Customer Communities

15Building Blocks to Successfully Starting a Community: Putting Together a Strong Strategy in Five Steps

In the first two parts of this book, we've covered many of the most essential principles that relate to building an effective community. Now it's worthwhile reflecting on the process of actually putting it all together and creating a community strategy. We've seen countless community strategies over the years, and many of them share similar themes. We will, in fact, share a strategy template that includes many of the most common themes that likely will play a role in getting your community off the ground. Such a template can provide useful inspiration, but before we share that, let's first talk about a very common pitfall.

When we ask customers what they want to achieve with their community, they will often say something like, “We want it to be a community of practice,” or “We want our customers to connect with each other and get inspired.” Those are fine answers, but sometimes it turns out that what is being aimed for isn't happening. Perhaps the community isn't growing as expected. Or perhaps something else unexpected is happening. It's not uncommon, for example, to hear from a community team that they don't want to have a support-focused community but somehow their community members keep asking support questions. They then might wonder how to make this stop. Very often, the pitfall that these teams have fallen into is that they have taken a mostly inside-out perspective ...