So you’ve decided to use an online community of practice and you’re hoping that your users will dive in and get involved, but will they?
The short answer is yes. It has become increasingly important to people that the critical information which they need is available to them in usable chunks at the point which they need it. Even more powerful is the need for information to be kept current, since the rate of change in our world has increased radically. Updates to traditional training style materials have become increasingly difficult to manage in a timely way, as the need for changes has become more frequent.
That said there is still a key task of implementation to be achieved when introducing a new community for the first time and this is not to be underestimated. In the early days of the community it is essential to do the work to engage users, stimulate them and show them the way.
In this short overview I’ll share some tips that worked for me when I first started using online communities and needed to engage participants.
1 - Engage through value
Implementation of any online solution or platform is so often seen as a technical task, when the real work is always about integrating the tool into the working life of the intended users. This is easily underestimated or even overlooked entirely, but with some upfront planning, allocation of resources and effort it needn’t become a problem.
Early adopters will help you build some initial activity and it’s important to nurture them and acknowledge their contributions. By engaging with the first users you can multiply the actions that they take and build toward a critical mass of content and user activity that you need for your next steps.
The “wait and see” brigade are likely to be your largest group. Many of these will access your community in the first few weeks, but they’re far less likely to post anything or generate a great deal of content.
To build the involvement of early users it’s important to launch with content in place designed specifically to draw them in further, so they can see some value early in their experience. In addition you should build a plan to release new content regularly and often to generate a feeling that the community is living and developing in useful ways. Ideally this early content will be planned in, but made up of collaborative efforts from a variety of areas, rather than released from a central team.
It’s ok for users to be passive as a consumer of content at first, but quickly you’ll want them to transform into contributors and again this needs some care and attention. Specific tasks given to defined individuals and groups are helpful in nudging them over the threshold from consumer to contributor.
A good example of a social task invites users to comment on something shared as pre-work or follow up to a real life meeting or workshop. For example “Watch this video before our next team meeting and share in the comments your questions and reaction”. This has the nice dual effect of engaging users to use the platform as well and making their team meeting more efficient by answering some questions in advance online.
Tasks that drive a multimedia share are even better, but require more from contributors, so the key here is to support users in the real world with their first experiences of generating content.
For example, build into a workshop an activity during which individuals prepare a 2 minute overview of something, then take it in turn to present it in small groups (about 4). The group also take it in turns to capture each other’s presentations as video using a phone or tablet and share it to the community.
Because the focus of the presenter is their small audience, this is far less intimidating than presenting to camera. By using mobile devices, rather than video cameras or laptops, the experience is again more familiar and less nerve racking.
2 - Play the host
Like a real life social occasion the job of host is essential and many faceted. At a party you want to make sure your guests are taken care of for the basics like parking, finding the cloakroom, where to put a gift, getting a drink and some food and. In addition you may want people who don’t know each other to be introduced, the atmosphere to be enhanced by music and lighting and perhaps you have many other little touches that make your parties thrive. During the evening maybe you’ll keep an eye out for undesirable behaviour, but that’s hardly your starting point!
A community of practice is a social space, so by analogy many similar things need to be considered. I’ll stay away from the detail, but think about how you can:
- Help new users sign in for the first time and find their way
- Make new participants feel welcome and comfortable
- Show everyone around and help familiarise themselves with the platform
- Accept gifts of new content and other offers
- Stimulate conversations and formation of likeminded groups
- Help people when they need it
- Keep an eye out for undesirable behaviour
Often when we think about online communities we start from policing the undesirable stuff and moderating conversations, but there’s so much more to do! With this in mind it’s worth considering who you can involve to also act as hosts. Engaging with influential people throughout the organisation to ensure that they are enthusiastically promoting the community is a dual win if they are also proactively hosting within the community.
