Getting and Retaining Members
By Heather Duggan
"A community is those people you keep running into over and over again."
Without regulars, there is no community. Drawing in and retaining those regulars is the most important job of any community owner. And it is a job that becomes more difficult as the net continues to grow and to fragment.
David Woolley, President of Thinkofit (a virtual community consultant specializing in community software) summarizes the difficulty – "I think [building a community] is a lot harder then it used to be, mainly because there's so much competition for attention. It used to be, back in the 1980s that "If you build it, they will come." . . . Early on there weren't very many venues for online discussion, so if you opened one up, people who liked that kind of thing would flock to it. Now barriers to starting one of these things . . . well, there aren't any barriers. You just go to Yahoo or Excite and start up a "community" in five minutes. Actually getting attention for it is much harder because there's so much out there."
The stages of membership
Community membership is not an event, but a process, as potential members move from stranger -> passer-by -> lurker -> participant -> regular. Only a small percentage of people make the conversion from step to step, so it’s important to hold on to as many as possible.
From stranger to passer-by
Key task: Make potential members aware of your community.
If you’re starting a new community, focus on building content {link to content article} that will attract members and publicize that content.
Some other attractors include:
- Write a regular newsletter highlighting your site and community {link to OSS newsletter help}
- Stage events and advertise them on the major search engines
- Host regular chats and publicize them in advance {link to OSS chat help}
If you’re hosting an existing community, the most successful marketing tool is your own members. To make the most of that potential:
- Encourage members to bring in interesting participants
- Make the invitation and acceptance process as simple as possible. {link to OSS help page on invitations}
From passer-by to lurker
Key task: Move the passer-by into the community space. (But be realistic in your expectations -- only a very small percentage of the people who are interested in your site will visit the community areas.)
Here’s some pointers to increase your chances of converting a web page visitor into a community entrant:
- Highlight community content {link to content article} on your web page.
- Create "small steps" for encouraging participation—posting regular survey questions with email or form answers on your web page.
- Make the signing-on process as simple as possible.
- Provide some reward to those who make the effort.
From lurker to participant
Key task: Transform a regular reader into a participant.
You can encourage this transformation by making the community as welcoming as possible. Here are some pointers:
- Send an email to new members within 24 hours of their membership. Welcome them, give them pointers on getting started, suggest topics where they might participate, and tell them about any interesting upcoming events.
- Make the discussion as permeable as possible. This means creating regular breaks in the discussion, through summaries or open questions, where a newcomer might sense a space for themselves.
- Provide a place where newcomers can experiment with the software.
- ALWAYS greet newcomers, and encourage other community members to welcome them.
From participant to regular
Key task: Encourage intermittent participants to check in, and participate, regularly.
While the community owner can largely manage the first three steps, this final step is wholly dependent on the entire community. People return to places where they find a group of people to talk to. If you do not have such a place, you will not be able to retain members. No effort on your part, no matter how great, will create a regular where there is no community.
This means that creating a community involves, in large part, knowing when and how to let go and allow the community to take ownership. This is an art form (much like the art of raising a child), but there are some general rules to follow:
- Just as you leave spaces in the conversation, leave spaces in the ownership. After a certain point, efficiency runs contrary to community. Find things you DON’T do well, and let your members know that you need help in those areas. And then expand the areas of your inefficiency (while carefully not allowing the community to fall apart.)
- Make certain your community software facilitates changes in membership. Can you hand over some (but not all) of the hosting tools? Can you allow members to take over certain content maintenance tasks?
- Facilitate members finding people to talk to through personal profiles, highlighting member interests, databases, searchable discussions, and so on.
According to Denham Grey, President of Grey Matter, a knowledge consultancy "It's no good being high up on a search engine. You really have to capture people's attention and commitment inside the community. That's what it's all about. You can bribe them in, but you don't keep them that way."
