chapter 3

Creating your community experience

If you haven’t tried to develop your own community website before, it can feel like walking through a minefield with a blindfold on. There are a whole bunch of things which can blow up (and you don’t even know about them yet).

I’ve seen organisations flush millions of dollars down the drain through terribly designed community websites. Almost nothing causes community leaders more stress than trying to create a new community website from scratch. Like building a home, it often winds up being far more expensive, time-consuming, and difficult than you ever anticipated.

This chapter is going to guide you through the process of building a home for your community. Whether you’re creating a community for a few dozen members or coordinating the efforts of millions of customers, your community needs a place where members can engage and interact with each other. While some organisations invest millions of dollars in a community platform, others create something that works really well for their members for less than a few hundred dollars. And if you’re going this alone and forgo a few features, you can even develop an effective community platform for free.

In this chapter you’re going to learn what community platforms are available, how to select the right community platform for your audience, and how to design your community platform. I’m also going to highlight some of the common mistakes to avoid and how to deal with other issues which may arise.

What’s the difference between a community platform and a community website?

Let’s begin by distinguishing between two key terms; community platform and a community website. They’re often used interchangeably but they mean very different things.

A platform is a set of technologies which you will use to create your website. Facebook, for example, is a platform where you can host groups.

A community website is built upon a platform and is the home for your community. It is what your members will see and how they will interact with one another. For example, the Spotify community website is built upon the Khoros platform. The Khoros platform also hosts the communities for Fitbit, HP, and Sephora websites and many others.

To keep things simple and avoid confusion, I’m going to refer to any interface you create on a platform as a ‘community website’ (even though this won’t be strictly true if you use a tool like WhatsApp or Slack).

It’s best to think of this process like finding a house to live in. Some community platforms offer something akin to pre-built homes. You can simply slap your name on the letterbox and move in. Others give you the materials and expect you to assemble it yourself. You can customise it exactly how you want, but it will cost you time and money.

What type of platform should you use?

Before deciding what platform to use, you need to figure out which approach you plan to take. You have five broad options here:

1 Build your own platform

You can simply build your own community platform from scratch. The main benefit of this is you don’t need to pay a licence fee (more on that soon) and you can customise it anyway you like. Most of the major sites you can think of like Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Stack Overflow were also custom-built. Some large brands have recently taken this route too.

However, be warned this is exactly like building your own house from scratch. If you haven’t done it before, you’re going to find it’s more complex than you imagine. Even if you hire experts, you’re still going to face challenges you don’t expect. Many people who try this approach soon realise it’s far more trouble than it’s worth. It’s hard for any organisation to create a community experience comparable to one provided by one of the major platform providers.

The major community platform providers have more skills, knowledge, and experience in communities than you do. Their entire organisations are designed to do precisely this one thing extremely well. When you purchase a platform, you’re not just paying for the technology, you’re also saving yourself from making a tonne of costly mistakes. The major benefit of creating your own platform (ensuring it has every possible feature you could want and saving on licence fees) is usually outweighed by the trouble you will face making it work in practice.

The only two groups who should attempt this are the very largest organisations with a tonne of expertise and resources or the start-ups who have nothing to lose and are keen to try something new and risky.

2 White-label platforms

White-label platforms are pre-built community platforms which you can brand as your own. You can best think of these as prefabricated houses. They’re fully built for you, you can move in today, and they’re cheaper compared to other options.

However, it’s cheaper because (like a prefabricated home) every website looks almost identical. These platforms work by offering the same product to everyone instead of customising each website to each community. You can change a few things, but you’re largely restricted in what you can do.

The term ‘white label’ means that it’s your name, rather than the name of the platform, that appears on the community. This is what separates these platforms from Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Reddit, and other platforms which are free – but carries the platform’s branding rather than your own.

So why not just use one of these free platforms instead of a white-label platform? The main reason is not only can you customise white-label platforms more, but being a paying customer means you can expect someone to answer the phone when you call with problems (try getting Facebook on the phone when you’re not happy!).

It also means the platform provider won’t suddenly delete your group from existence without explanation as happens often on Facebook. Imagine spending years building up a Facebook group and one day finding it has disappeared due to a vague complaint and you have no means of getting it back. You can also expect better communication about what’s coming up and give feedback to a real person. You also won’t typically have advertising in your community (especially from competitors!). Remember the reason social media tools are free is because you’re helping them sell advertising to your members.

