What it looks Like When an Online Community Works 19NTC
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NTC 2019 presentation by Karen Uffelman of Percolator Consulting, Elijah van der Giessen of TechSoup, and Ryan Phillips of Ceres. Both Ceres and NetSquared manage online communities. Ceres manages a network of investors engaging corporations on issues from environmental practices to social justice. NetSquared is a global network of volunteer-led meetups dedicated to building the digital capacity of nonprofits. They use different online community tools for different outcomes, but both online communities are central to how they achieve their missions. Learn about the methods both organizations are using to power supporter collaboration. Find out what has made both communities successful, lessons learned along the way, and how to judge what tools your online community needs. Learning Outcomes 1. Understand how to gauge the use case for an online community platform 2. Describe what a successful online community project looks like 3. Understand the pros and cons of different online community tools
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What it looks Like When an Online Community Works 19NTC
- 1. What it looks Like When an Online Community Works March 15, 2019 #19NTConlinecommunity http://po.st/onlinecommunity-19NTC
- 2. Presenters Elijah van der Giessen Community Manager TechSoup Ryan Hollett Information Systems Manager Ceres Karen Uffelman Co-founder & Principal Percolator Consulting
- 3. We help our clients wield technology for engagement and mobilization.
- 4. What is an Online Community? “A virtual community is defined as an aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact around a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially supported and/or mediated by technology and guided by some protocols or norms.”
- 5. Your Experience with Online Communities?
- 6. Build it and They Will Come...
- 7. What’s the Winning Recipe? ❏ An audience (that is already active), with access to the internet, that shares an interest or a mission ❏ Things this audience wants to do online with each other to satisfy their interest or assist in achieving their shared mission ❏ Online tools to do those things ❏ And almost always...a good community manager
- 8. Why Do Online Communities Fail? ❏ Haven’t identified the right audience ❏ The things to do online don’t satisfy the audience’s interest or assist in achieving their shared mission (or they are more easily/better done offline) ❏ The online tools suck ❏ Inadequate community management Golden, OREGON
- 9. When Should You Invest?
- 10. What tech do you need?
- 11. A Tale of Two Online Communities
- 13. Our Audience: Ceres Investor Network The Ceres Investor Network on Climate Risk and Sustainability comprises 163 institutional investors, collectively managing more than $25.4 trillion in assets, advancing leading investment practices, corporate engagement strategies and policy solutions to build an equitable, sustainable global economy and planet. AND
- 14. Who’s in the network? Some examples: ▣ AFL-CIO ▣ Jesuit Committee on Investment Responsibility ▣ Amherst College ▣ California Public Employees’ Retirement System ▣ Morgan Stanley
- 15. What do they do? ▣ Entering dialogue with companies ▣ Educating corporations on sustainability best practices ▣ Demand change in corporate practice through shareholder resolutions
- 16. And we win!
- 17. Before... ▣ Email ▣ Phone calls ▣ Hindsight/Missed Opportunities ▣ Lots of manual coordination ▣ Sometimes no coordination at all
- 18. The vision for our community ▣ Data management ▣ Data sharing ▣ Opportunity to collaborate ▣ Centralized communication
- 19. Investor 1 Investor 2 Company X Shareholders Shareholders Investor Network Portal
- 20. A Day In The Life Of… A Member
- 21. Name
- 24. Event Calendar
- 25. Data related to shared interests
- 26. Track records
- 28. Access to Community Members
- 29. Personal Dashboard ▣ Dynamically filtered by user ▣ Components link to underlying reports ▣ Flexible visualization options for size, type, etc.
- 30. Data entry from Community Users Name
- 31. A Day In The Life Of… Ceres Staff
- 32. Working Groups Guide Engagement
- 33. Data That Informs Support
- 34. Reports show granular details
- 35. A Day In The Life Of An… Admin
- 37. Contact Organization Working Group Working Group Contact Working Group Organization Engagement Engagement Filer Our Data Model Salesforce Schema
- 38. Automation for efficiency ▣ Automation is great for controlling repetitive, tedious processes ▣ Salesforce Process Builder helps visualize the automation process
- 40. Lessons Learned
- 41. Lesson 1: Know (and build for) your community
- 42. Lesson 2: Build where they go, not where we want them to go Ohio State University
- 43. Lesson 3: Build community before automation
- 45. Global Network of #Tech4Good Meetups
- 47. NetSquared + Tech Club Organizers
- 48. Snowflake Model
- 49. NetSquared’s in Sketch Book Form!
