Whether you're starting a new community or deliberately growing an established one, maintaining speed through the course of change is a critical skill for change management in communities. I'm going to share some tips about speed, because I keep repeating myself when I talk to clients that are setting up communities for the first time.
Communities are organisms that do whatever they please; control over them is illusory at best. When we concede that our function is that of a rudder, we can start to plan out the largest landscape possible for our community to exist mostly autonomously, where we're more agents of their chaos and co-conspirators than unilateral deciders of much.
Thinking about it - change management applies pretty solidly, if you think about the creation of a community as a change itself. Isn't what platform should we use? a question that applies to a brand new community, or a fledgling one that outgrew its rompers? It's the same deal!
You have to ask these questions like you're asking your coworkers where you should eat for lunch.
What might take an option totally off the table? GDPR or privacy issues are an example of what to consider here. There could be other internal show-stoppers. You'd have to steer discussions around these away very quickly.
What would the software approval process at your company be like for choice [x] [y] or [z]? Do they only take credit cards or do they invoice? How long will approval take once a decision is made?
Will engineering be able to handle any domain / subdomain
/ setup / installation issues? Again - deal breakers need to be communicated quickly before people waste time planning them.
All of the questions above aren't one that a community-facing employee is likely to be able to answer without asking, and any one of the above examples could take a week and a few traded emails to get answered.
Deciding on a platform is just one example. Others are more complex, like needing to overhaul your bug bounty program or plan a contest or hack-a-thon. It goes pretty far beyond what most reasonable people would think of as prepared.
When you talk to your community, you want to do it when you can speak in the active voice as soon as your community energy level is buzzing (where you have people's attention for a little while), so when they say "We want to use [x] [y] and [zzz]" you can do some math in your head and show them what's next, because you'll very likely already have all of the answers you need to feel confident in what's going on.
You never want to go from the height of enthusiasm to "I'll get back to you ASAP" if you can avoid it, because you'll have missed a rare moment to instill extra trust in what you're doing by how prepared you were to move forward. You also want to avoid cold starts with communities as they're super harmful to trust.
Just something I thought was worth sharing, since it doesn't seem to be common advice, despite seeming like it ought to be.
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