at every turn. You got this!
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