Welcome to my first Invision Community blog post!

For those that haven't yet seen me making my way around this community, I'm Gary, and I have just recently joined the Customer Service team at Invision Community. I want to take this moment to thank the staff for giving me such an amazing opportunity and welcoming me with open arms.

My history goes way back to circa 2004-2005 (I was still in high school) where I first dug my hands into forums and forum software in the good old Invisionfree days. Through the years I have created too many communities to count, including my own free post-to-host hosting service (remember those days?). Some were successful and so many others were anything but. Little did I know these experiences would only get me more and more hooked into this virtual world!

Forums have been more to me than just an invaluable source of information. They are communities of like-minded people sharing their knowledge, experiences, hobbies and most of all, coming together in a common place to just be themselves. I have experienced nearly every forum software out there, though I always made my way back to the Invision Community suite of products as I not only found it to be a very powerful and dynamic bit of kit, but it always provided the solutions I wanted and needed for my communities.

I thought I would share some tips on things that have worked for me when creating my own community. This will make up part one of a set of planned blog entries relating to community tips in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Use the KISS principle.

One thing I have found in order to engage guests and new and existing members of my community is to incorporate the 'Keep it simple, silly!' principle.

When you visit a community and you're overwhelmed with categories, forums and unnecessary pinned topics, you are actually not doing yourself a favour. It mostly adds confusion to your community and does the complete opposite to having things organised. Too much clutter is never a good thing, and keeping things orderly and ensuring content is concise will provide your members with a more comfortable and easier overall experience. I did not incorporate this principle into my communities, and soon realised that was a huge contributor to the cause of their demise. 😅

Keep some of these in mind:

• Can I combine forums that are similar in content?
• Do I need so many separately pinned topics?
• Can I write more concisely? Targeting this point on the more administrative side of things like 'how to use this forum' topics, forum descriptions, etc.
• Are there things that are already self-explanatory and do not require repeat descriptions or mentions?
• Can I use less jargon and target my writing to a wider audience?
• Am I using too many graphics?
• If the above is not a factor, can graphics assist in reducing large chunks of plain text?
• When is too much, in fact, too much?

Quality over quantity as they say. How about, less is more?

Whatever stance you take and whichever influential quote you can most relate to, you want your audience to feel welcomed, not overstimulated with irrelevant content you think they need to see. Let your audience guide your community. I will delve into this further in the next blog entry.

I'll leave it there for this edition, otherwise I may just keep you here all day...

I'm sure there are many of you who are doing this so well already, so please share your own useful and proven tips and tricks. What have you found works for you and your community? What is something you are doing differently or uniquely in an effort to keep it simple?

As the Invision Community platform continues to evolve, so do the precarious ploys of pesky bots. 

Oftentimes spammers, whether they are bots or actual humans, spam your community with links in an effort to boost their website’s SEO. 

There are already a number of ways in the Invision Community platform to fight against spam, including…
 

• Our native Spam Defense built into the platform that scores a newly-registered member
• Placing new registrations into a moderator queue
• Adding word filters that, when triggered, put the member in a moderation queue

We also integrate with various CAPTCHAs. You might be unfamiliar with the term, but you’ve definitely participated with one. It’s a digital gatekeeper in the form of an interactive puzzle that asks you to find patterns or similar images in order to evade malicious bots from taking action, whether that’s submitting a spam email, comment or registering an account. 

Our existing CAPTCHA defenses include:
 

• Invisible reCAPTCHA where the system intelligently detects if the user is human in the background
• reCAPTCHA V2 where the user simply clicks an "I'm not a robot" checkbox
• keyCAPTCHA where the user must complete a jigsaw puzzle
   

In our latest update, version 4.7, we’ve included yet another defense to block spam from seeing the light of day: hCaptcha

hCaptcha is one of the world's most widely used independent Captcha services. 

We’re incorporating it in a few places where spammers can prepare their attacks.

Registering:

Prevent spammers from joining your community. If enabled, the hCaptcha will stop spammers in their tracks before even creating an account in your community.

Guest posts:

Community leaders have the option to allow guests to reply to topics. This could potentially open up the floodgates for spammers, but the hCaptcha effectively mitigates this by asking the entity (hopefully an actual person) to problem solve. If the sequence is not successfully completed, the guest post won't be published.

hCaptcha is available in the new 4.7 Beta 1 release.

Give it a shot and let us know what you think in the comments… just be sure to successfully select all the traffic lights if you’re a guest! 😉 
 

Since the dawn of the Internet, forums have remained a dominant force on the worldwide web. 

Invision Community not only survived the social media boom, we thrived. Our community forum platform is an industry leader and continues to serve thousands of businesses year-round. 

If community forums are tried and true, then why is the average Internet user bombarded with pleas to follow a brand’s Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts versus a forum? 

It's often the case that when decision makers consider building a community, they look to social media tools first and overlook the power an owned community platform has.

It's rare to find an instance where exclusively maintaining a social media presence builds a rich and diverse community that shares information and actively help each other.

Every smart company should invest in fostering a community through the means of a forum.

Without geeking out too hard (I’m about to geek out real hard), allow me to explain why forums harness immense power.

Meaningful user generated content

I added meaningful because the fabric of social media is also user generated content, however, much of the time it's followers competing for attention or having no interest or knowledge of your brand and its products. One issue with social media is random trolls and people misunderstanding a brand's products or services. That causes a lot of noise or adds little value.

This is because community forums focus on the content, whereas social media centers around the individual user. 

Social media comment sections have become increasingly divisive with tempers easily flared. It can be hard to have a worthwhile conversation. You’re either tossing a comment into the social media campfire, arguing with someone you’ll never meet or double tapping a “like” to show public support. None of which adds value or elevates a brand’s identity. 

On the other hand, a community forum offers various pathways for meaningful engagement. 
 

• A library of content 
  Topics build on top of one another and eventually creates a searchable library of content for new users to discover.
• Easily discoverable
  Search engines don’t typically respond to your query with social media posts. On the other hand, forum posts are quickly indexed. Invision Community’s latest update 4.6.11 includes IndexNow, which quickly informs search engines about new content changes. This draws in new users with little effort. 
• Belonging
  Successful forums are inherently niche. Generally, members who participate share overarching commonalities with one another, and where they don’t they have a platform to express otherwise. Social media is too gargantuan to recreate these special connections. 
• Moderation
  Social media can be powerful, but often spirals into toxicity because these platforms rely on automatic moderation tools. Our community forum has built-in tools for automatic moderation as well as tools for moderators (actual people caring for your community!) to ensure stability.  

Invision Community's forums in Fluid mode

Fosters community

Community forums facilitate community building. They are the apparatus for Internet users around the world to instantly connect with one another. 

Think of community forums like a neighborhood. A construction company (that's you) builds the community, but the community needs residents (your members) to transform the houses into homes. 

Once the infrastructure is set up, forums can use time to its advantage. Unlike social media, forum content can remain relevant and circulate throughout a community for long periods of time. That’s because ongoing conversations aren’t dependent on complex algorithms that display content based on past engagement.

For example, your Instagram explore page shows you similar content based on other content you’ve engaged with in the past. That keeps you stuck in a loop and prevents you from interacting with new content. The algorithm sees you liked X, it shows you more of X, you see X, you engage with more of X and the cycle repeats itself, never allowing yourself to explore A, B, C or literally anything else. 

Forums display content based on what the community as a whole is interested in (not just the individual).

With the Invision Community’s forums application,  the member also has the option to decide how they want to consume content (maybe engaging with X is all that member wants, but they have the ability to discover more content outside of what machine learning dictates). 

