How to get your first 1000 sustainable community members
In the first quarter of 2016 a new community was build from scratch. Just 4 months after going live this community has over 1100 users and is growing faster than ever before. In this post I will tell you the story of Amsterdam Smart City (amsterdamsmartcity.com) and how we build the Amsterdam Smart City community in the past months.
Learn more about city networks at cities.crowded.co
The first month
Let's start with a small introduction of Amsterdam Smart City (ASC). ASC is the innovation platform of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area which contributes to the liveability and promotes sustainable economic growth. On the platform you will find knowledge institutions, governmental organizations, companies and citizens, all with interest for smart city projects. Read more about ASC at amsterdamsmartcity.com/p/about
The beta
The ASC platform is built with Crowded and started as a small opt-in beta with only 50 users in the first month. The first month was the toughest, because there was not much content yet and thus no reward for visiting the website. Fortunately the ASC community had two big advantages in the early stages of their existence. They had a great community manager, Emma, and they have very passionate early adopters.
Personal approach
To fill the platform with quality content we focussed on the personal approach and used Intercom for direct communication with the users. Intercom is a customer platform with a suite of products for live chat, marketing, feedback, and support.
Emma would send new users messages like:
"Hi there, thanks for signing up! Could you post your project on our platform? I think a lot of people could learn from your experiences."
or when it wasn’t sure if they’re already participating in projects:
“Hi, how are you? Can I help you with something?”
When people would post content by themselves, we would simply send messages to thank them and feel rewarded for their effort:
"Great to see you so active! Did you know we also have a special page for Events? Let me know if I can help you with something :)"
Every message was personal and would make the user feel appreciated on the platform. It's important to get a connection with your users via their screen. If people have the feeling to be online with a real person, they will have a stronger connection with the platform. All the chats were in normal chat language, with words like hey, hi and groetjes (Dutch). As a result you would get a personal connection with the community manager.
The community posted 18 projects, 7 events and 5 requests in the first month.
The platform
After the first month we looked towards the launch date. When would we go live? What would be needed? What does the community want?
Launch date
The launch date was set on the 1st of June, just before the 6th edition of the Smart City Event with ASC as official host. Before this date the platform should be filled with quality content and quite some users. This way we would get a lot of feedback from the early adopters and would get the chance to optimize the platform before the launch.
Sections
We started the platform with a couple sections; News, Posts, Projects, Requests, Events. We checked if people understood which content was meant to be posted in specific sections. Most of the people would place their content in the right place. Some content was replaced by admins, but always a personal message was send to the user. In this message the user was encouraged to place more content in the future but also explained where it should be posted.
Somewhat later on we merged News with Posts, because it was quite the same thing. We also added Products, because companies would place their products inside the Projects section. We wanted to keep a clear cut between Products and Projects and therefore added an explanation to the Projects add page so people would place their Products in the right section.
Structured pages
We optimized specific templates to a specific need. We made it possible to add Posts, Requests and Tours underneath Projects, this way you could make your project page complete with all the needed information. Furthermore we structured the Projects page input with 5 questions, so people would be forced to answer specific questions about their projects.
We noticed that people would automatically make better project pages. They would no longer combine all their content into one sloppy story, but would actually answer the questions. Now the projects can be compared much easier and have the same layout.
Overall we worked closely together in a triangle: users, community manager and Crowded. Users could give their opinion via Intercom to Emma, Emma would discuss all the proposals during our weekly community coaching call with Crowded. Good initiatives would be implemented, others were rejected. Users would be informed by personal messages, no matter the outcome. This way users would feel connected to the development of the platform.
The automated messages
At a certain moment your user base becomes so large that it's no longer possible to always send handwritten personal messages to individual users. Our personal approach was the main reason for our success, we had to keep this focus. Fortunately Intercom supports bulk personal messages to a segment of your users.