There are plenty of small white-label platforms to choose from. Three of the most popular are Mighty Networks, Tribe, and Hivebrite. All three of these platforms allow you to select what features you want (discussions, private groups, online courses, file sharing etc.), customise the design a little, and launch your community in a matter of minutes.

At the time of writing, both Mighty Networks and Tribe are free for the most basic options with costs rising to $57 per month to $87 per month with premium features and support. Hivebrite offers a more advanced range of features with prices beginning at $5k per year. If you have limited budget and technical capacity, these are a great way to get your community started and test different ideas before upgrading later.

The big advantage of using white-label tools is they’re typically quicker to launch and a lot less risky than investing a large sum of money on a fancy community website (especially before you’ve got thousands of members ready to use it). You don’t have to pay a lot of money upfront and hope people show up.

The obvious downside is these platforms don’t have many of the features of enterprise platforms. It can be tricky to connect these platforms to your existing databases and you can’t customise the platform the way you might want. It can also be really hard to leave these platforms when you want to move on.

For example, if you can’t move your community’s data from one platform to another, you need all your members to recreate their accounts and lose all the previous conversations and expertise they’ve shared. That can be extremely painful.

3 Open source platforms (and self-hosting)

Let’s go back to our house analogy for a second. You don’t just need a house, you also need somewhere to put the house. In technology terms, this is called hosting. Your website, for example, is hosted on a server somewhere. You pay a fee for the use of that server. Communities are the same. When you pay for a community platform, you’re not just paying for the community technology, you’re usually also paying them to host the community for you.

This means they act as your landlords. You pay them a licence fee and they keep the software updated, maintain it, and generally fix things when they go wrong (although some might charge extra for this). The upside of this is someone else takes care of the dirty work. The downside is it costs money.

An alternative option between creating your own site and using a white-label platform is to use open source software. This is software provided by an organisation (or community of coders and developers), which you can download for free and customise as much as you like. You also host it yourself (on a web server either you own or, more likely, rent from a third party such as Amazon web services).

The upside of this approach is it’s inexpensive, you begin with something that works (i.e. you’re not developing something from scratch), and you typically have a community you can call upon for support. The downside is you often still need to spend plenty of time customising it to your whims and you have to take care of all the fiddly bits yourself. These fiddly bits include upgrading the software every time it’s updated, ensuring there’s no major security risk, and fixing things which break. Unless you have an advanced level of technical expertise (and experience working with open source software), I’d suggest avoiding open source options for now.

4 Enterprise platforms

The luxury homes of the community platform world are fully fledged enterprise community platforms. Most of the largest customer communities today are hosted by around half a dozen enterprise platforms. The reason for this is simple. Big brands have very specific needs and don’t want their big new community initiative hosted on a cheap platform with limited features.

Technically, enterprise platforms are also white-label platforms. They give you the software and you can slap your name and logo on it. Most of your members won’t even know whose software they’re using. The difference is the range and depth of features enterprise platforms offer.

These features typically extend far beyond just question and answer forums. Members can typically share blog posts, publish their own documentation (knowledge base), earn points through their contributions and get a ranking (gamification), livestream themselves, submit and vote on the ideas of others (ideation), create and join groups, and much, much more.

Enterprise platforms also tend to offer more advanced search, onboarding (more on this later) features, and better abilities to integrate with your existing systems. This last feature, integration with your current database, is important. You don’t want your customers to have to remember different usernames and passwords. At this level, integration does not only mean the seamless ability to sign on (or stay logged in) when a customer moves from your company website to the community, but also to track community and purchase activity all in one place.

For example, your customer support team would know what questions a customer has asked in the community before and what answers they’ve viewed. They can use this information to avoid telling customers things they’ve already tried and guide them to the best solutions. You can also get interesting data about what customers really want based upon their participation in the community.

Enterprise platforms also typically offer more customisation, advanced privacy and security options, and additional services to help you run and grow your community. At large companies, it will be impossible to gain approval for any software that doesn’t match the company’s security requirements – this often means you’re forced to use enterprise platforms by default.