Own your community forum

Imagine spending years building a following on social media only for it to vanish overnight. Even worse, there’s no point of contact to reach out to to gain an understanding of what happened.

That can’t happen when owning your own community forum. 

Not only do you maintain control, but you…
 

• Call the shots 
  You are the decision maker. On social media, there’s no ability to enable, test, try or optimize new ideas / features.
• Have access to rich reporting
  Social media offers some insights, but it’s limited. Invision Community’s reporting inside the ACP includes various engagement reporting metrics to help you better understand what’s working (and what isn’t).
• Can monetize
  There are roundabout ways to get monetized on social media, however with our community forums application, you have far more flexibility to integrate digital campaigns such as banner ads, affiliate links and paid promotional content.

Invision Community's Activity Streams

Free market research

Save money on market research by tapping into your audience's needs free of charge. Your power users want to tell you about their experience in your community, something big brands without a community pay big money for.

If you’ve made it to the bottom of this post, you probably think I have something against social media. To the contrary! Social media is a powerful tool, but most use it as the be-all end-all when it can better serve businesses to encourage new audiences to visit your community (versus attempting to create community directly on a platform you don’t own, control or have any real say in). 

Owning your own community forum is so immensely powerful, and, despite message boards and forums existing since the early ‘80s, it still feels like a secret. 

Invision Community’s forums application is the best in the industry. If you have your own community forum, show it off in the comments! Don’t have one yet? Please reach out to us and we’ll get you started. 

So you’re a small/medium sized business who purchased one of our plans and launched a new community. The topics, replies and views will start to rack up any time now, right? Riiight?!

Perhaps you’re a major brand wanting to give your customers a place to connect, ask questions and get more information, but aren't sure how to inspire them to join.

Maybe you haven’t even pulled the trigger and launched a new community just yet because you fear your hard work won’t be seen so what’s the point? 

You feel confident nailing down the color scheme, header, navigation and forum categories, but the dreaded “0 replies” is casting a gloomy shadow over your bright and shiny new community. A lack of initial momentum is one of the scariest hurdles a new community builder faces. 

Here are a few tips to kick off your community in style and start receiving engagement right away.
 

Be visible.

As your community’s leader, it’s important to be accessible to your members. Make yourself available to them so they know you’re willing to lend a hand. This helps forge meaningful connections with your community and fosters trust. 

Being visible looks like creating topics, responding to members’ posts, answering private messages, enabling a contact form and including a profile photo.  

Use your voice.

You can’t expect your members to speak up if there isn’t a community leader or brand ambassador doing so first. Lead by example and use your voice in your own community.

This is also a great opportunity to shape the tone of your community, whether that’s informative, casual, snarky or funny. 

The tone of your community: 

• Sets a precedent for how members respond. 
• Broadcasts your brand’s values.
• Defines how a member can connect.
• Inspires guests to silently react.

Expressing your community’s tone adds character, helping you differentiate from competitors. 

Create content that invokes an emotional response.

This is one of the best kept secrets! Creating content that inspires a feeling from your members is a surefire way to keep them continually participating and returning. 

It's one thing to make content, it's another to create valuable content. Value enhances a member’s life, quantified by whether it produces a positive effect.

Publish content that invokes an emotional response and watch how quickly your engagement rate climbs.

Provide a great user experience.

Generally speaking, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but when it comes to community building, a slick user interface helps facilitate a great user experience. 

In case you missed our blog post about the importance of your brand’s look and feel, creating an immersive visual experience for your community matters. 

A few quick design tips:

• Ensure your navigation is easy to use
• Employ a beautiful color scheme that reflects your community’s tone
• Add spacing in between components 
• Include a logo

Promote your community

You likely have some type of presence on social media. Use that as a tool to drive traffic to your community (versus what most people do: use social media as the be-all and end-all for promotion). 

If you have a following on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, you’ll want to entice and mobilize your existing base to join your community. 

Do this by being visible, using your voice, creating content that invokes an emotional response and offering a great user experience (see what I did there?). 

How do you engage your community? Drop us a line in the comments. We’d love to engage with you!

Front-facing support creates visible opportunities for clients to find answers to both frequently asked and uncommon questions. 

Earlier this year, Invision Community lifted the veil off support, shifting from a private, 1-on-1, email-driven medium to open topics in our community support forum. 

We found ourselves answering the same questions because we hadn’t fully leaned into community support, which also gives our existing clients opportunities to weigh in with solutions. 

While we still do convert a chunk of community support questions to a private ticket, most issues are resolved for all to see. This is important to note because it's created an invaluable resource for others who may be searching for similar answers. 

We have:

• Improved support staff time management
• Improved retention
• Improved support response times for clients
• Built a resource library and knowledge base
• Forged stronger connections

A few key stats in our support areas: 

• 71% solved (+80%) in 3 months
• 9 hours is our average time to find a solution (50% faster) in 3 months
• 14% of topics became a ticket
   

Feel free to mirror what we do for your own community! This is done through four key steps: 

1) Identify, 2) Assess, 3) Execute, 4) Follow up

1) Identify:

The first step is to identify the client’s problem or concerns. Our team keeps an eye on the support forums and anticipate new topics are incoming. 

We are equipped with any stored access details, and cloud access details, to login to a client’s community and take a look if needed (with their consent). This can aid us in identifying the issue.

2) Assess:

After assessing the issue and gathering information, we put on our critical thinking caps. One of several things may happen:

• A solution is provided
• More information may be requested
• A ticket can be created if needed for more sensitive issues, or items needing more detailed review

Sometimes our support team needs to investigate an issue further. That requires us to take things off the community and open a specialized ticket for our tier two support team to take a closer look. 

3) Execute

Now that we’ve created a path towards finding a solution, we get to work. 

Each ticket can result in one of three outcomes: 

• It's resolved
• It needs to be further investigated
• Or, it’s a bug

Bugs

Hey, they happen. If an item is determined to be a bug, that bug is also added as a follow up item and the topic is marked as a known issue.

When we follow up on a bug item, we go through a few processes. 

Our developers will work through these bugs to get them resolved, in order of priority/severity. Once done, they are reviewed and added to a new release.

As items are fixed, our support staff will pick up on this through the followup process. The ticket will be changed from “known issue” to “in future release” to show its status. The follow up item status is also changed to show it being in the next release.

Upon release of a new version, the above items are gone through to mark them as solved, then we inform the client that the issue is resolved.

We also have weekly development meetings to discuss items with developers, as well as weekly support staff meetings to discuss issues with any support processes for that week.

4) Followup

Following up with a client after we found a solution helps us stay connected to our community and improves retention.

We like to check back in a few days, a week, or even more depending on what the nature of the issue was. The aim is to provide a working solution to the client then ensure that, well… it worked! 

If an item is escalated, we have an internal follow up system that allows us to keep an eye on your ticket.

Shifting the way you handle support, from behind-the-scenes to center stage, has been one of the most profound and rewarding changes to Invision Community. Not only is our support community a wealth of knowledge and saves our clients time, but it also creates trust with our clients because we’re held accountable. 

How do you handle support in your community? Drop us a line in the comments; we’d love to hear from (and see) you!

Before we unpack this special trifecta, let’s define what success means through the lens of community building. 

While success is subjective, there are a few things we can all agree on: 

Cause is your ‘why.’ Why does your community exist and why should anyone care to join?

It sounds obvious, but many businesses have trouble understanding who their audience is or how their community can help them.

