Going Beyond Volunteers: Introducing Community Management
A Letter from the Co-Founders | Because helping others should be easy
As some of you might have noticed over the last few weeks, our website now has a brand new look with fresh content. It’s been an exciting a few months for our social tech startup — our steady growth has brought onboard new clients and teammates, and this constantly pushes us to create more social impact.
We’ve worked with many organisations — varying from non-profits that fight to protect the environment, to foundations that focus on safekeeping the rights of people living in poverty. With every organisation, we’ve constantly challenged ourselves to provide our technology as a service to a wide range of social causes. That said, we have seen a few trends surface, and we began to recognise that we are able to help these social sector heroes in more than just what we’ve been experts at – volunteer management and engagement.
Going Beyond the Volunteering Landscape
Moving forward, we are expanding bantu Workspace, to a Community Management and Engagement Platform – extending our service offerings to the greater social sector!
This expansion into Community Management is part of our strategy targeted to emphasise the strength of our capabilities, our growth, and our commitment to support our social sector clients create even more social good than ever before.
Why Community Management?
Simply put, successful Community Management means making communities stronger! We want to help attract new people to communities, reach out to active and inactive community participants to bring them back into community conversations, and to give more opportunities for current community participants to engage with one another.
- Member Retention: Community management is highly valuable for retaining an existing audience who already has prior interaction with the organisation — whether volunteers, donors, alumni, and so on.
- Member Attraction: Through community management, organisations can start cultivating new audience members
- Increased brand reputation: Community management focuses on the building of relationships. This in turn garners trust and builds the reputation of your brand — giving you a better position in the long run.
So what’s changed?
We’re now bigger and better — our social-sector focused approach to developing technology remains core to our social mission, and we’ve grown to become a thriving team of customer success officers, marketers and developers! We have an ever-growing customer portfolio that we can be proud of. It is because of this growth that has enabled us realise our focus and expand on the breadth of expertise that bantu truly represents as per our vision that “helping others should be easy”.
Additionally, we think our latest blog post (written by our talented Jerald Lim) really helps kick off our rebranding journey by exploring the use of organisational psychology to retain community members.
What this means for bantu
This rebranding of bantu from, previously, helping the social sector with Volunteer Management, into a larger scope of Community Management, will enable us to expand product features, accomplish our local and global growth objectives, and to foster and develop new client relationships in the social sector. And ultimately, this will help us to offer more capabilities to our customers!
What’s most important is that this also reemphasises the vision we’ve been working on, that “helping others should be easy”. We wanted to move away from just focusing on volunteers, since our customers work with a large range of stakeholders in their organisations, from volunteers, donors, members to event participants. We want to become a true utility helping organisations to succeed by improving their effectiveness in managing different groups of communities.
In a nutshell, we want to help all Community Managers in management and engagement with their members – regardless of your social mission, whether you’re a voluntary welfare organisation, non-profit, foundation, training provider, club, association, or school. We want to help you build your communities better.
What this means for our existing customers
It’s business as usual with more capabilities offered for our customers! We are committed to continue to build features that enhances your daily productivity, to empower both your team & your community. Yes, that same proactive listening and professionalism as we’ve always done, if not better! In short, we are ever as committed to creating the easiest-to-use technology for the social sector.
We’re incredibly proud of the work that we do at bantu and thankful for our interns, partnerships, and customers that have trusted us since our early days. Without you, this would not be possible and we look forward to a successful 2019 and beyond with all of you.
Signing off,
The bantu Co-founders (Nicholas, Joshua, Han & Janelle)
