Lessons Learned from Pruning Online Community Groups

Lessons Learned from Pruning Online Community Groups

I recently completed a significant cleanup of the groups in Buzz - our 40,000 member enterprise social network (ESN) at Humana for employees. It was a bit of a daunting task since I started the process with 1688 groups. It was a sure thing that many groups needed to be archived, deleted or merged in accordance with our group policy. This is a process we’ve gone through at least annually during my eight years as the Buzz community manager. It’s incredibly boring and something that easily gets pushed aside in favor of other types of work (hence the annual frequency and not more often). But it needs to be done so that the group directory isn’t too cluttered and members can more easily find what they need. This time I decided to take some notes along the way so that other community managers might benefit from what I learned.

In no particular order of importance, here are some of my takeaways from the process that ultimately resulted in me removing about 43% of our ESN groups in the past few weeks – over 700 of the nearly 1700.

1. Have and enforce a policy about group creation. Our software, Socialcast, unfortunately does not allow for any administrative intervention in the group creation process. Anyone who wants to create a group can do so at any time. This inevitably results in duplicate groups being created where there is already an existing group for certain topics. With our software being sunset in about a year, you can bet we’ll have a policy and process enforced for creating groups, even if the new software doesn’t enforce it from a technical standpoint. By having a policy and process, we can nip in the bud the duplicate groups and better enforce naming and description conventions.

2. Have and enforce a policy about group retention. For Buzz, we have the following rules about groups posted on the community’s home page:

Rule #1: “Groups with no new unique posts for three months will be archived.” Archiving means the existing content is still discoverable and existing conversations can continue, but no new conversations are allowed. “Unique” means that there must be posts within the past three months that are only posted to that group. Posts cross-tagged to multiple groups do not qualify as unique. I do reactivate archived groups upon request, so archiving isn’t necessarily permanent, but I get very few requests to reactivate groups once they are out of sight. I allow seasonal groups to remain as long as they become active each relevant season, so I bypass those when archiving.

Rule #2: “New groups with no activity for one month will be deleted.” I realize that it may take a while for activity to pick up in a new group, but if a group exists for a full month and nobody ever posts to it, then I delete it as unnecessary. I uncover a lot of test groups this way that creators never intended to be ongoing. There is no undelete option with our software, but all we lose when deleting a never-used group is a group name and description – not post content – so it’s easy to recreate if needed.

3. Merge groups with very similar purposes and audience. This is especially helpful if your group cleanup is after the fact rather than preventable through process or technical controls. People can get rather creative with group names and descriptions, so when you find groups with similar purposes and audiences, ask the group admins about their willingness to merge them together. I don’t suggest just doing the merge without discussing it first with the admins because there may be legitimate reasons why they should remain separate that you’re not aware of until you ask. If the groups have no admins, I may ask the groups involved in a public post.

4. Train and encourage group admins to drive engagement. A number of groups I recently archived, deleted or merged no longer had a group admin. It’s difficult for a group to continue, much less thrive, without leadership. When you notice a group without an admin, ask the group if one or more members are willing to step up and take ownership. Their next question will be, “What does an admin do?” so you need to be ready with answers. I recorded an hour-long webinar on how to be a group admin and I point interested people to that link which is also posted on the home page of our community along with other learning resources.

5. Don’t make a group’s audience so small that it loses viability. For example, it may be fine to have a “Running” group for running enthusiasts across the whole company or even for a major location with lots of employees, but once you narrow it down to those who like to run barefoot at night in winter and are located in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, you’re probably going to have very little activity. Keep audiences large enough to see new content regularly and to keep things fresh. Individual team groups may be the exception to this rule where small teams want their own place to communicate. That’s perfectly fine, but it still needs to be active to have a reason for people to check in regularly.

6. Make groups public unless there is a vital business reason for privacy. My recent purge saw several private groups removed that I believe would have had a greater chance for survival if they had been public. More people will be aware of groups if they are visible in a public stream, thus attracting more members. Default to having public groups in your enterprise – not private. The point is social collaboration – not reinforcing enterprise silos. Only go private for necessary business reasons.

7. Use the cleanup process to educate the community about any issues noticed. In our case, we noticed that a few dozen users were in the habit of incorrectly tagging multiple groups for many posts. They would tag large groups in their posts just because there were a lot of people in those groups, even though the content of the post had nothing to do with that group’s audience or purpose. Those people were privately contacted and told of the issue, educated on the subject, and the posts were removed from those groups wrongly tagged. The old adage is still true: praise in public, correct in private. However, you can still use the moment as an opportunity to educate the larger community on the subject as well – just don’t call out publicly those who needed private correction.

8. Keep the community informed about your process and the results. I warned our community weekly through broadcasts for a few weeks before starting the cleanup. I then updated them weekly during the cleanup and told them the results afterward. If anyone paid attention, they knew it was happening and couldn’t claim that they weren’t warned. In a nutshell: tell them what you’re going to do, tell them what you’re doing, and tell them what you did.

9. Don’t let the mundane jobs build up to an overwhelming point. Rarely have I done this group cleanup more than once a year. After this last round, I put a block of time on my calendar at the end of each month to do the small amount of cleanup needed to keep things tidy on a monthly basis. It will be much easier to prune a small flower bed of groups rather than the whole garden at once.

10. Don’t automate everything about the process even if you think you can. In our case, the software didn’t allow such automation, but even if it did, there is some human judgment involved. A few questions a real person has to think through during this process include:

  •  Were taggings for multiple groups all appropriate, thus calling for a little leniency on the “unique” content rule?
  • Are groups seasonal in focus and, therefore, active only certain months of the year?
  • Are you aware of an initiative on the horizon that will cause a group to be useful soon even if it technically doesn’t meet the standard for remaining active right now?

Only a community manager who knows and loves the community and the business can answer some of those kinds of questions appropriately.

Pruning your community to keep it tidy and healthy is a must. It doesn’t have to be a tedious chore you put off too long to the detriment of your community. Apply the lessons learned above from my recent major cleanup and help keep your community in great shape!

Deb Williamson

Knowledge Solutions Specialist at Medtronic, Inc.

5y

Thank you for your takeaways! I'm in the process of pruning communities, I call it my 'archaelogical dig' as I decipher if the community is still viable, the community leaders are current (and even with the company) and updating the corresponding request form so records match reality. Looking forward to getting to #9.

Becky Scott, MBA

Head of Community | Community Architect / Strategist | Digital Transformation | Industry Expert / Speaker | Support Programs

5y

I agree about letting everyone know what you’re going to do and then remind them as you are doing it. We had to do this with inactive boards on my old community ... human judgment was extremely important!

Candida Rodriguez-Lee

Internal Communications Leader | Channel and Community Management Expert

5y

This is great Jeff. Oddly, we're doing the same thing. Love your guidelines here, I'll have to share with my team.  Now back to auditing!

Hillary Boucher

Community Management Team Lead at UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group)

5y

This is an amazing share, Jeff. 

Stan Garfield

Knowledge Management Author, Speaker, and Community Leader

5y

Great article, Jeff. Here is a similar one I published about doing this in Yammer. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/addition-subtraction-when-delete-yammer-stan-garfield/

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