At the time of writing, the top enterprise platforms are Salesforce (­Community Cloud), Khoros (formerly Lithium), Telligent (Verint), inSided, Higher Logic, Vanilla, and Discourse. While there are certainly a plethora of other contenders, it’s often best to stick with a known name. The reason for this is simple. If you’ve spent a tonne of time and money setting up your community on a platform, you don’t want to find out your platform vendor is struggling financially and may either shut down the business or not be able to compete with better platforms.

5 Use free tools

You might be thinking that setting up a fancy enterprise platform sounds like an almighty amount of trouble. Does your community really need a fancy platform to host activity? What if you don’t have a few thousand dollars a year to spend on your community platform? Why not just use the same social media tools you and your audience are using every day?

Your audience already spends hours every day on social media, the platforms are free to use and in many cases have the most advanced features available. You can get started right now and let these platforms take care of all the fiddly stuff.

You can create a pretty decent community experience using tools that are available right now. You can use Twitter, Slack, WhatsApp, or Facebook Groups as a place for members to talk to one another. You can create and share blog posts on Medium, host webinars on Zoom and GoToWebinar, send emails out on Mailchimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, and maybe use event software like Bevy, Meetup, and Eventbrite to help coordinate the efforts of thousands, even millions, of people without directly controlling them.

Using tools like Zapier you can also integrate other great software like Tettra (for members to share resources with one another) and Donut (to build bonds between members). You might even end up creating a better community experience than you would’ve done with a more expensive platform.

The major benefit of this is it’s cheap and you’re often getting a best in class experience in many key features. It’s also relatively quick to get started, you have a lot more flexibility and someone else takes care of all the hard work. Often you’re using the tools members are already using so you don’t need to keep persuading them to visit a new place.

Another major benefit is it can be empowering for members. You can go where they are, benefit from siphoning from existing audiences (Reddit, Stack Exchange etc.), and support members who are deciding to create a new group, blog, or contribute in their own way.

However, this approach also has major downsides. You have no control over many of these platforms, and the reach (the number of people who will see your messages) on platforms like Facebook can be as low as 0.1%. This means just 1 in 1000 of the people who like or follow your accounts will see any update you post.

The lack of control can also be a problem when things go wrong. If your members start abusing one another and sharing false information your brand suffers even though there’s nothing you can do to stop it. There’s nothing to stop competitors slipping in and wreaking havoc either.

You also don’t get any useful data. Want to know how many people are viewing and participating? Tough luck. Want to know if your efforts are having a big impact? You’re going to struggle to find out. You will have no idea how many of your customers are engaging in the community.

Finally it can also be a discombobulating community experience if your members have to jump from one tool to the next without any central website driving and coordinating all activities. There’s no ‘town centre’ experience that sits as the beating heart of your community. You can create a single page connecting all these things – but it’s unlikely most of your members will see it.

While this might not be a great approach for top brands, it can be the perfect approach if you’re developing a community for a topic you’re passionate about, and for a smaller group or local club, this can be a great option. A growing number of DIYers are creating their communities precisely in this way.

Comparing different approaches

You can use the comparison table of the different approaches below to help guide the best approach for you.

If you’re working at a large organisation, you don’t want to launch something which doesn’t function perfectly, has a gaping security flaw, or just doesn’t look good. This will probably drive you to one of the largest enterprise platforms.

If you’re working in a small to medium-sized organisation, you should either use a white-label platform or create your community experience using inexpensive social media tools. If you have some unique needs or have advanced technical skills, you might try an open source approach (but be sure you know what you’re doing).

Note that these are approximate rules of thumb rather than rigid rules. And before making a decision about which approach to take you should first make a membership projection. This is especially important if you’re expecting more than a few hundred people participating.

How to make an accurate membership projection

To make an accurate membership projection, you’re going to need access to three types of data.

1. Web traffic. You want to know how many people are visiting your organisation’s homepage today. We will use this to make estimations for how many will visit the community later.
2. Click-through data. This shows how many people click on the various tabs and menu options from your homepage and elsewhere in the community. This shows what percentage of visitors might visit a community.
3. Audience data. You want to know how many people you could potentially promote the community to when you launch it.

You can see the types of data and where it might help below:

Don’t worry if you can’t get access to this kind of data, we will come to a solution for that soon.

Now you have three methods to make an accurate membership projection. These are:

1. Estimate by web traffic. This is the most common option. You look at the number of current visitors you get to your website and estimate how many of them might then visit the community. For example, if you have one million monthly visitors to your main website and you know a typical navigation tab is clicked by 10% of them, it’s reasonable to assume your community will attract 100,000 visitors each month (assuming the community is also on a navigation tab).

