Let’s be honest. We’ve all fallen for a slick demo at one time or another. All too often the features that got us excited don’t quite work as well in real-life as they did when the sales-person was showing us, or they only work in very specific circumstances.
Lots of our clients have switched to us after getting stuck with an inflexible platform that doesn’t suit their needs.
Whilst we’d like to think our platform, ex-plor has some pretty neat features we always advise clients to focus on the flexibility of a platform, the ease in which they can integrate data and the people behind the platform.
Onboarding a bit of a juggling act. You need ensure that your critical info on members is captured whilst also creating an onboarding process which is painless for participants.
Make sure your team thinks carefully about the critical info you’ll need as getting this further down the line may be a lot more difficult.
Profiles need to be linked back to the objectives of the community and data needs to be captured in a user-friendly way.
Who wouldn’t love the idea of loyal fans cheering them on? Insight Communities often attract people who are passionate about the brand, but this means that they are not a representative research tool.
You can’t allow your community to slide too far out of step with feelings and behaviours of the wider world. If your business is performing poorly, you might need to hear some hard truths and this is where its healthy to balance your members with fans, buyers and lapsed or non-customers. If you spot some consistent bias sneaking into your outputs, you may need to do an overhaul of your membership or go on a recruitment spree.
"Strong opinions are great! It's what we want as researchers, but in a community the more vocal members can sometimes bias others. Think about ways to turn their passion to your advantage." Laura Thabart, Community Manager
We’re always talking about the value in listening. It’s amazing some of the insight and themes you can pick up just through listening to what your members are saying. This is also true of rewards. Many brands struggle to come up with a reward model, but don’t ask their own members!
Trust us this is something people are always happy to talk about and understanding the mix of intrinsic and material rewards your members want is crucial to your value exchange.
Members aren’t the only ones who need a little love and attention. Stakeholders are often only involved in the planning and launch of a community and then somewhat forgotten about.
You might be thinking about your community every day, but others won’t. It’s just as important to keep re-engaging stakeholders as it is your members.
We all learn in different ways. Whilst variety may be the spice of life you can waste some serious time creating outputs that are never really used. Be sure to ask for plenty of feedback on the info and format that different stakeholders need. Do a test run and see how long it will take you, even if your dashboards may not be set up or showing the relevant data yet.
