Using Message Boards to Build Community

As many organizations are aware, a Web site can be a valuable tool for publicizing your mission, relaying news about your work, and raising funds. But while having a site that lets you communicate to the public is certainly a good thing, a site that lets your visitors communicate with you and with each other can sometimes be even better.

A message board can help your organization's Web site become a valuable communications and community-building tool. On a message board, nonprofit colleagues can talk to each other and to experts as equals on topics that relate to your organization's mission.

Online communities can also foster valuable relationships that even enhance face-to-face networking. As the leader of a strong online community, you can often gain more credibility in your local networking efforts.

But creating and sustaining a successful online community is more than an "if you build it, they will come" proposition. It involves significant planning, commitment, and marketing.

Why Message Boards?

Certainly, there's more than one way to build an online community. But a message board can be a particularly effective way to sustain a large, thriving community as it provides a "location" where your members can gather (without the inconveniences of travel, of course). Users can chat with each other nearly in real-time and navigate through conversation threads with ease. Discussions are archived, and you can access them and search them via a Web-based interface.

But message boards are often flexible enough to be accessed in other ways: you can subscribe to conversations and have new posts sent to you via e-mail if you wish.

When considering building a message board, consult reviews of community building tools to determine your choice of platform. There are many pre-built message boards available that take little or no technical knowledge to administer. They can be found in TechSoup's Online Community Building tools resource list.

Organizational Commitment

It would be impossible to maintain, manage, and promote an online community without a commitment from your organization. In a successfull online community, you'll find people playing many roles. This doesn't happen by accident. You'll need to plan how to get staff and others involved in your community, and find the resources to put your plan into action.

The roles involved are:

Organizer:

defines and plans how the community will function, plans events

Moderator:

ensures that posts are on topic and nudges hosts to answer questions

Member/user:

asks and answers questions

Host:

starts discussion threads, researches thorough answers to users' questions, and checks in on a regular basis

Seeder:

member of the community who is charged with making the community look lively from the onset

Visitor/lurker:

learns from the community but does not post

Technical administrator:

ensures that the message board is working and that appropriate features are added or enabled

Chances are that your organizer and your technical administrator, at least, will come from your organization's staff or volunteers. The organizer must understand the connection between your message boards and the rest of your organization, and make sure the boards are furthering your organization's mission.

The technical administrator will need to be someone you trust, as he or she will have access to your site and be able to make changes to your configurations. The role can require a large time commitment, and the administrator will need to work with the organizer to implement the appropriate features.

Other roles, like the host and moderator, may require a significant amount of day-to-day work, depending on how active your boards are. People in these roles will need to commit to spending time participating in the community. You may find that staff or volunteers in your organization can do this, or you may find new people from the ranks of your community members who are interested in taking on this work.

Seeders are most important when you begin your community or host online events. Other visitors will be less likely to become involved if they don't see anyone else there. You may recruit seeders from people on staff, especially if the seeding committment is for a specific amount of time tied to a launch or an event. Your hosts may also serve as seeders.

Community members and visitors are what keep your community alive. Chances are that they won't just happen to find your message board; you'll need to find a way to get them there.

Building Your Community

There are many message boards that are inhabited only by the staff that created them. To create an active online community, you need to make direct contact with potential members. While some of this contact can come from personal invitations, few people will visit a community that is promoted only by its owners. Work your network of contacts to build support for your community. Send appropriate announcements to listservs and influential members of the nonprofit community. You want to build word-of-mouth and buzz about your community. If you have an e-newsletter, highlight interesting threads and any special events in your community.

Once you have people participating in your community, you need to encourage them. Part of community-building is rewarding and highlighting frequent participators. Keep track of your star users and write to them off the mesage boards. You need to create a community within your community, as this helps give your members a sense of ownership. Consider ways to highlight star members: create special profiles of them and their work, find some graphic or title to identify them on the boards. You can even ask them to host online events, special discussions where an expert is available to your community for a specific amount of time. Not only do online events encourage your stars, they're also a great way to market your community to a new audience and give older users a reason to come back. Learn more about online events in the "Hosting Online Events " article on TechSoup.

Pointers for Sustaining Your Community

As you work on building and sustaining your community, keep the following points in mind

• Compare users' "Registered date" to the "Last visited" date. If they are the same, you're not bringing users back as repeat visitors.
• Expect that between one and ten percent of your registered visitors will return.
• Compare the number of posts to the total number of page views; the smaller the ratio, the more trouble your members are having posting messages. If you have many more people reading than posting, something is wrong.

Online Community Best Practices

• Provide your users with member lists and access to user profiles. It's hard to be engaged in a community if you don't know who's in it.
• Collect minimal information during registration -- username, password, and e-mail address. A long registration process can turn off users; gather additional information through polls and surveys.
• Make sure that registration requires no more than two clicks -- one to start the process and one to verify the information entered.
• Clearly identify your community purpose and target audience.
• Seed new message board with posts written by moderators.
• Provide help for newbies.
• Scatter interesting quotes, hot discussions, and poll results throughout the site and link them back to the message boards. Also provide links in your message boards to other places on your site.
• Acknowledge holidays and community milestones. When you've logged 1,000 posts, let your members know.
• Although you can expect a fair number of lurkers (members who read but don't post) in any community, watch out for a post/page view ratio below .05.
• Reward users who post frequently with titles and public recognition.
• Highlight your most active discussions on the main page of your site and on the main page of your community, and list your topics in order of most recent posts (except for the few general-purpose topics -- such as how to use the site -- at the top of the list).
• Feature experts from the field in special online events to expand interest and generate new members.
• Participate in related e-mail lists and online communities to build and maintain connections with other communities. With a presence in other communities, you can credibly promote special events in yours.
• Respond to incoming feedback within 24 hours.
• Finally, in order to keep your organization as a whole commited to the community, ask your co-workers to foster relationships with the hosts of the forums and regularly participate in discussions.