Show me the goods: Why organizations love investing $ into custom-made community tech
And why it’s often not a good investment…
Here is a scenario I have experienced many times. An organization tells us that in order to strengthen its community, it wants to invest a significant amount of money into developing their own tech platform, usually some variation of a virtual social network. We strongly recommend them not to do that (because nobody will use it) and instead encourage them to spend a fraction of that budget on some simple, off-the-shelf tech solutions and invest the rest into the actual community.
The organization ignores our advice, hires a team of developers and creates their own social network. The project takes longer and costs more than originally projected. Finally, it is done and announced with great fanfare to the community. Initially, some varying percentage of members join the community. It turns out the social network has some cool features, but is buggy. The launch creates a sense of momentum and for a few weeks there is regular activity on the platform. Some message boards are buzzing. But after a few months the engagement metrics go down. And down. And down. After 6 months the platform is basically dead. At that point the organization has already invested so much time and money that simply scraping the platform would look wasteful (especially internally). So they continuously encourage members to use it, creating extrinsic incentives for people to engage virtually. A few years later, a new person takes on the job of managing the community and the platform gets replaced with a new solution.
I have experienced variations of this many, many, many times.
Organizations need something tangible to show for their community investment, even if it’s useless
One of the greatest challenges of relational work is that community metrics (trust, care, collaboration, belonging etc) are super intangible. And to make things worse, many tactics to achieve these metrics are rather intangible too: connecting people, small self-organized gatherings by members, phone calls, email introductions etc.
So if you work in a organization and your boss gives you a budget for a community or a network, what will you show in your presentation at the end of the year? Two simple answers: Large gatherings and technology. Spending money on a tech platform gives very tangible results: you now have a website with things on it. Never mind that nobody uses it. This still trumps spending money on much more intangible (but effective) things, like supporting community stewards, resourcing a backbone or allowing members to host decentralized activities.
Most communities don’t need tailor-made tech
Obviously, technology can be an amazing tool to better connect a community. But ironically, there are powerful community tech tools like Hylo (open-sourced, you own your data, no ads) and many others available on the market that are inexpensive and can be bought off the shelf. In 99.99% of cases your group will not need a tailor-made platform, but can likely work with an existing tool.
What do you think? I seem to have strong opinions about community tech, but there are many people who know so much more about tech than me, so I’d be grateful to read your reflections and comment!
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Related posts
- Don’t create your own community platform or social network.
- Beyond the noise of crypto: 4 amazing community technologies
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