You might want to encourage the hosts to think of themselves as guides and connectors rather than experts. You might even want to avoid the perception that these people are anything other than enthusiastic participants. Ideally they’ll help people with new connections and directions rather than simply answering questions. An example would be to guide a colleague to a particular piece of content using the navigation of the platform rather than providing a link to click. That way the person being helped will find their way around more easily in future, but importantly so will anyone else who comes across the guidance later.
3 - Show the way with content
Ideally you’ll want individuals and teams to make their own content and share it spontaneously, but that might take some time to happen. In the meantime work with subject matter experts and knowledge owners to support them in making useful contributions. Your support should be coaching rather than directive as you’re hoping to achieve two things. Firstly to build their confidence and capability so they’ll make more content in future and secondly your community needs the content that they create. The most helpful content in this context looks like it is user generated, because if it were too polished this could intimidate others. Smartphones are more than good enough for short videos, production values can be shonky and that is an advantage!
Answer pertinent questions. Make content and support others to make content that answers any question that are asked repeatedly. This is especially useful if the answers change often, as it positions your community of practice as the first place to check for the latest information. Again immediacy and relevance is more important than polished content. A screen grab with an arrow or a screen capture of a document of computer system with a voiceover are great examples. The later versions of Powerpoint support making screen capture videos and since it’s such a familiar tool this can be a handy way in for new content creators.
Ideal content is in small pieces that are easily digested and searched for when the user needs them. You could think of some of these as pieces of “Micro-learning” which are small and focused enough to access “just in time”. Some users, with the best of intentions, will start to turn documents into videos by simply reading them and adding images or slides. It’s worth watching out for this and giving some guidance. Long form text really is better as a document, and uploaded documents are content in their own right, but a 3 minute introductory video is a great way to tell others why the document is worth reading.
Live events and webinars are great raw material for new content, particularly if you can work with a stakeholder who wants to get their message out. For example video of a ‘town hall’ style event or presentation can be edited down to capture the main points in a few minutes, or a series of shorts, each only a few minutes long. You can really see the value of the ‘Social Effect’ when users comment on a piece of video from a presentation, to start a 2 way conversation about the subject. Participants in that online conversation can be more deeply engaged into the message than is possible in most live Q&A sessions.
A final note on content is to acknowledge the very important role that content from outside your organisation can be used. Curation can be as important as creation, in particular for learning outcomes. For example why would I want to make a video about human motivation when I can post a link to Dan Pink’s TED Talk on the subject? The power of linking out to sources that you and your users find is not to be underestimated!
4 - Redirect from other channels
My last tip is about making your community central to the way people in your target group get information, ask for and receive help.
Seek out colleagues who have the messages that people really want or need to hear, then facilitate those messages being shared in your community of practice as a primary source. If the information is traditionally shared by other means then use that method to direct recipients to the information in your online community. This way your community will rapidly be seen as an essential resource rather than an additional one.
You can also redirect specific requests. For example, when someone contacts you by email with a query that actually may well be something a number of people might ask, then this would make a great ‘share’ in your community of practice. Depending on who is asking for your help and the relationship that you have with them, you might ask them the favour of repeating their request online in the community, especially if you explain how this will benefit everyone else when you answer. An easier approach is simply to share their question and your answer in a post of your own after you’ve answered them personally.. Don’t forget to ask for comments from those who read your post and encourage follow up questions!
If you can persuade others to take this approach too, then you’ll have a better chance at becoming the hub of everything that is most current and most reliable!
Finally support of all kinds should be available within your platform. This includes getting help with anything involving the community platform itself. The exception of course is when users need help getting access to the platform. This has to be as easy and immediate as possible as it might not take much difficulty re-setting passwords or similar for a user to become quickly disillusioned.
So those are my top tips for starting off in the right direction with a new community of practice, based on what has worked for me and my colleagues so far. Of course there was plenty more that we learned about what not to do!
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Will Woodward is founder and lead facilitator of No More Rhubarb who provide facilitators and facilitation training to guide conversations in person, remotely and online. Clients work with No More Rhubarb when they need workshops that get the work done, meetings to be brilliantly effective and to build communities to share the information that people need to be successful.