Can you answer this?

An important component of cause is justifying your community’s existence. If you can define why your community helps people, you’ll see success. That may look like:

• Offering guidance
• Answering questions
• Sharing information
• Selling a product or service

A community that stands to elevate a group of peoples’ lives will eventually break the threshold from ordinary to extraordinary. 

There’s a number of ways to utilize the Invision Community platform to assist with your cause.
 

• Create a niche forum for your members to engage with one another using our Forum application.
• Sell a digital product or physical item using our Commerce application.
• Create an event with our Calendar application.
• Share news, information and blogs using our Blogs and Pages applications.

How to create a cause: creating and nurturing your community takes a lot of hard work and determination. Having a passion to serve is a must; without it you will burn out. 

If you have yet to define your community’s purpose, don’t fret – reading this blog post about how to create a successful community is a perfect starting point. However, if you’re a small or big business and ready to take that next step, start by answering the following:

Members participating in a shared experience together is what takes your company from just a business to a community. 

Your community’s cause inspires experiences.

A lively community isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it medium. While you’re consistently chucking wood into the community campfire, you’ll need time on your side. That’s a nice way of saying be patient! The compounding effect of shared group experiences is something a company or brand can’t manufacture, however it’s essential for a meaningful history. Oftentimes, a business owner expects their community to flourish in a year or two. It’s possible, but uncommon, because there likely wasn’t enough time to generate an impact across a population. Be in this for the long haul. 

How to create experiences: tap into people’s emotions. Create content that takes the member on a journey of highs and lows – encourage them to follow suit when creating their own content.  

We’ve all heard the recycled marketing adage, ‘people come for the content, but they stay for the community.’ There’s a reason content is king; it’s a vehicle to drive new audiences to your community while also making your brand more valuable. However, content is only one of several value modalities. 

This is when value comes full circle with experiences. A brand does this by easily explaining its cause, creating experiences then adding value by justifying its existence through offering guidance, answering questions, sharing information or selling a product/service. 

How to create value: A community platform alone won’t create value. It requires thoughtful intention, inspired action and follow up.  

Offer a world class experience by consistently over-delivering: 

• Offer premium, information-style content (like blog posts, YouTube videos, newsletters, social media outreach).
• Engage with your members in the community (reply to their posts, feature their content, reward them with public recognition using our Achievements system).
•  Touch base outside the community with email outreach, respond to their social media posts, even monthly calls.  

Creating a community is single-handedly one of the best decisions you can make for your business. 

We’ve helped serious hobbyists, small businesses and enterprise giants give their super fans/customers/clients the ability to create meaningful connections with one another. 

Ready to bring cause, experiences and value to your company? 

Get in touch with us!

Every time I checked in with a newly launched running community, it seemed like there were more and more new people posting.

As a result, I found it harder to find my friends' latest run write-ups and even harder to reply directly to them. Speaking with other early adopters, they felt the same way, and we all eventually drifted out of the community's orbit. 

It's natural to want your community to grow; indeed, a lot of community management strategies are based on increasing registrations and scaling upwards.

However, your early adopters may feel very different about growth as they watch their close friendship circles dissolve as more members join and begin posting.

A small and tightly connected community is very different from a large sprawling community, and often our business goals as community managers can be at odds with our member's goals.

Let's take a look at the problem and then the solution.

A new community is small and personal. Your early adopters will make friends fast by sharing their experiences and stories. They start to learn about each other and actively look forward to new posts and content. It's easy to keep track of the conversations and people in those early days when memberships are still in their infancy.

Before themes and topics drive your community, the primary reason your members return is to strengthen burgeoning bonds.

As your thriving community grows, more names appear, generating more posts and content. It can become harder to keep track of those personal conversations and friends. For those early adopters, it becomes overwhelming, and the feel of the community changes.

The key to growth is to do it with consideration and understanding by allowing your members to retain smaller friendship circles within the larger community. Think of these small circles as a secure basecamp your members will use to explore more of the community together.

How you structure your community can heavily influence member behaviour, so let's ensure you are set up for success.

Forum structure
Deciding how many forums to have largely depends on the size of your community. Generally, fewer is better; however, adding more when activity increases is recommended. Using the example of a running community, when you have few members, a single topic can be used to keep track of workouts; however, as membership increases, a dedicated forum where members can post and maintain their own workout log topic makes it easier for others to find specific member's logs rather than trawling through a long busy topic.

If you're in doubt, asking your community is always a great way to draw out real honest feedback and guidance on how to improve.

Clubs
Creating a sub-community is a big decision. On the one hand, you syphon off discussion to areas outside the main community, but this can be an advantage if you want members to retain their smaller friendship circles. On the other hand, you may find an appetite for more niched discussion within your topic. For example, while your site may be based around road running, you may have a small group specifically interested in mountain running. Using a club allows them to follow that passion without altering the core purpose of your community.

Follow
Using the robust follow and notification tools is an efficient way to let members know when a favoured member posts something new or a loved topic gets a reply. Make sure your members know how to set up notifications and the different ways to receive them, such as via mobile, email, or the community's bell.

Your members need not miss a friends update again.

Discover
Activity streams allow members to personalise their first point of discovery. In addition, the flexibility of the streams will enable members to choose which member's content to see and which forum's content to include in a single news feed style stream. 

Giving your members the ability to customise which content they see when they first visit the community allows them to check in with their favourite areas before exploring the rest of the community.

Growing a community from a handful of people to tens of thousands takes a lot of planning. Unfortunately, it's easy to focus on just numbers and forget about the people behind them. However, aligning your business goals with your members' goals is critical when growing beyond your early adopters.

Setting up your community for success using our built-in tools will help your members feel comfortable as you grow.

🟢 Scaling your community requires overcoming many barriers and learning new ways of working with your community. Rosie explores this in her blog: How we are at the small scale is who we are at the large scale.

"In community, we often say to do things that don't scale. To start small. To get the foundations right. To trust that how we are and what we do is what the community becomes, on a larger scale. Our behaviour, our intentions, our alignment, and our goals all influence what the community can become."

🧠 What we think: There is no right or wrong way to scale your community from its humble beginnings and it can be a lot of hard work but that doesn't mean we should change our core values and how we approach helping others.

 🟢 Should you respond to questions before your members? Is a question explored by Richard at Feverbee.

"If you (the community manager) respond to a question in a community, other members are less likely to respond. This makes it harder for top members to earn points and feel a sense of influence.

But if you don’t respond to a question in a community, it can linger and look bad. It also means the person asking a question is waiting for a response and becoming increasingly frustrated."

 🧠 What we think: There are certain areas where you need your team to lead. Right here on this forum we want to provide the best service for our customers so our support team are active and quick to reply to all questions. There are other community-led sections that definitely benefit from allowing time for other members to reply to share their knowledge. It's a good feeling helping others.

 🟢 CMX explores how to move your community online. Much of this is great advice for anyone considering moving platform (to Invision Community, right?). 

"Christiana recommends viewing community migration as a process that requires patiences, “this is not a race meant to be run fast. We are changing the mindset of the people in our ecosystem”. "

  🧠 What we think: Patience is definitely key when moving platforms. The sooner you start engaging with your own community and explaining the reasons for the move and the benefits it'll bring, the easier it will be.

 🟢 Michelle can't find the bathroom when at a party which inspires a blog on 5 secrets to community onboarding.

"Walking into a party without your host can feel confusing, alienating, and frustrating. And for your customers, joining a new community without onboarding is just as bad."