   The problem with this method is it ignores search traffic. For most public communities, the majority of people will visit via search engines as opposed to navigating through your organisation’s website. As a rough rule of thumb, you can look at how many people arrive at your organisation’s website by search and estimate around 20% to 30% of them will instead land upon a community page within two to three years.

2. Estimate number of active users. Sometimes you want to know how many active users (people logged in) your community will have. This is important if you’re using a platform like Salesforce or Slack which charges by the number of active users instead of the number of visitors.

   This has the potential to be a lot cheaper or more expensive than other platforms depending upon how many people are likely to log in to your community as opposed to reading the content for free. It’s also important if you’re planning to build a community which isn’t open to the public.

   A simple way to estimate this is to look at how many visitors log in to your main organisation website today. For example, if you know you have 5000 people asking and looking up answers to questions on your website today, you might estimate a percentage (say 10%–20%) of these will instead ask questions in your community.

   Another way is to assume 1%–10% of your current mailing list might regularly log in to your community if it isn’t open to the public.

3. Estimate by similarly sized organisations. If you don’t have access to the data above, you can look at organisations of a similar size and make an estimate based upon that. If a similarly sized competitor attracted 20k members in the first few years, you can use that as an approximate estimate.

   Be careful though. It will take your community years to reach the same size and level of participation as an existing community. Also some organisations have a frustrating tendency to inflate their metrics in public statements to look good.

You might notice that the estimates we’re using here of how many people who currently visit your homepage might visit or log in to the community are far too broad to make a specific projection.

This is because it varies significantly by community and by the topic. The goal isn’t to be 100% accurate but instead be accurate enough to make an informed decision about what pricing tier you should be on. You should be able to at least know if you should be on the 0 to 500k tier, the 500k to 3m tier, or the 3m to 6m tier. If it’s close between two pricing tiers, pick the lowest one.

To help you make a more specific projection, you can use our handy member projection tool available at: www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity. You drop in your own metrics and come up with our best estimate of how many members you’re likely to have engaged and are visiting your community.

Now you know how many people you’re likely to attract, you can start thinking about what you need these people to do in your community and begin shortlisting possible community platforms.

Turn use cases into technology requirements

In the last chapter, we turned our member needs into use cases. These are the specific things members want to use the community for. Before we can shortlist our platforms, we need to turn these use cases into more specific technical requirements.

If you’re going to use a white-label platform or social media tools, you can probably just list out the broad use cases and then start looking for platforms to match. If you’re going to use an enterprise or open source platform (or build your own), you need to be very specific in how your community needs to work.

I recommend listing both the use case and the technology requirement here. Often you might find platform vendors or developers who will see this later and who might have a better way to achieve the same use case. But for now list the primary use cases of your community and try to list the specific technology requirements. Here is an example:

You don’t need to list every single thing your platform needs to do. Most platforms have a default set of features which will come as a standard. Things like being able to register an account, browse discussions etc. are pretty much a given. You do need to ensure, however, that your primary use cases are being supported by the platform beyond the features that are present in every platform.

Shortlist community platforms

Once you know what features you need, the approach you will take, and how many members you can expect, you can start shortlisting possible community platforms. You can use our community platform comparison tool here (www.feverbee.com/communityplatforms). This tool will let you calculate the number of members you anticipate, set a budget, and showcase a list of relevant features offered by each platform. You can also see examples of communities on each platform.

You can also find a breakdown of some of the most popular platforms in the table below. Be warned this isn’t a comprehensive list and technology changes fast. By the time you read these words the landscape may have changed significantly – so do your own research!

From this tool and your research, you should be able to narrow down your options to a handful (usually two to three) of platforms and select the best one for you.

Negotiating and signing the contract

If you’re using a white-label platform, you can usually purchase the platform with a few clicks of a button. If you’re using an open source platform, you simply download the software and get started. However, if you’re using an enterprise platform you will likely go through a process of negotiating and signing the contract. Even if this entire process is handled by a procurement team you should be aware of what you’re paying for.

