Having a healthy and active online community is a great way to maximise the benefits of community engagement within an organisation. As organisations become more sophisticated in their approach to engagement, the importance of building and managing online communities where widespread public engagement activities occur is growing.

Leveraging online communities can yield a number of benefits to organisations who do regular community engagement across a number of projects. An online community of people who are continually engaging is more likely to be positive and constructive - having many conversations with people over time builds trust and unlocks deeper insights.

However, properly building an online community generally takes significant time and effort, and it usually isn’t high on the agenda. Most online communities grow in an ad-hoc way, with most people signing up because they have to (forced registration), or motivated by a single, high profile project.

Benefits of community building

There are a range of benefits to building an online community via your engagement platform including making it easier to:

• promote future engagement opportunities
• update members on progress, news, and upcoming events
• understand how people engage with your site and content, enabling you to refine your content strategy over time
• have certainty over who is participating
• understand the socio-demographic characteristics of your participants
• track user interactions over time
• convert members to offline activities.

Principles for building strong online communities

• Offer something in return - have a clear value proposition - People require motivation to engage in an online community. Using features like project Follow to allow people to stay informed and then keep them in the loop with timely updates and feedback is a value proposition that can encourage people to join and participate in your community.
• Measure and track the health of your community - Online communities need to be nurtured and success needs to be measured both via reporting and other indicators of health. This includes how often people are logging in, how many have participated and how many have been involved in more than one project.
• Keep people in the loop - You should communicate with your community over the lifetime of your projects. It is often beneficial to provide feedback at various stages during the engagement process, helping to maintain the momentum around your project, keep people informed and interested in the development of the project and inviting further participation.
• Find and utilise engaged members - You may identify particularly engaged individuals and invite them to participate in offline activities such as community panels or citizen juries.You can also identify opportunities to encourage community members to volunteer to help with projects.
• Engage often and early - Engaging often and early is one of the key principles of stakeholder engagement. Early engagement provides the building blocks for successful long term engagement. Engaging regularly with you community helps you deliver of core, traditional engagement principles.
  

Automating community building

The HiVE provides a number of tools and features that simplify the process of building online communities by automating key tasks that make it easy to attract new members and communicate with them in consistent ways that require less effort on behalf of the user.

These features simplify the effort in providing updates, promoting new opportunities and interacting with members consistently. Here are six key features that will help you automate your way to a healthy and active online community.

Mailer

The central hub of The HiVE is the mailer functionality which provides insight into the ‘subscriber’ lists you have built and the campaigns that have been sent. This provides functionality similar to popular eDM tools like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, integrated into The HiVE’s architecture.

Automatic lists are created around projects, categories (topics), locations and ‘newsletter’, and custom lists can be created. Custom lists can be added manually, imported, or even created by segmenting existing lists based on a number of attributes.

In the campaigns area of the mailer, administrators can see all the automated campaigns sent by the platform such as project updates, event updates and new project notifications. Engagement metrics such as ‘opens’, ‘clicks’ and ‘bounces’ can be seen, and even viewed at the recipient level.

Users can also create manual campaigns to send to any of the lists in The HiVE if they want to provide an extra layer of communication outside of the automated framework provided.

Project Follow

the ‘Follow’ functionality makes it easy for interested participants to subscribe to a project to receive news updates and events. This provides an upfront value proposition for people interested in the project, and helps convert this interest into membership. Administrators can easily notify their follower list automatically when new updates or events are added via the News and Events tools.

Communities of interest

When signing up new members, The HiVE allows users to identify their areas of interest, selecting from a list of topics and geographical areas. This helps establish ‘communities of interest’ within the larger community that can be targeted for future communications.

New project notifications

The HiVE automatically leverages existing communities of interest by notifying members of new engagement opportunities. When new projects are launched on a site, an auto-notification is sent to members who have matching interests (topics and locations). This feature helps re-engage past participants and promote the new engagement at no additional cost.

Member database

All visitors who become members of your site will be added to a single member database. This database lists out each member along with their details (as collected on the signup form). It also identifies the date of signup, the date of last login, and the number of contributions they have made to help you assess the ‘health’ of the community.

Anti-SPAM measures

Signup forms used to convert members can be the target of SPAM bots and other automated manipulation. To limit this type of interference, we have introduced a reCAPTCHA on the signup form.