   🧠 What we think: Onboarding is critical to your community's success. New members can often feel lost and unsure where to start. It can be intimidating in real life to enter a room full of people that know each other, and this is true in the online space too.

🎧 Podcast: What makes a community a home? Patrick explores this by interviewing members of his own community, which opened 20 years ago and is still going strong.

    🧠 What we think: We love hearing about long established communities that are still thriving and hearing how those early online relationships shaped people's lives.

Each digital world includes its own series of hurdles to overcome. As a community gains momentum and the registration count climbs higher, community moderators are presented with new challenges. These tasks become inherently more complex as a result, siphoning precious resources and oftentimes paint moderators into a corner.

Take back the brush and illustrate a new scene with these supportive tips on how to better engage with your community. These pro-moderation tactics aim to foster a greater sense of togetherness and unity while also acknowledging individual members for their contributions. 

These are the building blocks for a solid foundation. Community guidance is less about different means of restriction and more about the ability to express one’s thoughts and feelings in a healthy way. All communities will inevitably run into toxic trolls, but instead of exerting energy on the negative, give praise and accolades to the positive.

As we mentioned in a previous blog post about community guidance, show your community in the guidelines how you want them to post by contributing that way yourself. That sets a precedent. From there, you'll notice other community members participating in a way that is similar to you

(TL;DR lead by example).

Curating member content is the secret sauce to accelerated growth when it comes to community building. Featuring your members' posts publicly demonstrates your desire to embrace participating members. It’s one thing to comment on members’ topics, it’s another to feature and promote them for all to see. It gives added depth to your community by amplifying differing opinions, builds trust and encourages others to partake. It’ll take extra effort on your end to manually curate content (be selective regarding what topics you want to represent your community); establishing multiple authorities in your community builds momentum.

Remember, people come for the content, but stay for the community. Give them both!

Moderating has a bad rap. Generally speaking, most view it as a prohibitive tool. A member posts profanity? Moderate! A topic goes live in the wrong section? Moderate! A spam bot infiltrates the latest blog entry? Moderate, moderate, moderate! That aspect of community building will always exist, but setting up automations will save you time and money. More importantly, it creates an elevated user experience because your attention is spent engaging with your members. 

We have some powerful tools at your disposal to help, including a designated ‘automatic moderation’ section in your Admin Control Panel. Here, community leaders can set up rules that will trigger automatic content moderation. For example, you could create a rule that automatically hides content when it receives three or more user-submitted reports. If your members collectively agree another member’s post is problematic, and three or more of them report it, the post is hidden from public view until a moderator has a chance to review it. 

Moderation doesn’t have to be a dirty word. And if it does, we have an automatic moderation tool for that, too. 

Members who refuse to follow your community guidelines likely won’t fall in line with a public reprimand. Either privately message them your concerns or issue a warning only the moderation team can see.

Instead, focus your attention on recognizing and rewarding contributing members. There’s a number of ways you can energize morale, including responding to members’ positive posts, manually or automatically awarding badges with our Achievements system, highlighting engaged members in a sidebar block, showcasing Leaderboard champs or even interviewing your MVPs. The idea is to approach community guidance with open arms – not a closed fist.

There’s a reason it’s cliché. Organizing then empowering a moderation team is essential. Once on the same page in terms of expectations and processes, a community leader is then faced with the daunting task of relinquishing control as their team gears up to congratulate and moderate. 

Your moderation team is only one moving part of a well-oiled machine. There are times, especially in the early days of a community where, as the community leader, you’re doing most of the heavy lifting. However, there will come a time when the community supports you in return and shares the weight. It’s important to recognize those instances and publicly acknowledge them!

The world has enough doom and gloom; be an inspiration to your community and in return they’ll inspire you. 

Do you have a community management tip to share? Drop it into the comments. We’d love to hear from you! 

Header photo: Unsplash

I’ve run my company, BreatheHeavy, since 2004. While many online businesses shuttered because of social media’s looming presence, mine thrived because of the community. Full disclosure? I had no idea creating a community back in 2004 would become the not-so-secret ingredient to staying alive. Ahh, if only I knew then what I know now.

Hindsight is 20/20 (that number gives me anxiety, am I right?), but I never fully understood or appreciated how immensely game-changing community building is. 

Related: The Importance of Moderation, err... Community Guidance (New Video!)

In the past, I focused my efforts on writing news articles (in Wordpress) while my Invision Community community ran rampant. I felt my presence needed to take center stage. That cast a shadow on my community and thus my members. I unintentionally muted their voices by exclusively promoting mine. 

That was a colossal mistake, but the greatest learning lesson. 

One year ago, I decided to pivot and shift all my energy towards fostering my community; the results were astounding! I saw more than a 100% increase in unique visits compared to the previous year. 

The most powerful change I made was shining a light on the content my members created.

My website went from being a news site to a community. 

I constructed a new homepage that featured topics created by myself AND my members. This not only manifested a dynamic, constantly varied homepage, but also incentivized members to post thought-provoking and engaging topics in the hopes their content gets featured. 

In my community, topics that are featured on the homepage are considerably more viewed and commented on than topics that aren’t. I suspect you’d find similar results.

Here’s how I set up my new homepage:

I utilized Invision Community’s custom blocks feature. It’s available with the Pages application.

I created a new block plugin, selected “topic feed” from the list, then set the permissions in the Feed Configuration tab to only show “featured” topics from members. I also used @opentype's SuperTopics plugin to give a more-polished look. Might sound a bit complex, but it’s rather intuitive. 

Community leaders can “feature” members’ content by selecting their topic and in the moderation panel, tap “Feature.” 
 

“Featuring” content isn’t the only powerful tool Invision Community has baked into its software to highlight your members’ content. We’ve also carefully crafted a promotion option to manually select content that’s included on the “Our Picks” page and corresponding block. This is another powerful method to curate community content. 

We created a guide on how to set up promotion/our picks.

The ability to “feature” content is a privilege only moderators in your community should have access to – at least in the beginning. Avoid giving any member the ability to freely feature their own content onto the homepage - instead, focus on manually curating the content. Be selective and choose what topics you want to represent your community. 

By creating a standard, your homepage won’t feature any and all content. Instead, it’ll display items you believe will pack the greatest punch. 

Featuring your members' content visibly shows your desire to embrace your community. It’s one thing to comment on members’ topics, it’s another to feature and promote them for all to see. That’s the secret sauce of curation. 

Do you agree? Disagree? Have any suggestions? Curate content in your own community? How many questions can I ask in a row? Drop us a line in the comments below! 

Moderation feels a bit like an outdated term created pre-social media, but it stuck. We’d like to re-frame your thinking in terms of guiding your community versus moderating it.
 

Guidance is an essential component to any thriving community because it creates structure and boundaries for the community.

Oftentimes, people think community guidance is about restriction, but in reality it allows your community to express itself in a healthy way. 

All communities run into issues unless there are clear guidelines laid out for all members. It only takes a couple of toxic trolls to bring down an entire community of thousands of members.

As a community leader, it's important to find the balance between allowing freedom of speech and restricting what people can and can't say. 

An Internet troll tends to want to see what they can get away with and push the boundaries to the brink. They’ll claim that they are not allowed to speak their mind, but I want to stress the importance this:

Freedom of speech has some limitations. 

For instance, you can't just shout ‘FIRE!’ in a crowded room because you believe you have the right to freedom of speech (though some would argue you can, which is why guidance is imperative). There are certain rules that everyone needs to follow in order for an online community to function.

The first thing you'll want to do when guiding your community is... to create community guidelines.