- 50. ‘’ Online Community NetSquared is a community of practice where we share techniques for managing local events to build the digital capacity of nonprofits.
- 51. A Day In The Life Of An… Attendee
- 52. Email → RSVP → Comment & Questions
- 53. Nonprofits gets help at meetup
- 54. Then we network and socialize
- 55. A Day In The Life Of An… Organizer
- 57. Getting feedback from community
- 58. Post event to meetup
- 59. Promote event
- 60. A Day In The Life Of A… Community Manager
- 61. Tracking active groups in Meetup.com
- 63. Workflows and process are key
- 64. CRM for tracking organizer status
- 65. Think thru the stages of engagement
- 66. … pick whichever model fits your brain
- 67. … and document your workflow for each stage
- 69. Lessons Learned
- 70. Lesson 1: Let go of control
- 71. Lesson 2: Go where the people are
- 72. Lesson 3: Value proposition clarity What does the community offer each segment? ● Members ● Leaders ● Host organization ● Partner organizations
- 73. My wish list for the future DATAMeetup black hole
- 74. Questions?
- 75. Thanks! You can find us at: eli@techsoup.org hollett@ceres.org karen@percolatorconsuting.com
Editor's Notes
- KAREN’S BIO: My Name is Karen Uffelman and I am a Co-founder and Principal at Percolator Consulting. I’ve been working in the nonprofit sector for two decades, with the first half of that spent working for Performing Arts, Environmental and Social Justice organizations. I’ve been a community organizer, a producer, a Development Director, a lobbyist, and I’ve managed operations so I have done ALL the jobs. A little over 10 years ago I made a career shift to work more specifically on how the supporter engagement required for all of those jobs could be scaled using technology, and that’s been my focus ever since.
- KAREN: So I mentioned that I’m a co-founder at Percolator and we work with nonprofit organization to use technology to allow their supporters to do real and meaningful work to advance a mission. Often those supporters are doing that work in collaboration with each other, and that’s where an online community can be very powerful.
- KAREN: For the purposes of this session, we’re going to stick to this definition, provided by Constance Elise Porter (from her University of Notre Dame in a paper entitled A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research)
- KAREN: Who in the room is a member of an online community? Who in the room manages an online community? Who’s a member of a “failed” or “non-active” online community?
- KAREN: This is almost never true (partially completed mcmansions in abandoned subdivision in Southern Missouri)
- KAREN: How many of you have the first ingredient? How many of you have the first and second ingredient?
- KAREN: Any other reasons online communities fail? Any stories from the trenches?
- KAREN:
- KAREN:
- KAREN:
- People with lots of money impact
- This takes a tremendous amount of coordination: Both among Ceres staff and among network members. We saw an opportunity to have technology support these efforts.
- How might the latest engagement with GM impact me?
- All of this information used to be in email, phone calls, etc. Now all of that information is in one place.
- This is a message I received from another network member providing some follow-up information after a recent conversation. This is also great for my contact at Ceres, who is able to follow this conversation and provide additional support. What’s more, Ceres has data on these conversations, that would have been impossible to track previously.
- I know we have an upcoming shareholder meeting, so it’s great that I have a place to keep track of events happening within the community. I can also add additional events when Jane and I get more momentum on this resolution we’re developing.
- What would make this especially exciting is the list of companies that are greyed out. But I, the investor, can see them and gain insight into what’s worked or hasn’t worked in the past.
- Here are some of the companies that we’re putting pressure on and how they’re responding.
- I’m going to look up my colleague, who manages investments for the University of Illinois. I want to reach out to him because I think he might want to see the work that we’re doing in our working group. There are 350+ members in the directory, and this is a resource that we didn’t have before.
- This is critical to me and my organization as this is the kind of information that we report back to our bosses, board of directors, and other stakeholders.
- I was meeting with my colleagues at AFL-CIO and clean energy jobs have been top of mind for us. Happily, I found that there is a working group on the portal that wou
- Only 13 logins this week!
