On Holidays, Themes, and Events

[JoelR]

Valentine's Day is coming up this weekend, which is a perfect excuse to host a "Love Your Members" theme, contest, or event.  

There are plenty of fun celebrations throughout the year, anchored by big seasonal ones such as Valentine's and Christmas.  These are "easy" themes.  The dates and context behind these holidays are well-known, well-understood, and easily adoptable.  But it's also heavily overused and generic.  Every forum tries to do a Christmas thing. Every forum tries to do a Valentine's thing.  When your credit card company tries to send you a Christmas celebratory introductory rate on a new credit card, you know the holiday has become a bit overdone.  

What I encourage you to do is come up with events that are tribal.  These are events or contests that uniquely resonate with your community or within your industry, so it's much more specific, smaller, and therefore more special.  Your industry might already have some events that you can build on, or you can come up with your own events that are unique to your community.  

Some thoughts:

• Hosting tribal events versus generic events isn't any harder or any easier.  You're still hosting an event, one way or another.  You may need to design different branding, images, or marketing artwork to put a unique spin on the event, but going through the motions of hosting the event is the same.
• It gets better as time goes on.  The first year, you may need to do more communication and more awareness around what the event means. In future years, you've already built the template and cultural legacy. 
• It's okay to still fall back to the generic events.  If you're in a rush, it's forgivable to quickly throw together a Valentine's "Love Your Members" or a Christmas "Secret Santa" forum post exchange, so don't beat yourself up if you didn't do all of the ideas that you wanted.  Supplement and incorporate tribal events when you can.  

So this Valentine's day, you will not celebrating any membership loves and kisses with Invisioneer.  What I do care about on this Valentine's day is helping you think about building a deeper, more meaningful and special relationship with your members in a way that can't be replicated.