These guidelines must be visible and easy to access. There, you can lay out all the nitty-gritty rules you want, but essentially it should boil down to this:

Be kind. 

Treat people with respect when posting and remember that there’s a person behind the user name. It's important not to hide behind anonymity just because you can. 

Being a part of the community means that all members must abide by these guidelines.

Now what happens if someone "breaks the rules” or ignores these guidelines? As your community’s leader how do you proceed?

You do so by creating actionable rules that can adversely affect a member’s standing in your community if they break them. 

I know that sounds kind of threatening, but it's important to establish to your community that you're there for them and that your priority is to hear them out, but at the same time you must take action to keep the peace. 

Invision Community has automatic moderation tools and a warning system section baked into the software. Below is a snapshot of Invision Community's administration panel where community leaders may set up custom automatic moderation rules:
 

Tap here for more specific information on how to implement community guidance/moderation to your community. 

One important component to these rules is that you enforce them across-the-board to all members and do so consistently. 

If you leave the door open for one member and not another, it's going to create an unwanted hierarchy and instigate chaos.

One of the best ways to be consistent is by walking the walk. 

Show your community how you want them to post by posting and contributing that way yourself. What that does is it sets a visible precedent.

From there, you'll begin to notice other community members contributing in a way that is similar to you (lead by example).

This is a great opportunity to consider them to join a new moderators team. Whether they are paid moderators or are volunteering their time, you still want them to be mini leaders inside your community. It's important that you are a positive role model for them. 

Watch the video up top, then drop us a line in the comments! And hey, while I've got you... check out what our own community has to say about moderation (aka community guidance 😉).
 

Remember, guiding your community starts from the top (a.k.a. you!). Now get out there and moder-... guide!

Stay tuned for more Invision Community video content coming soon!

A long time ago in the Interwebs far, far away... I proudly signed off all my posts and emails with the title: Owner, Administrator. Anyone in a 10-mile digital radius from me was made well aware:

I AM AN OWNER AND ADMINISTRATOR. I AM IMPORTANT I PROMISE. I OWN AND ADMINISTRATE!!! 

Granted I held off on the all-caps, but still.

My assertion permeated throughout all areas of my online presence. 

Though well-intentioned, my identity as an administrator pushed me away from the community I fostered. 

I focused more on growing the group rather than being part of the group, thus creating an unspoken hierarchy that placed my members below me. 

Recognizing your members are living, breathing, sentient people is one of the most important aspects of community building, but I couldn’t see the forest from the trees. 

Part of me enjoyed the authority and power attached to my role as the website’s administrator. But with that power came isolating separation – the dark side if you will. 

A community I unknowingly built was unrelatable to me because I was unrelatable to them. Is it possible to remove “me” and “them” from the equation entirely and replace it with an “us?” 

Our community members aren’t naive to the fact that someone does technically own the community, and that part of your role as a community leader is administrating. It’s less about the title and more of the mindset. How can you connect with your community? By being relatable and approachable. Better yet? Leading by example.

Shifting your interpersonal narrative from administrator to community leader can profoundly change your community’s culture for the better. 

As a community leader, you’ll inevitably perform administrative tasks, including the nitty gritty like group promotions, moderating and reputation (all critical functions for a high-functioning community). However, it’s possible to execute said functions while cloaked under anonymity that the administrator title can provide (that’s not necessarily good or bad, it just is). An important component to community leading is visibility.

For many years, I made sure my Invision Community software was up-to-date, licenses paid, the registration system worked, spam defense was light-saber slicing the plastic-surgery-gambling bots to Tatooine. I was a fantastic administrator, but my presence from my community, the very place I worked tirelessly to keep running, was sorely missed. 

The moment I went “all-in,” meaning I decided to become an integral part of my community outside of the administrator role (by commenting on members’ topics, responding back in private message group chats, reacting to content, listening to feedback and opening up about real-life success and failures) is the moment I evolved into a community leader. I wanted to be seen.

My deliberate change of self perception produced exponential growth in terms of traffic and new registrations. More importantly, I became a better community leader. 

I feel compelled to not only share pop music news with my community, but also what’s going on in my life. It wasn’t a comfortable transition, but a necessary one. Upon stripping away my title from administrator to community leader, I became a role model. I became someone my members came to for more than just technical forum advice. They wanted to see how I was doing. They wanted to share their wins and losses with me after seeing me succeed and fail in public. They saw me as a person; a leader. 

At the end of the day, community leading means forging connections, sharing your highs and lows and showing up for your members. That starts from within, which may feel incredibly awkward at first, but get comfortable with discomfort and watch you and your community blossom.

Thoughts on transforming from administrator to Jedi community leader? Sound off in the comments! And may the +1 be with you.

One of the most commonly asked questions we get is how to ensure your new community launch is successful.

You may think that if you have the right features with the correct configuration, success is guaranteed, but it requires more than that.

Way back in the early 2000s when the internet was in its infancy, there was an explosion of new communities. If you had some webspace, a little technical knowledge and a forum script you were almost guaranteed to attract people into your community.

These days it takes a little more work to get your new community off the ground. There’s a lot of books and resources out there to help, but focusing on your purpose, value, and emotion will give you a bright star to sail by.

Purpose

The purpose of your community should be very clear from the first visit. You want your new visitors to instantly understand the reason your community exists and the benefit they will get from it.

This can be implicit with a short written mission statement at the top, or it can be through robust visual design and structure.

When launching a new community, aim to be as specific as possible with your purpose. You can always broaden when it grows. This may go against your instinct to cast a wide net to catch as many people as possible, but resist that temptation!

For example, a community focused on fitness has a vague purpose. Fitness is a broad topic, and there are many niches inside of it. This could be anything from losing weight, to running faster to increasing the weight on a barbell. Narrowing the focus to running helps a little, but there’s a lot of space in that field. You have marathon runners, ultra runners, Sunday park joggers and everything in between.

A better starting point for a community may be “Run your first 5k”. This instantly makes it very clear to your audience that you intend to help new runners develop their ability enough to finish a short race. The sense of purpose is clear, and it is easy to know what to ask of this new community and the benefit you may get.

Asperger Experts has a strong design and mission statement above the fold, which makes its purpose clear from the first visit.

Make your purpose very clear and don’t be afraid to niche down to a specific area, to begin with.

Value

The earliest communities allowed people from all around the world to gather and talk. Anyone who had the technical skill to host a community could be virtually guaranteed members and just being able to meet was all the value needed.

We now live in more sophisticated times and crave more than facilitation. Your community needs to add value beyond companionship and knowledge.

One of the simplest ways to give value to your members is through sharing your expertise. A steady flow of written articles or videos gives your members a reason to come back.

IG, a fintech company use their expert articles to draw their audience back to their community to contribute. IG is a known leader in their field, so their blog is a real draw for those investing in the markets.

Never post for the sake of it, always inform, educate or entertain your community.

Emotion

At the heart of every conversation is emotion. We pride ourselves on being logical and thoughtful creatures, yet our emotional brain responds first and makes a judgement often subconsciously.

Setting the pitch and tone of your community is critical from its earliest days. As the community manager, you get to define the tone by modelling the behaviour you want to see in your own content. Some communities do well with dark humour and snark; while others require positivity and fun.

“Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in tribes. Becoming separated from the tribe—or worse, being cast out—was a death sentence.” - James Clear

Hang out where your audience hangs out and develop your tone so that it resonates with your community.

Starting a community is a rewarding experience, but you need to do more than just open your doors to ensure a successful launch.

