The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage

There are four factors that contribute to a sense of community: membership, influence, integration/fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.

Keep your community guidelines simple, visible, and easily accessible.

Communities work best when members are intrinsically motivated, but external rewards can be effective when used wisely.

Activate community engagement by doing things that don’t scale, giving members a say in what happens, being funny, sparking debates, being authentic, and keeping your energy high and positive. Lead by example.

Community programs should focus on creating value and belonging for members, while also creating value and results for the business. A good way to structure and measure your community strategy involves three levels: business, community, and tactical. Each of these will have distinct goals and measures for tracking success.

Like a person, a community will have a personality, and the right people will feel drawn to that personality.

The community life cycle goes through the seed phase (beginnings of the community where you design and craft the experience), growth phase (community starts to organically grow and engage), maturity (the community becomes well-established), and pollination (the community breaks down into subcommunities).

All community experiences are either synchronous or asynchronous – most great communities have a combination of both. When your members can experience your community in a consistent, repetitive way, it will make it easier for them to develop a habit of coming back. Set rituals and be repetitive.

To identify key business objectives and revenue drivers, use the SPACES model: support, product, acquisition, contribution, engagement, success. Start by focusing on one or two primary objectives you can measure and expand from there. Good measurement frameworks consist of the goal you’re trying to achieve, the measures that will tell you if you ac... See more