Six Best Practices for Your Own House Social Network

In this section we present six best practices to keep in mind when building your platform, growing the user base, and managing your community on house social networks.

Best Practice 1: Verticalize Your Audience
At the beginning, target a narrow swath of your total eventual audience. Like building a new company, or launching a new program, it takes time, money and resources to get your house social network
rolling. Narrowing in on a vertical segment is more cost-effective, takes less time, and builds financial and word-of-mouth momentum.
Example: Community Gatepath recently launched a community portal, AbilityPath.org, for parents of children with special needs. AbilityPath is focusing on parents of children under five within the California market during the crucial first year of service, with plans to extend to a national network in the long term.

Best Practice 2: Categorize Your Community Type
Social networking communities are not all the same. Social networking features like discussions, ratings/reviews, commenting, and profiles are common to sites with very different purposes. We’ve compiled a list of the types of social networking sites. Use this list to designate the role of your social networking site.

* Research Role: The community primarily serves a market research function for the nonprofit. It is a way for the organization to to learn about the activities,habits, needs, desires or opinions of your constituents via observation and active inquiry.

* Marketing Role: The nonprofit primarily uses the community to promote your brand, programs, events, and mission.

* Service Delivery Role: These communities allow the nonprofit to accomplish the service-based components of your mission such as advocacy, grant making, education, or financial aid.

* Emotional Support Role: These communities allow members to connect and support one another emotionally or spiritually.

* Customer Service Role: This type of social network allows your constituents to help one another by asking and answering questions about your organization, events, services, programs, thereby reducing the burden of customer service on your organization.

After you define the role of your social networking site, use this definition to drive the strategy, design, implementation, promotion and on-going community management. Remain true to this role, for example, in the social networking features you integrate into the site, the audience you target, and the messaging you craft. It is possible to evolve your site into new roles over time, but do so consciously, with a plan, and only after successfully achieving your original objective.

Best Practice 3: Identify Your Differentiating Assets
Identify the most unique aspects of your site, and then incorporate them in to your community development plan. To flourish, each new community must bring something new and different to the market. Differentiation ensures that members clearly understand and value your community.
Example: Sierra Club manages a community site focused on hikers and hiking trails—SierraTrails.org, where the hiking trails are contributed by community members. In this case, the most important and unique components of the site are the hiking trails and the community—the hikers. Focusing on these two elements will help Sierra Club to prioritize marketing, site and community management resources for maximum effectiveness.

Best Practice 4: Build in Increments
When building the marketing, implementation, and financial plans for your community site, it is tempting to ‘plan’ for very rapid growth. Recognize that several factors may limit your growth, so be sure to plan for them:

* 1. Technology: The white label social networking software—the commercial software with which you build your community—is maturing quickly, and there are numerous examples of large communities operating on these platforms. Having said that, this industry is still relatively young—building and testing your social networking sites incrementally is required.

* 2. Resource: Recruiting the specialized resources—people and tools—to promote and manage your online community is crucial, and sometimes slow. Community managers, moderators, and social media marketing expertise are not always easy to find.You’ll need them, so allocate the time to find the right resources.

* 3. Process: Social networking communities require processes for content work flow management and production, user-generated content moderation, member policing, and product development. Scaling these processes cost-effectively is intrinsic to the growth and development of the site and community. But these processes may be new to your organization, so allow time to get them right and grow them correctly.

Best Practice 5: Seed Your Community
The marketing conundrum is simple: you need people to make the site valuable for visitors, but at the beginning you have no members. So how to get started? Seed the community with people who are familiar with and sympathetic to your organization. Consider employees, board members, volunteers, funders, peer organizations, and commercial partners. Send out personal invites to these audiences and ask them to check out the community, register, join a discussion, and post content—photos or blog comments. A seed community of 250 to 1,000 members is crucial to get started.

Best Practice 6: Make Joining Easy
In today’s Internet world, most visitors will view registering on your community as an inconvenience. Yet, getting visitors registered is a crucial step in growing a thriving community. Make it easy for people to register, so the time and effort required by registrants is low.

* 1. Keep registration simple: Keep required and non-required fields to a minimum. Once the visitors are in, there are other ways to get more profile information.

* 2. Limit the registration process to one page: Multi-page registration forms allow you to collect more information about members, but they also increase the abandonment rate—the percentage of visitors that leave before completing the registration process. Unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise, limit your registration process to one page.

* 3. Be careful with single sign-on: single sign-on allows you to register visitors on multiple databases. For example, using single sign-on technology, visitors are automatically added to an organization’s Convio online constituent database and to the social networking software member database. Carefully review the registration process for new and existing constituents. Make sure the process for retrieving username and passwords for existing account holders is clear for registrants.

Nonprofits will succeed at building social networking sites much as they have succeeded over the years in introducing unique new services, new fundraising programs, and fundamentally making change—via a thorough, disciplined, strategic and creative application of new concepts and technology. Social networking is indeed a new phenomenon, but nonprofits have all the skills and resources to successfully capitalize on it today.