A few things are important here:

1. Most contracts are for three years. A typical community contract at an enterprise platform will last for three years. Many platform vendors apply significant discounts to encourage the client to sign a three-year contract. This isn’t simply about greed, it often takes that much time to get a community up and running. You might spend three to six months on the development of the community alone and a further few years growing the level of activity.
2. Know exactly what’s in the contract. A typical community contract at an enterprise platform will specify some combination of the following:
   • A licence for a specific number of annual visits (often <500k, <3m, <6m). Make sure this matches your membership projection. As we’ve discussed, some platforms (i.e. Salesforce) charge primarily by the number of active users of the community. At the time of writing this is $2 per unique logged in member and $5 for each member who contributes 2+ times per month. If your community is primarily customer support, this might be significantly cheaper given that the majority of people view answers without having to log in or register. If it’s for people to discuss a topic in general (i.e. Sephora’s Beauty Community), this might become a lot more expensive.
   • A licence for a number of applications calls. If you’re integrating the community with additional features that might request information from the community vendor, there may be additional costs here to consider.
   • Cost for additional features (gamification, knowledge, ideas etc.). It’s common for additional features to be bundled together at different pricing tiers. Be sure that you’re getting the features you expect. It’s not uncommon for features like gamification or a knowledge base to be charged at $10k to $20k per year extra in addition to your licence fee.
   • Support services (customer support, speed of response agreement). You might be getting premium support services, which will explain how quickly you can expect a response and through what medium. Be warned that if the level of service you can expert isn’t specified in the agreement, you might find yourself not getting the level of support you need to develop your community.
   • Training costs. This includes both training to use the platform, ongoing ‘tune up’ workshops, and strategic advice in managing the community. You might be able to negotiate a deal to have these included for free. As a general rule, anything which doesn’t cost the platform vendor significant effort to offer can usually be included for free.
   • Implementation and development costs. If the vendor is also developing and designing the platform, there will also be a considerable implementation fee here. We will cover implementation in more depth later.

   Make sure you’re making full use of the support services you’re paying for. You need to know exactly which activities are within your realm of responsibility and which are not. Be aware that even minor help requests or questions to your vendor can be considered billable time that you pay for.

3. Have everything prepared. The moment the contract begins (and you gain access to the platform), you are paying for the community. Even if you haven’t launched the community to the public yet, you are still paying for it. This means you need to make sure you have developers, designers, and an implementation partner ready to go from day one. One former client gained access to their platform and then learned they wouldn’t have access to the company’s developer team for five months. They spent almost $80k in fees during this time for a platform they couldn’t do anything with yet.

   Before you sign a contract, you should have your ducks aligned. This includes:

   • an implementation partner or developers lined up and ready to go
   • internal technical staff ready to support the development (i.e. helping with integration and single sign on)
   • a relatively clear idea for the design of your community.

   Signing the contract is like launching the starting gun for your community. You want to be ready to spring to action.

Finding implementation partners

Some organisations are surprised that after paying for an expensive platform, they often get something which doesn’t look great. This is like buying an expensive home and finding it empty when you arrive. It has huge potential, but you need to do plenty of work to get it up and running. Even if you’re using an inexpensive white-label platform, you’re still going to need to spend some time to set up and design the site.

Many community platforms will offer to design and develop the platform for you at an additional cost. Others will refer you to recommended ‘implementation partners’ who do this work for you. Implementation partners are essentially the plumbers, electricians, and decorators of your community. They are third-party firms who specialise in your vendor’s software. They are often certified by the vendor and may even be paying the vendor to receive referrals as part of a ‘partner programme’.

The benefit of working with an implementation partner is typically speed and experience. They can move fast, have experience working with lots of different organisations, and can create a very customised experience. The downside is cost. They don’t come cheap. If you have developers on your team you can take this on yourself. However, be warned that if you don’t have experience, this is just like doing plumbing yourself. You might save money now but end up spending a lot more further down the line.

Two roles of implementation partners

Implementation partners should do two specific things:

1. They should integrate with your current systems. If you’re moving from one community to the next, they will also take care of the migration. This essentially means exporting data in a readable format from one platform and then uploading it in another. This sounds simple enough, but can be devilishly tricky in practice. Many fields in vendor databases don’t match each other so you need to transform the data to make it work. For example, sometimes one database doesn’t allow specific characters to be used and can force members to change their names or profiles – which wreak havoc and upset members.
2. They should make the community look really, really good. You don’t want the first impression of your community to be a negative one. It doesn’t have to be Facebook, but if you’re making a big investment, it shouldn’t just be a bland forum either.