Checking to make sure your site has a strong purpose, that you offer value to your members and the emotional pitch is right will set you on the right course. 

Moats have been used for centuries as a way to defend a building from potential attack.

A flooded ditch around a castle is a great way to make it harder to be taken. You can't push battering rams against walls, and neither can you dig under the castle. Quite frankly, a moat is a pretty decent deterrent when there are plenty of other castles to pillage.

What does this mean for your business?

A community can be an economic moat, or in more simple terms, your competitive advantage.

When your product or service is surrounded by an engaged community that feels invested in your brand, you'll be able to resist challenges from competitors looking to tempt your customers away.

Humans are social creatures, and we love seeking out and joining a tribe that aligns with our values. The intangible value of belonging creates a sense of momentum for your brand and helps champion it to others.

The statistics back this strategy; 88% of community professionals said in a recent survey that community is critical to their company's mission and 85% said that their community has had a positive impact to their business.[1]

Your competitive advantage

One of the cheapest ways to create momentum for your product is to build a community around your startup. A community is much more than a one-time marketing campaign and can help you throughout your company's life cycle if you take the time to grow it right. [2]

Creating a buzz around a product can take a lot of time, effort and money. 

Traditionally, this buzz would be created with a mixture of videos, websites, influencer reviews, and heavy advertisement spends across multiple channels, including social media.

 Your community can create a shortcut and reach an audience without those costs and increase the chance of your product being shared virally. 

Your community creates a bond over a shared interest that continually re-enforces loyalty to your brand. This creates a personal investment which makes it less likely your customers will try a competitor.

Put simply, if a company can move from just shipping a product to building a community, it can benefit from several competitive advantages such as:

• Engaged members help acquire new members, lowering the cost for customer acquisition.
• Increased customer retention through community loyalty. Members won't want to abandon the community they enjoy.
• Reduced support costs as members support each other.

This benefit forms a loop that generates more value as the community grows.

Brand building 

Another area of opportunity for social marketing is "brand building" - connecting enthusiastic online brand advocates with the company's product development cycle. Here, research becomes marketing; product developers are now using social forums to spot reactions after they modify an offer, a price, or a feature in a product or service. Such brand-managed communities can have real success. One well-documented example is IdeaStorm, Dell's community discussion and "brainstorming" website, which saw a measurable increase in sales following its launch, by providing a forum for meaningful dialogue and "to gauge which ideas are most important and most relevant to" the public. [3]

By creating a community around your product or service, not only do you create brand advocates, but you also gain powerful insights into what your customers want through research which drives marketing. 

Consumers today crave a stronger bond with brands. It's no longer enough to give them a customer support email address and a monthly newsletter. They want a much more in-depth interaction with the company and other users of the product or service.

One tactic for success is for brands to move away from the hard-sell to instead embrace the notion of "co-creation". This means moving beyond "old-school" approaches to website advertising to embrace the principles of relationship marketing - building virtual environments in which customers can connect with each other to share insights and relevant information.

To capitalise on currently available opportunities, marketers need to find or establish real brand communities, listen to them, and then create special programs and tools that will empower potential and existing community members, rewarding existing consumers and eliciting behavioural change from potential consumers. [3]

Evernote, the note-taking app, is a great example. Their lively community encourages customers to interact directly with staff, post their wish-lists for future versions and learn more about what happens behind the scenes.

The community creates evangelists for Evernote and makes it harder for competitors to gain a foothold with a potent mix of dialogue, access to other customers, transparency from the brand and many opportunities for co-creation of content.

Co-creation fundamentally challenges the traditional roles of the firm and the consumer. The tension manifests itself at points of interaction between the consumer and the company where the co-creation experience occurs, where individuals exercise choice, and where value is co-created. Points of interaction provide opportunities for collaboration and negotiation, explicit or implicit, between the consumer and the company.

In the emergent economy, competition will center on personalized co-creation experiences, resulting in value that is truly unique to each individual. [4]

In simple terms, a community allows your customers to feel closer to your brand and the products you sell.

What are you waiting for?

Nearly 80% of founders reported building a community of users as important to their business, with 28% describing their moat as critical to their success.[1]

Our team at Invision Community has over two decades of community building experience and are trusted by brands of all sizes.

Whether you have an existing community, or you're taking your first steps to create your own, our experience and expertise will guide your success.

[1] https://cmxhub.com/community-industry-trends-report-2020
[2] https://viral-loops.com/blog/your-company-needs-a-pre-launch-campaign/
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268200746_Social_media_and_its_implications_for_viral_marketing#read
[4] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhm/Readings/Co-creating unique value with customers.pdf

Conspiracy theories have roots in the 19th century and have been popular for decades. Until recently, conspiracy theorists have lived in the margins. They are often convinced the earth is flat, Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone, and the moon landings were faked in a Hollywood sound stage.

More recently, with 9/11 and the coronavirus pandemic, these conspiracy theories have become more mainstream, with celebrities and politicians sharing them over their official social media channels. From the evil machinations of Bill Gates, the rise of QAnon, to the conflation that 5G is responsible for spreading coronavirus, it's hard to ignore the impact they have in creating misinformation which undermines attempts at effective communication from governments and public health bodies.

Despite reams of facts, logic and critical thinking, those that follow conspiracy theories will not be budged from their positions. They trust their sources implicitly, and a mountain of research disproving the argument does not interest them.

The number of people that succumbs to these narratives grows every day. When you consume the content shared by the primary sources of this misinformation, it's easy to see why.

Conspiracy theories are created and shared in a way that is engaging and irresistible to many seeking stability in a confusing world. Whatever your position is on these conspiracy theorists, you can leverage these tactics to make your own content more engaging and shareable.

Lesson 1: Make it emotive
Human beings have two distinct and independent thinking centres in the brain. One works on emotion (the limbic system) and the other on logic (the neocortex).

The emotional brain works much faster than the logical brain. It is what has kept us alive as a species. If you hear a loud bang, your emotional brain processes this first and triggers the urge to move before your logical brain kicks in and deduces the bang was from a book expertly pawed from its shelf by your cat.

The emotional brain is continually processing the world, and even though it's part of you, you do not have much control over it. Your logic brain, however, works on facts, truths and analysis.

When you watch harrowing whistleblower testimony telling of their suffering in a conspiracy theory video, your emotional brain is powerfully stirred.

It's why challenging conspiracy theorists who are emotionally committed to the point of view with just logic often fails. The emotional commitment is incredibly powerful, and when you challenge them, the logic brain is short-circuited, and the emotional brain becomes defensive. In fact, the more logic and evidence you provide, the more the emotional brain digs in and refuses the new evidence.

How can you use this to your advantage?

Work on creating an emotional response with your content. Don't purely rely on facts and logic to persuade your audience. Try and evoke an emotional reaction through imagery, metaphors and similes.

President Obama was a powerful orator and used emotion often to create a strong message. When he spoke of investing in education, he invokes emotion by saying "We believe that when she goes to school for the first time, it should be in a place where the rats don't outnumber the computer."

Lesson 2: Tell a story
Conspiracy theory videos don't just reel off a list of events and facts, they tell a story. Some of the more complex theories are akin to a sprawling TV series with several characters linked by circumstance.

Humans have always been curators of stories. From religious texts to morality fables, we learn and process the world through stories. Stories are memorable. Most adults can recite fairytales read to us when we were children.

Use a story to link together critical points within your content.