Engaging users
So we started sending bulk messages with a personal touch. Asking all people with an incomplete profile to update their settings, with 40% clickthrough rate and 80% of those actually changing their settings. Convincing users to follow specific themes so they automatically got updates of new content posted within those themes. And telling them about new features such as a tour on the homepage which walked through all possibilities on the platform.
A/B testing
With all messages and email updates we used A/B testing to get to know our users a bit better. We noticed that some changes didn't matter at all, but sometimes also boosting our clickthrough rates with 10% thanks to better CTA-buttons. Our in-app messages were opened 70–100% of the time and our emails anywhere between 40–70% via Intercom. That are pretty nice numbers if you ask me!
Going live and further
Amsterdam Smart City wanted to go live with a big bang. To be able to handle the amount of users we upgraded the platform to the newest version of Crowded. Now the platform was ready.
We silently put the community live on the 1st of June, checking if everything was going fine with the platform. Then announced the community the 2nd of June via all the social media channels of ASC and through Nouncy.
Nouncy
Nouncy is a marketing tool to create a buzz on social media. We wanted to reach a lot of people with our live message, that's where Nouncy came in. The Nouncy campaign was first promoted on the community with a full screen message to all users and visitors in the weeks before the launch date. With this approach we gathered a decent amount of supporters and made quite a buzz around the launch of the Amsterdam Smart City community!
Thanks to the Nouncy campaign the amount of people that would register for the community spiked to 450% on the date we announced it. After a couple of days the amount of signups had stabilized, but some days it spikes up to 33 new users/day.
Share the content
So we had a great start and just 2 months later in August we crossed the 1000 users line. How did we keep this steep growth? First of all we knew our content was great, projects were posted regularly and all projects had interactions with other users. Then we started sharing the great content of the platform with our users and other likeminded people via newsletters, social media and through word-of-mouth. We added share buttons to multiple sections to encourage the sharing of content to other platforms.
Furthermore we made sure there was a steady amount of new content every day. New events, requests, posts, projects, products, tours and companies are posted on a daily basis. Anything you want to know about smart cities is available at the Amsterdam Smart City community and created by users. It's not the community managers who are creating all the content, but the users themselves creating value to others users.
Check the statistics underneath to see how much content is already posted on the Amsterdam Smart City community!
Keep improving
A community is a living thing, we need to keep improving the platform and keep listening to our users. We are working every day to implement new features and stay on track with the community needs.
Statistics
I love numbers, probably some of you do too :)
Users
After the first month 50 users had signed up for the community. Just before we went live this amount had grew to 313 users and only two months later we surpassed the 1000 users.
Launching month
In June, the month we went live, the statistics went crazy. We had 15.000 individual visitors that viewed over 100.000 pages. Ever since we have an average amount of 7 pageviews/session and a bounce rate of less than 7%.
Going global
Only 45% of the users of Amsterdam Smart City are from within the Netherlands. We have users in 55 countries and visitors in 132 countries, from Argentina all the way up to Iceland.
Content creation
Since the start there are over 150 projects, 100 events, 50 requests, 350 posts, 190 companies, 35 products and 40 tours posted on the Amsterdam Smart City community.
Working together with Crowded is very pleasant. They listened carefully to our goals and translated those into concrete features. They are continuously evolving and consequently our platform improved quickly. Their knowledge about community management and the application of various tools and techniques is useful and very welcome, since we have little experience with it.
I would recommend Crowded if you are looking for a software partner who sits on top of the latest developments, can deploy those rapidly and thus build a user friendly and dedicated community in a smart and sustainable way.
Emma van der Veen, Community Manager at Amsterdam Smart City
Feedback
Any feedback is welcome, leave a comment down below or email me directly at jonatan@getcrowded.co. We learn new things every day and I would like to learn from your experience!
Amsterdam Smart City
We worked a lot together with Amsterdam Smart City, so I want to thank Maaike, Nancy, Elien, Emma and the others at Amsterdam Smart City for this great partnership!
Your own community
Are you interested in your own community? Or doesn't your community grow as fast as you would like? Just let me know, you can reach me at jonatan@getcrowded.co
