Bringing Real Value To Your Members

So, you’ve taken that first step and invited a bunch of people to join your community. Congrats! You’ve kicked off an awesome round of introductions. Now what? It’s a classic predicament. How do you ensure there’s a consistent flow of valuable content for your members so that the group stays valuable long term?

Here’s a quick three-fold framework for thinking through how you can add value to your members through your community:

Knowledge. Opportunity. Significance.

Let’s break that down.

Knowledge

What do your community members come to this group to learn? What is it that you know that you can teach them? Or even better, what can they teach each other?

Recently, I was brainstorming with one of my student (I teach a class on Community Development) on how they could share more knowledge with their chapter leaders at her non profit. We came to realize not only how much knowledge these leaders had to share, but also that they rarely got a chance to do so. To tap into this gold mine, they began to host lunch and learns for chapter leaders in which each of them would have an opportunity to share their experience and expertise with the group. By doing so, this team unleashed the knowledge of their community, which is not only inspiring, but also, cost-free.

Opportunity

What opportunities are your community members looking for? What opportunities are you uniquely positioned to offer them?

For example, Dreamers and Doers, a community for women entrepreneurs that I’m a member of, builds partnerships with publications. They help close the gap between the member and the publication by sharing opportunities for members to apply to be guest columnist or contributors. This type of opportunity is one that many women entrepreneurs look for, but have trouble finding. Being a member of Dreamers and Doers allows you to tap into these possibilities and that’s extremely valuable to their members.

Significance

How can you recognize and shine light on your community members? What are they proud of that they’d want to share with this group? How can you make your members feel special, heard, and noticed?

I was advising a company building a community for gardeners, and we came up with the simple idea of #gardeninggoals — a hashtag that their members could use to share their plant pictures within the facebook group. Especially in quarantine when no one is physically there to see the garden you’ve worked so hard on, it’s nice to have a devoted audience to share your progress with.

A bonus for this particular example is that those who used the hashtag when posting their photos helped the team collect TONS of user-generated images of the planter they sell, which could then be shared on their instagram.

Launching your community is a great first step, but supporting them in these three ways — knowledge, opportunity, and significance — will keep them around, engaged, and will bring them lots of value.

By the way, if you’re reading this article and thinking, “All my members want different things, I don’t know where to start,” I highly recommend checking out my blog post covering the rule of three. It’s possible that your community is a bit too broad and focusing in could be a helpful place to begin.

Finally, if you’ are reading this and thinking, “I have no clue what my community wants,” the simple answer is to ask! Consider this an opportunity to do some discovery work; it’ll be hugely valuable down the line.

Good luck, and always feel free to sign up for free office hours if you’d like to continue the conversation. I’m here to help!