Consider how "Gamification has been proven to make communities more sticky and encourage more engagement" reads compared to "It was 3am, the flicker of the TV set was the only light in the room. My palms, slick with sweat, fought to keep the controller sticks moving. Even though I had a 6am start, I couldn't put the controller down. I had to finish the quest and collect the reward. Your community is no different."

Take your reader on a journey, and they're more likely to finish your content. Try and make it personal. When we read, we always try and put ourselves in the shoes of the author or the protagonist.

Stories and emotion go hand in hand. Recently, the Huffington Post ran a story with the headline "One death a minute" which is a very emotive and powerful alternative to the raw fact that 1,461 Americans lost their lives to COVID-19 on the 29th July.

Lesson 3: Make it easy to consume
A key strength for any content creator is to know when to create long-form content and snackable content.

A single meme is more potent than 300 links to PubMed. A single YouTube video can be more persuasive than an expert in her field.

Conspiracy theory creators use over-simplification to reduce a complex issue into an easily digestible entertaining snack. A meme generally contains a single idea that is easy to grasp and engaging. You don't have to work very hard to understand it, your visual brain processes it in 1/10th of a second, and it triggers a moment of delight.

Infographics and memes are often smart ways to create an entrance to your content. If an image containing a straightforward idea from a more complex piece of content is digested quickly, it can leave your audience wanting more, and therefore more likely to involve themselves in your more complex work.

When creating long-form content, consider the use of iconography, infographics and photography. Visuals help us remember and understand content quickly. I could say that 63% of this blog was written on an iPad, but a piechart would make this easier to process and more memorable.

No tin foil hats required
Creating compelling content is key to building your community. Your content sets the tone, helps drive re-engagement and positions you as a key expert in your field. Using the techniques many conspiracy theory creators use to spread their narratives will help your content be more memorable and shareable

A well-created story with emotional cornerstones made more accessible by key points simplified into snackable quotes or images will help your content find a wider audience, whether you believe Neil Armstrong landed on the moon or not.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the world's most trusted source of information on international health, and a foremost partner to public health agencies combating the coronavirus.  They also understand the critical need for risk communication and community engagement to respond to the coronavirus pandemic -- a valuable strategy that any online community can adopt in these volatile times.  

In March of this year as the coronavirus was already rampaging across nations, WHO published a series of guidance for risk communication and community engagement.  One of the major lessons they learned during some of the most perilous outbreaks including SARS, Ebola, and MERS was that community engagement was a critical factor in the success of containing any pandemic.  

Here are 3 best practices from the World Health Organization that can help online communities navigate any crisis.  

INFODEMICS

One of the biggest problems hampering the effective treatment of coronavirus, or any major disruptive event in a community, is the excessive abundance of information - an "infodemic" from multiple and untrustworthy sources that reduces trust in any advice.  The flood of information can quickly overwhelm any at-risk population.  

Community leaders need to proactively communicate.  As WHO recommends, "One of the most important and effective interventions to any event is to proactively communicate what is known, what is unknown, and what is being done to get more information."  Communication from community leaders establishes the chain of communication and establishes themselves as a source of credible information.  By getting out in front of disruptive events and staying in regular communication with your members, you build trust and ensure that proper advice will be followed.  

PERCEPTIONS OF RISK 

Different groups of people perceive the same problem differently.  In the case of coronavirus, WHO discovered that certain segments of the population didn't understand the risk of the virus as much as they should have - a gap of knowledge that effective communication would have addressed for different populations.  Part of the goal of WHO's risk communication and community engagement is to "help transform and deliver complex scientific knowledge so that it is understood by and trusted by populations and communities."  

Community leaders need to tailor their communication to sub-groups.  While regular announcements and general updates are important for the community at-large, it leaves knowledge gaps for different sub-groups of your community membership: clients need to be informed of service interruptions; vendors need to be informed of supply chain disruptions; superusers need to know how to direct users for help.  Different stakeholders have differing needs, and each group requires customized and tailored communication to best navigate through the crisis.  

ADDRESSING THE UNKNOWN & MISINFORMATION

One of WHO's recommended actions for leaders was to be prepared to communicate about the first coronavirus case, even before the full picture was known.  Even today, much is unknown and data is still being compiled about coronavirus.  But in a digital world where misinformation gets mixed in with the ease of a tweet or share, it's more important than ever to communicate factually while acknowledging uncertainty.

Address uncertainty by systematically collecting questions and providing answers to all questions.  In the beginning of any crisis, you won't have all the answers and events will still be unfolding.  It's critical to establish an early dialogue with your community to gather concerns from members, to monitor for misinformation, and to systematically compile questions into a FAQ. 

Source:   Risk communication and community engagement readiness and response to coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Interim guidance 19 March 2020. World Health Organization.  

On behalf of the entire IPS team, we wish our clients well wishes during these difficult times!  

Executive Summary

• Problems of crisis: infodemics with excess information, different perceptions of risk among sub-groups, and uncertainty with misinformation.
• Solutions for community leaders: proactive communication, customized communication, and addressing uncertainty.  

If your brand sells a product or service, the first thing that comes to mind as a benefit to building your community is support deflection.

And it's easy to see why. It's something you can quickly calculate an ROI for. Let's say every 20 hits to a public question with a solved answer from a client or team member equates to one less ticket. If a ticket costs $10 to solve on average, it's straightforward to see the value by calculating deflected tickets. Let's say your busy public support community had 20,000 hits a month; you've just saved $200,000 a month in support costs.

Great! But before you finish there, I want you to consider the rewards a brand community can offer.

A public support desk isn't a community. It's likely most of your customers join because of an issue with your product. They tap in some keywords on Google and come across your site. They see a bunch of solved questions like theirs, and they either get the fix and bounce out, or post and wait for a reply. With nothing to get them to come back, once they have the answer they'll likely bounce out then and only come back when they hit a new problem.

That's not a community. A community is a place where people return multiple times to collaborate, learn and grow together.

"[A brand community is] a group of people who share an identity and a mutual concern for one another's welfare - who participate in shared experiences that are shaped by a brand." - Carrie Melissa Jones

For that, you need to look beyond the support desk and expand into more use cases, and there are compelling reasons to do this.

Shared experiences

Allowing your customers to share their experiences with your products can lead to unique brand stories that reinforce bonds between members and creates social solidarity in the community.

A few years ago, I remember reading a post on a travel community. A family were flying with Delta and their son who has autism was becoming more and more distressed with the change in routine for that day. A Delta employee saw this and came and spoke with the family, helped settle the boy and ensured they boarded early to avoid the crush of passengers.

It's a small moment of kindness that wouldn't make headlines, but it was very memorable for this family; enough so that they posted about it. This post had numerous replies in praise for the airline and no doubt made many of them think of Delta when booking their next flight.

"[Social solidarity is] not just passive tolerance but felt concern for what is individual and particular about the other person." - Alex Honneth "The Struggle for Recognition"

All those stories, connections and moments build social capital and loyalty for your brand.

Feedback

Your customers are already talking about your product. Some of it will be good, and some of it won't be good. They are already talking about it on social media, and in numerous communities, they belong to.

If you do not have space within your community for your customers to leave feedback, then you're missing out on a massive benefit. You get a chance to address negative feedback before it spills out further into the public domain. Likewise, positive feedback makes for compelling customer success stories.

Feedback is a great way to crowdsource innovation and to guide sales and marketing on how your customers are using your products and where the gaps are.

Owning your niche

Allowing space for conversations relating to your product makes good sense. If you sold a fitness tracker, then it makes good sense to have areas for discussions revolving around wellness areas such as sleep, diet and exercise. 

Likewise, a mobile phone network will do well having areas related to the various brands of mobile phones.