- This is all click-and-drag. Super easy to use!
- This is by bread and butter.
- We spent a lot of time thinking about this and invested substantial resources to get this set up… which has saved a lot of staff time!
- If you’re interested in Salesforce Communities, Karen helped us get our portal up and running, and she can answer questions about what Communities can do… including some of the constraints.
- Structured sharing vs. unstructured sharing. We expected academic articles, reports, etc.
- Our target audience is YOU! We’re in 41 countries • 120 groups • 63,000 members
- Each local chapter is hosting networking events and workshops with the goal of building the digital capacity of the nonprofit sector.
- The core audience I work with are the local community managers 368 meetup organizers, who are a mix of consultants, nonprofit techies, and local activists and campaigners.
- We are organized along a snowflake model. Each local chapter lead operates very independently. This is the key to growth! You need to let go!
- We are organized along a snowflake model. Each local chapter lead operates very independently. This is the key to growth! You need to let go!
- Net2 is a community of practice at the organizer level.
- Let’s make this practical by following a user journey. Who here has been to a NetSquared or Nonprofit Tech Club meeting?
- Standard event flow - from email to meetup
- Attendees gets hands-on help
- Then there’s a post-event social!
- ALL THE PLATFORMS!! So, say I’m Ashleigh, co-organizer of NetSquared Vancouver These are mostly FREE platforms! Hooray! As long as my sanity has no cost! The big expense is Meetup.com $11/Group/month.
- We have “event recipes” on Zendesk Guide
- Ashleigh goes to one of our two online communities…. Facebook and Slack (pick your poison) Why two platforms? It’s the curse of global communities and the power of Facebook Free Basics.
- Ashleigh posts the event to meetup. This is easy!
- Now to promote the event. Ashleigh is BIG into twitter, so that’s her place to promote. Others leave on Facebook, LlinkedIn or Instagram. Then begin again with event planning
- A day in the life me me! Community Manager. ALL THE PLATFORMS!!
- I get to see all 120 meetups and the 60.000+ members. This is the one time that I get to feel like Ryan with his beautiful Salesforce dashboards. In Meetup I can filter and message members! And export data on how many events and attendees our community has. It’s the magic of Meetup Pro.
- But most of my day is all about the onboarding process taking new applicants through what is essentially a sales funnel. Which means it’s me on the phone/skype/zoom/text chat (when I don’t have a language in common… Check out Skype’s instant translation features.
- None of my core platforms have a CRM….More than just a spreadsheet and more than an address book. But you need one!
- I use CiviCRM… But honestly anything will do. All you need are basic features like reminders, email Lists, and the ability to update the CRM from a form. I have not got to the point of doing anything beyond the very basic automation, which involves triggered emails based on initial event dates in my database. But I set myself sets of reminders so that I can be the robot doing the work but keeping the context of the relationship always in mind, because not everything makes it into the CRM! BONUS: can the CRM easily capture email communications via a special BCC Email address?
- Don’t treat everyone the same. You have minimal time, so focus on the most engaged and high value members.
- What what do you ask people to do? Who will you ask? An engagement pyramid can help you think through this. Shows that each level has different number too. Karen is your expert on this!
- Get out pen and paper… What are the usual steps…. Give yourself a checklist and you’ll do better work by creating your own best practices. AND then you can automate. Ie. Email 10 days before event. Check in email after first trio of event. Onboarding series.
- Each chapter is very independent. They often can go months without checking in. If I were hit by a bus most of the community wouldn’t notice for six months.
- Organizers post events without me. They Choose their local tools without me. They recruit their local partners and co-organizers without me. This model allows us to host about 1,000 events a year. Sure, not all the events are perfect, but the quantity vastly outweighs any quality issues.
- I tried to avoid Whatsapp… but if I wanted to succeed in Africa I had to go to the “free” platform. Using a trillion platforms is messy but acceptable, as long as you are always driving people “home” with links, which in our case is Meetup.
- If you aren’t offering money why are people engaging with the community. As my co-presenter said yesterday you can offer: Items of value (money, swag, etc) Experiences Reputation
- The curse of my million platform approach is that it’s hard to get a big picture view of the community. And I don’t know anything from meetup about Who my members are.
- Questions?