10 Tactics for Growing Your Community Online

Morgan Sully — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 20:56:22 +0000

Last week I attended an NTEN Member Appreciation Webinar entitled: 10 Tactics for Growing Your Community Online. As NAMAC's Online Community Manager, I found this webinar very helpful, engaging and well worth my time.

The webinar, provided by the awesome N-TEN, can be found in context here:
http://tinyurl.com/2mtekz

The following are the main bullet points that were discussed at the *session:

1) Let the potential members of the community know why you are providing an online community, and how being an active member of a community would benefit them.

2) Use every opportunity to showcase your online community.

3) Seed the community with groups, forum postings, blogs, etc., so that early adopters aren’t faced with an “empty” community.

4) Make it as easy as possible for people to sign up and to use the community tools.

5) Designate a staff person to be the facilitator or moderator of the community.

6) Acknowledge those members who use the community frequently.

7) Seek input from the members on your organization’s agenda and other organizational issues. Take what you learn from the community and put it into practice in the organization.

8) Use wiki and/or forum functionality to publish ongoing lists of group events.

9) Announce new initiatives and other important organizational news in the community first.

10) Keep the community content fresh.

Feel free to watch the powerpoint below (click on it to go to a download page):

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The powerpoint was provided on kind permission from Christopher Dworin, VP of Business Development at GoLightly - thanks Chris! GoLightly provides communication and collaboration solutions for community-minded organizations. [Their] social networking tools give your members the ability to interact with you and each other in powerful new ways.

To read more about GoLightly, see: http://www.golightly.com/

Digital Arts Service Corps - webinar

10 Tactics for Growing Your Community Online