How to revive a ‘dead’ community’?| Experts’ Roundup
A community is quite important as it reflects you as a community manager & your brand. It not only helps your community members to express their views on your products/services/content but also provides constant feedback that will help you also in the long run.
But at the same time, it is not that easy to run online communities with ease. There are many things one needs to keep in mind being a community manager. If you’re not doing the things in the right manner, then your community might be ‘dead’ someday.
Like many of you may have started your own communities but they have become inactive now due to some reason. So the real task in front of you in this stage is to revive a ‘dead’ community and you know it is not an easy task at all.
A few days back, one of our fellow community members Ritesh Aggarwal who runs a community around cooking called TODODISH came up with this query at as ‘What are the practices to revive a community which has members but is dead’?
In this post, our group members started putting their views from their experiences I guess and few of them came up with tactics that can be implemented easily to revive a community.
I have compiled our folk’s discussion at Community Folks on ‘Best practices to revive a community’ with some background content that will help you to better understand the flow and I hope it gives you some great insights around.
Identify & contact old+active members:
One of the first things that you can do is identify a group of members who were active in the past, and who made great contributions but now no longer visits your group. The best way is to contact them individually and explain to them that you want to get the community back to a good place and ask them why they left the community.
Maybe some people won’t respond but you shouldn’t pester them for this. One message plus a follow up is enough. Some of the answers that you receive will not help you but appreciate their response.
Many people leave communities because their lives change or some people may be unhappy with some policies that are well-intentioned and necessary.
But others may give you ideas on things that you can improve and make better. Don’t do something just to do it — try to identify good ideas and make them happen and then tell the member who suggested it that you are doing so. The conclusion of these conversations should hopefully end in an invitation to return to the community with an honest expression of appreciation on your part.
Teja Bitra who runs a community of 58k freelancers on Quora named Freelancing Mindset suggested a few feasible ways to reach old members. And he said, once they see active engagement in your group, there is a good chance they come back and treat your community like before.
Dipesh Sharma who runs a bunch of food communities having 17k plus members said, Identify members who used to be active in the past. On adding to this, he said creating an event on the type of community can be a great thing for engaging all members in the community.
Hannan Hashim who runs a community of beer lovers named India Beer Club came up with the complete process on how to identify and contact regular members from your community to get it going. With this, he also added a few ways to get in touch with old active members.
Improve your community:
Take an honest look at your community.
If you have any moderators or team members on this community that you feel are good and want to help you then bring them back and enlist them in the process. Ask them for feedback and get their thoughts on changes that you are thinking of making.
Do you have a good wealth of content and conversation? Even if it isn’t a recent activity, it is still beneficial especially when it comes to attracting new visitors through search engines. Reviving a community is not just about outreach, marketing, software, and aesthetics — it’s about active management.
Mohit Mahajan who runs a food community named Plates2Miles mentioned a few basic but important things he did towards building his community from 30 active members to 28k active members.
Lola Jutta who works with the largest social network for women community named Sheroes shared a few tactics from her experience in community & content management.
Malavikka Sridharan Sundar who runs a community of married women with the name Married Superwomen shared a few practices such as posting questions having quick & simple answers that can encourage members to participate and interact with each other.
Geriann Hanley Wiesbrook who runs a community of military mamas named Military Mama Network said asking members what they want to engage with can be the most helpful option to revive a community.
Arbab Usmani who runs a digital marketing community named Uppskill shared his different perspective about a community and also added few things which encourage members for active participation like incentives in the form of content & recognition as well.
Always remember that the key to staying relevant is to embrace the future as well while taking care of old members because new members are vital and you should do make them feel welcome. When you reach milestones as a community, share them, and say thank you. When you notice that a member is doing a particularly great job in contributing to the community, send them a note privately to say that you noticed and appreciate it. If you see someone make a great post, thank them in the thread with a reply. This all seems small, but it is very powerful.
The community didn’t die in a day and it won’t be back in a weekend. But, with the right mix of time, commitment, and work, you may just be able to give the community a joyful return.
Are we missing any important point here? It’s a community-driven blog, if you have anything similar from your community-building experience, do add your thoughts in the comment section and it will be updated here
