Intentionality of community building

[JoelR]

There are several communities that I visit that are nice, casual hangout spots.  They hold tremendous social value for their members to connect and bond.  

But I don't really know the purpose of them besides their social value - and given that these are all Internet strangers at the end of the day, it's very easy for me to walk away. 

They've also installed virtually the same set of plugins and themes and VIP bonuses, which makes them all blend together. 

What is the intentionality behind your community?  How are you adjusting your design and approach so its focused on that intentionality?  Just because "everyone else" has enabled a feature, doesn't mean you should too.    

Inspired by CMX Weekly

[dismalbliss]

You and I are on a few of the same communities that are basically clones of each other. And it's the same cast of characters posting the same topics across all of them too. They are basically general discussion forums with a category for almost everything.

Now granted, my largest community is similar, but we target a niche audience. My fledgling community is a support community concentrated to a specific niche.

[JoelR]

3 hours ago, dismalbliss said:

You and I are on a few of the same communities that are basically clones of each other. And it's the same cast of characters posting the same topics across all of them too. They are basically general discussion forums with a category for almost everything.

Now granted, my largest community is similar, but we target a niche audience. My fledgling community is a support community concentrated to a specific niche.

When you start offering the same set of mods, the same set of features, and the same structure when you have different purposes, you dilute the intentionality of your community's purpose. You're offering sameness and it all blends together.  

I want to emphasize that I don't necessarily fault any community for falling into this trap.  To a large degree, even Invisioneer falls into this problem since we utilize many of the default options of our software.  But no community should use the default because it's the default or offer a feature because "every other other community does it."  We should think hard - and be brave! - in choosing the options that are most appropriate for our community's specific goals. 

[dismalbliss]

9 hours ago, JoelR said:

But no community should use the default because it's the default or offer a feature because "every other other community does it."  We should think hard - and be brave! - in choosing the options that are most appropriate for our community's specific goals. 

We've done this with my large community, but we've also had 17 years to perfect it. We dumped Clubs, don't use Commerce, and have been selective with our 3rd party apps. Can't get Blogs off the ground either so we will probably remove them too, lol.

[JoelR]

6 hours ago, dismalbliss said:

We've done this with my large community, but we've also had 17 years to perfect it. We dumped Clubs, don't use Commerce, and have been selective with our 3rd party apps. Can't get Blogs off the ground either so we will probably remove them too, lol.

This is one the challenges of platforms, when you have an abundance of features.  Knowing which feature to enable should make you pause and think every time. 

It also took me 3 tries to get Blogs off the ground! The only community that I've seen do an extraordinary job with blogs is Club Poker where they journal about their card hands.  

[Cedric]

I would love to know what unique approach I could go with Admin Junkies without killing it. I mean, there is stuff on AJ which isn't unique but it works, we do a good job on providing it. And I do like to think outside the box but not all those ideas work. There are also features we'll likely drop in the future.

There are indeed similar forums to AJ, and we try to do the job and implementation better than our competition. 

[JoelR]

7 hours ago, Cedric said:

I would love to know what unique approach I could go with Admin Junkies without killing it. I mean, there is stuff on AJ which isn't unique but it works, we do a good job on providing it. And I do like to think outside the box but not all those ideas work. There are also features we'll likely drop in the future.

There are indeed similar forums to AJ, and we try to do the job and implementation better than our competition. 

I think you do a great job already with your target audience and provide fresh content for discussions, which is important.  Your target audience is forum administrators, which covers hosting, configuration, and the technical aspects as well as the community management of forums. So you can think about what to do more for those areas.  

One easy example of what I mean by features though is the Dragonbyte credits system.  Most forum admins enable it where members earn credits for literally everything they do - you're incentivizing engagement of any sort, versus targeted engagement that is geared towards to forum administration.  This means someone can play forum games or offtopic jokes and earn more credits than someone who shares really insightful, thought provoking discussions on configuring or tweaking a server.  

Let's drive rewards to where we want to deliver value, rather than rewards for anyone for doing anything.  

[Cedric]

29 minutes ago, JoelR said:

I think you do a great job already with your target audience and provide fresh content for discussions, which is important.  Your target audience is forum administrators, which covers hosting, configuration, and the technical aspects as well as the community management of forums. So you can think about what to do more for those areas.  

One easy example of what I mean by features though is the Dragonbyte credits system.  Most forum admins enable it where members earn credits for literally everything they do - you're incentivizing engagement of any sort, versus targeted engagement that is geared towards to forum administration.  This means someone can play forum games or offtopic jokes and earn more credits than someone who shares really insightful, thought provoking discussions on configuring or tweaking a server.  

Let's drive rewards to where we want to deliver value, rather than rewards for anyone for doing anything.  

Thanks.

 

We don't reward users for posting in forum games, or AMA's, nor any private forums like the Premium Lounge. It is however enabled in the general discussion. Members need to be able to let go some steam. It's great to have meaningful discussions but sometimes we don't want to do them, we just want to chat with fellow members and have a little fun. 

What we do is encourage as much as we can to engage in our webmaster discussions, placing it on top and only showing posts in the what's new page from the webmaster category. They are usually the place to make longer posts compared to general discussion and the DragonByte credits system is a featured packed add on which allows us to rewards more credits for longer posts and threads. 

Truth is, people expect rewards nowadays. Not saying my members are ungrateful - it's a general thing I've seen the whole scene gear towards to. The scene has definitely changed the last couple of years and being a community leader is even more hard work now compared to years ago. People have transitioned more into a lurker mode and as a community leader it's our job to engage with our members, create discussions, create activity. It's the same when I browse on other forums. If I read 10 topics/posts, there's probably only 1 or 2 I want to reply to.

So naturally, I expect the same behavior on AJ. That's why it's important to have a decent influx of topics and posts being active. But I'm very glad with the success on AJ and I try to be humble and show gratitude at all times. 

[Maria]

As a user of multiple online communities, I also do not have any unique features on online communities. If they are using the same software and are in the same niche, you will not be able to spot any difference except the name. Some communities have a purpose, for instance, there are a lot of support communities for specific groups of people and people interested in specific topics, however, most communities are just a duplicate of some other communities. The only purpose I see is these people are just trying to fulfill their own vanity.

[JoelR]

10 hours ago, Mariya said:

The only purpose I see is these people are just trying to fulfill their own vanity.

This is a common theme I find among hobbyist admins. They're building the community for themselves, not for a specific purpose or audience.