The cost of an implementation partner depends entirely upon the full scope of work. For most community projects we’ve been involved with, the fee has ranged from $50k to $500k. A mid-range of around $80k to $250k is usually about right for an enterprise community platform without too much complexity. You might be able to find some solo developers or smaller agencies for far less; just be careful to ensure they have the credentials to do the job.

Each platform will recommend different vendors. You can find our list of recommendations here: www.feverbee.com/implementationpartners

Designing the community experience

Now we can begin thinking about what the full community experience will look like for community members. The community experience can be divided into three areas:

1. Structure. This defines which features are positioned where and how the navigation will work.
2. Design. This defines how the community should look and feel.
3. Functions. This defines how the community features will work.

While your developers and implementation partners can give you direction, you need to be holding the reins and overseeing the decisions made in each of these categories. Getting any of these areas wrong can undermine your community effort. We can’t go through every single aspect of each in this book, but we can cover the major principles to ensure you can develop a quality community experience.

Developing the right community structure

The community structure covers the taxonomy, navigation, themes, and homepage layout.

Taxonomy is a technical term, which essentially means how you are going to classify all the information in your community. This sounds really boring, but it’s critically important. Your members are going to create a lot of content and discussions. If there isn’t a good system for categorising this content no one else will ever find it.

Sometimes you can borrow from an existing structure you have on your website, in your knowledge base (or documentation), or adapt one provided by your colleagues. At other times you will need to create your own taxonomy for the community (i.e. what will be featured in your navigation bar? Which areas will exist as sub-menus?).

You need to make one critical decision early on. Is all the information in your community (discussions, content and events etc.) structured around your products, interests, or what members are trying to achieve?

For example, imagine you’re managing the community at Fitbit. Would you structure the community by each variation of your fitness tracker (Ionic, Versa, Charge etc.)? By the type of exercise members want to do (jogging, swimming etc.)? Or by their goals (losing weight, running further, building muscle, sleep better etc.)?2 Each option offers a different community experience.

The larger your audience, the more difficult (and important) these decisions become. If you work for a company which has dozens of products, you will probably have to combine some products into a single category to sustain a good level of participation in each area. If any of these become too popular, you might need a separate sub-category just for a niche area within that topic.

As a rule of thumb, try to begin with as few features and categories as possible. It’s a lot easier to add features than remove them.

Designing your community

If you’re developing a community for your own goals, you have a lot of freedom in how you design your community. You also, however, have to make a lot more decisions.

If you’re working for an organisation, your community website should closely resemble your company website. This helps create a coherent experience for members as they move between your company website and your community. This also means many of the decisions you otherwise need to make (how large should buttons be, what colours should we use, what backgrounds make sense?) have already been made for you.

Before you begin designing the site, make sure you have a copy of your company’s brand guidelines (if they exist). Use these to design a consistent community experience. However, even with a handy copy of these guidelines, you still have a number of critical decisions about what appears on your community. Decisions that seem relatively arbitrary (should you display the latest or most popular activity first?) have a big impact upon whether and how members will participate.

These include the homepage, banners, and page and newsletter templates.

The homepage

Let’s begin with the homepage. This is the page every newcomer and regular member will see when they visit the community. If your community doesn’t feel like a thriving hub of exciting activity, members will be far less likely to start and reply to discussions. You have plenty of decisions to make here.

Here are the biggest:

• Should you show the latest, most popular, or most relevant activity? A simple rule of thumb, if you’re just getting started, you probably want to show the latest activity first. This helps the community seem engaging and active. As your community grows, you want to show the most popular activity. This lets people sort through the content to find the best stuff. If your community reaches ‘mega community’ status you probably need to personalise the experience to show the most relevant activity to each member.
• What platform features do you show? You have plenty of options for which features appear on the homepage. You can show discussions, search, groups, blogs documentation, leaderboards and more.
• Calls to action. What are the key calls to action? The most common are inviting members to search for information, register, start discussion, log in, vote, and share content. The more calls to action you have the less likely members will pay attention to any of them. As a general rule, try to limit the homepage to just two to three calls to action. For most communities (search for information, register/login, and start discussion) this should suffice. But let your use cases guide you. Whatever is the biggest priority for your members should be shown on the homepage.

