The Purpose of Your Community

We looked in an earlier module at your business goals for your community. Now it’s time to translate those goals into a clear purpose that you can promote to interested people, which will help them decide if your community is a good fit.
For example, you decide that a community will help you achieve your goal of reducing customer support tickets and saving time. But be careful how you convey that. Would this statement attract people to join?

“This community will reduce the numbers of support tickets this year by 10%.”

Not very appealing to your potential audience.

Rethink this statement to make it customer-focused, such as:

“This community will provide you with the knowledge and support to use our product without hassle right out of the box, so you start to reap the benefits the day it arrives.”

This is a much more attractive proposition for someone who’s considering joining your community. Reducing the time taken on support tickets is really about improving the customer experience.

Think about how you would describe the purpose of your community and the community itself. This is the description that people see when they visit your community. It’s what helps them understand what the community is all about and will motivate the right people to join.

This statement will go on your community home page and in any publicity you have to encourage people to sign up.

Benefits of Your Community

People won’t join your community and invest time in it if they don’t see the specific benefits for them.
You looked earlier at what your ideal community member is looking for in a community: things like networking, accountability, emotional support, and so on. Remind yourself of the psychological and practical needs of your group members that you came up with through your research and the overall benefits you came up with when you wrote you brand message.

Now it’s time to decide how your community can meet those needs.

Benefits will include the intangible, such as:

• Support
• Encouragement
• Motivation

As well as the tangible, such as:

• Money-off coupons
• 10% discount on all products
• Free entry to live events
• Bonus material
• Online courses
• Free one–on-one session with you
• Live Q&A or Facebook Live sessions
• Exclusive behind the scenes videos.

You can offer many of these benefits at little cost to you. When you think of intangible elements, find ways to make these tangible, as they’ll be more attractive to new people that way. For example, if the main purpose of your community is to provide support, then interactions with you such as a one-on-one session or live Q&A would be tangible methods to provide that support.

It’s up to you to choose what specific benefits you want to offer your community. These benefits will help fulfill the purpose of your group and help you achieve your business goals. When you write the description for your group members, highlight the benefits of being a member.