Most people running a community aren’t working from a strategy.
Without a community strategy, you’re letting yourself and your community down.
You’re making it more difficult for others to take you seriously.
You’re making it impossible for your colleagues to know how the community helps them and what help they need to offer in return.
You’re making it impossible for your boss and her boss to know what resources you’ll need and when you will need them.
You’re not accountable to any metrics and can’t prove the success of anything you do.
You’re not leading your community, you’re following it.
You’re not deciding what you need members to do, you’re reacting to what they already do.
You have no idea what motivates your members or how to amplify those motivations.
You resort to using a rising number of tactics instead of narrowing down your tactics to those that matter.
You collect a lot of data without any idea how to use it to improve your results.
Without a good community strategy, you’re not treating your work with the professionalism and thought with which it deserves to be treated.
Next week we’re going to open registrations for the Autumn semester of our Strategic Community Management course.
It’s helped over 200 community professionals create, rebuild, and rethink their community strategies. If your strategy isn’t driving your community forward today, I strongly recommend you consider it.