Even the simplest looking community homepages are the outcome of a dozen or more tricky decisions. In fact, the reason why some websites look so simple to use is precisely because they made a lot of difficult decisions during this phase. The more cluttered the homepage looks, the less able the designer was to make the key decisions to ensure members had a great community experience.

Banners

Banners are amongst the most underrated tool in community design today. A good banner can massively increase the number of people who join and participate in a community. We’ve tweaked banners in the past to increase the registration ratio by 400%+!3

A banner is essentially a graphic (or interactive graphic) which sits at the top of your community page. The purpose isn’t just to look good, but to advertise to your members what the community is about or what they should do next.

Most banners are poorly used. Which is a shame given they are taking up the prime real estate of your community homepage. Far too many communities have banners which are either too big or fail to guide members to the next action. For example, many communities have banners which take up 70% of their homepage. While this might work for your main company homepage, it is a disaster for a community. It pushes community activity below the fold (the point at which members have to scroll down for more information). In turn, this forces members to scroll down the page on every visit to see what’s new in the community.

This is a clear violation of principle two – it increases effort without delivering an additional reward. On a mobile phone, this problem is exacerbated as members must scroll with their thumbs to find the content they want. No one is going to visit your community several times a day if they have to constantly break their thumb to find the content on each visit. On mobile, which can account for anything from 20% to 90% of your traffic, the banner should be removed or minimised.

To make the banner work for you, there are a few things to get right.

1. Keep the banner to 1/4 of the height of the display area. At the very least, you should still be able to see the latest activity above the fold in the community.
2. Keep the search box within the banner. In most communities, this is what most people want to use. Make sure people can easily see the search box to find the information they want.
3. Ensure any text supports the unique value of the community. No one needs a welcome message here. This is like a brand advertising in Times Square welcoming people to Times Square. It’s a waste of an incredible opportunity. Instead explain the community’s powerful unique use case and what makes it amazing.
4. Have a clear call to action. The most common calls to action invite members to register and start a discussion. But don’t feel limited to that if you need your members to do something else.
5. Use conditional logic to serve different banners to different members. Newcomers may need calls to action to register and get started. Veterans probably want to easily reply to discussions and build their reputation. You can use conditional logic to serve a unique banner to members based upon previous activity. And you can change banners up frequently. If you have an exciting upcoming event or activity, change up the banner to promote it.

A good example of a homepage is the Temenos Kony Community.4

It has clear calls to action, a simple navigation structure, and small boxes for major features. Better yet, the latest activity appears above the fold and top members can see where they rank.

Page and newsletter templates

In addition to the homepage and banner, you may also need to create (or adapt) a few standard page templates. Page templates are essentially standard formats for how other types of content (discussions, categories, groups, knowledge articles, and blogs etc.) are displayed.

On a white-label platform, this will be done for you. On an enterprise platform, you will usually have a few templates you can adapt and work from. Make sure they’re suited to the needs of your audience.

You want to ensure a consistent experience. You don’t want the navigation buttons or design to change as members move between different areas of your community. For example, if you want a sidebar with a call to action to match one of your use cases, this should be within a template. Also be aware that if you’re looking for any unique customisations on these, this can take a lot more time than you expect.

When you set up these templates, follow the same principles as before. Ensure the key activity is placed above the fold, restrict the page elements to the core few, and follow the same branding as the rest of the site.

Functions and features of your community

Now we’ve covered the structure and design of a community, it’s time to talk briefly about the features within the community. Many of these we will cover in more depth later in this book.

Almost every feature a community offers also comes with a dozen or more different settings you can tinker with to create a different community experience.

From my experience, it’s common to see the sheer number of options available and imagine yourself sitting in the cockpit of an aeroplane. You don’t want to mess with any of the settings in case anything goes wrong. As a result you might stick to the default settings. This is a mistake.

The reality is you’re setting up a community not flying a plane. You need to explore what each of the settings does and make clear decisions about what you need to change to best support your members.

I’m not going to be able to go through each setting as they vary too much between platforms. However, it is a good idea to go through each setting in turn and see how it impacts the community experience and check that this matches the needs and use cases of your members. Much of the art in developing a great community experience lies in the configuration of the community settings to suit your members’ unique needs.