"There is status that comes from community. It is the status of respect in return for contribution for caring for seeing and being in sync with others. Especially others with no ability to repay you." - Seth Godin 

Creating these spaces encourages return visits beyond direct support for the product.

Those return visits are what makes your community a community.

We are currently living through one of the most turbulent times in history.

A once-in-a-century pandemic has a grip on all of us.

Whatever the outcome, come the end of the year, few of us are going to be the same again. We will have to sacrifice our personal freedoms, and some of us much more.

Like you, I'm worried about my family, my friends and neighbours. I'm watching the news, scrolling through social media and consuming articles from scientists, scholars and doctors.

The news coming out of Italy is truly heartbreaking. Doctors and nurses have to make life and death decisions daily as they wage war with the virus. Those of us in the UK and the USA are nervously watching the graphs climb in lockstep of Italy from just a few weeks ago.

It would be easy to succumb to fear and withdraw completely.

But as community leaders, we cannot.

Let us take some inspiration from the brave people of Italy who have suffered much with an overstretched health care system and enforced quarantine yet still sing from their apartments in a display of resolve.

In a time where we have to remain apart, we must come together.

We have to keep showing up and leading.

We must focus on what we still have and not what is being taken away.

Now more than ever, we are needed to keep the world connected. To bring comfort; to support and to love each other.

This year is going to test every one of us.

But whatever comes our way, I know that we are stronger together.

"Their faithful and zealous comradeship would almost between night and morning clear the path of progress and banish from all our lives the fear which already darkens the sunlight to hundreds of millions of men."

Winston Churchill

The news is currently filled with anxiety over coronavirus and workers are being encouraged to work from home where possible to limit or delay its spread.

For many people used to commuting daily and working in shared offices, this is a huge upheaval which will take a while to adjust.

How do you stay motivated and productive when you're not at your desk and held accountable by your colleagues next to you?

Remote working has become popular over the last few years. The internet has transformed how we work, and improvements to connection speeds, authentication systems and cloud architecture make working home a viable alternative for many office workers.

Working from home certainly doesn't suffer the same stigma it did years ago when it was synonymous with sleeping in late, daytime TV binges and excessive time in pyjamas.

A good number of years ago, I was getting my hair cut. It was about 11 am on a weekday, and we had the usual small talk as she attempted to tame my unruly mop. The question I was waiting for dropped a moment later "so, is this your day off?" My reply was that I work from home so have some flexibility in my day. Usually, this gets a nod, and we move onto the weather. I'd not met this hairdresser before. She processed my reply, stopped snipping and locked eyes with me via the mirror. "Do you really work from home, or is that you don't have a job?"

Fears over reduced productivity from remote workers have proved to be unfounded. A large-scale experiment was conducted with 16,000 employees of a Chinese call centre. Workers were randomly assigned to either work from home or at the office for nine months. The home workers enjoyed a 13% performance increase due to fewer breaks and sick days.

At Invision Community we not only make a product designed to bring people together online, but a good number of us also work remotely. Our HQ is in Virginia, USA but we have team members in the UK, Europe and Australia. Remote working allows us to hire the best people we can find, and not just those who are within a few miles of our HQ.

I spoke with our team to get their tips and strategies for working from home and still getting work done.

Rikki, lead UI designer
Get out of the house every day
It's easy to fall into the trap of being a hermit for days on end. Particularly in the summer, I like to take a walk to get lunch every single day. It gives me a chance to get some fresh air, a little exercise and most importantly get away from my office properly (instead of just being in the next room, which doesn't feel like it's really taking a break).

Don't take your work home downstairs with you
Another easy trap to fall into is working every waking hour because you're always 'at work'. Set fixed work start/end times and stick to them. Leave your office at the end of the day and consider the work finished. If you do need to hop back to work later because something cropped up, go back to your desk to put yourself in work mode - don't be tempted to start working from the sofa.

Olivia, Customer Success Manager
Organize your workspace
You may not be lucky enough to be able to repurpose a dedicated room in the house, but that doesn't mean you can't find a good spot to work from. Choose a place that is free of clutter and well lit.

Organize your work
I'm a big fan of to-do lists. Keeping my lists organized helps me stay on track and prevents me from drifting too far from what's important. I like the "To Do versus To Get Done concept."

Organize yourself
Plan in breaks away from your screen. There's always one more email to write, but setting times to take a break is vital to keeping your energy and focus. Working from home means that you cannot rely on others to remind you!

Check-in often with teammates
At Invision Community, we use Slack to keep in touch and recreate the 'water cooler' moments where we discuss our favourite TV shows, movies and more.

Reframe "my office is always open" to "I'm always available for a call". Remind your colleagues often that they can start a voice call if they need to talk.

Stuart, developer and migration specialist
Minimize human distractions
When you're working from home, it's easy to get distracted, especially by other people! Remind your family and friends that during your work hours you're working. As much as you'd love to spend the day drinking tea (or beverage of your choice) and chatting, you do have a job.

How we do it
There's no doubt that we're fortunate to have a team that is self-motivated and responsible. Remote working can allow individuals to drift, and productivity suffers.

We use a combination of software platforms and a few simple strategies to keep us all informed, organized and feeling part of a greater team.

We use Slack to not only onboard new clients, but also to organize product development, feedback and support. These channels are well used, but without a doubt, our 'general' channel is used the most. This is where we hang out socially and chat during our breaks. It's easy to see this as unproductive or distracting, but I feel that it helps build us as a team and helps forge relationships with each other.

We use a private Invision Community as an intranet hub which does the heavy lifting for organizing releases. It also acts as a repository for feedback, new feature ideas and development discussions.

We encourage breakout groups to voice call to resolve hot topics and pressing issues. It's amazing what you can get done in a few minutes by voice.

We hold a stand up voice meeting weekly where we organize the week, discuss anything pressing and run through development tasks. This call is developer-focused, but it's held company-wide, so it is inclusive. We try and avoid human information silos where possible.

Above all, just keep talking
It's just as important to share your personality as it is your work. Make sure you check in on quiet colleagues to make sure they're OK. Not everyone is super-chatty, and some prefer to switch off and focus. However, it's easy to feel a real sense of loneliness and isolation if you don't have a partner or family living with you.

It's essential to put effort into maintaining relationships online. Working remotely means less interaction with your colleagues, and it's easy for multifaceted personalities to become a flattened disembodied persona online. Without the office 'vibe' and body language cues we often take for granted, it's easy to lose that personal connection.

Build depth by asking how your colleagues weekends were. Ask about their hobbies and pets. Work at keeping a connection with the person behind the computer.

In our team we have little sub-groups that focus on our hobbies. There's the running/workout club where we share our training plans and give each other virtual high-fives. I've actually found it easier to stick to a running plan knowing that my colleague is running too (and beating my times!).

If you only take one thing away from this, maintaining strong relationships with your team is key! If your team isn't keen on video calling, then make sure you voice call regularly. I can't stress how important it is to verbally talk to your colleagues. We start each call off with some light hearted chat and listening to the inflections in other's voices and have them laugh at your silly jokes recharges your soul.

Take advantage of technology
Apart from using Invision Community as a hub and company-wide information repository, there's a lot of apps you can use to make your work time more productive and avoid the constant distractions partners and children rattling about the house can cause.

I work from home and have two young children. School holidays can be challenging when the house comes alive during the day, and there's a constant stream of potential distractions.

I use "focus music" with noise-cancelling headphones when I want to knuckle down and write code or blog articles. Right now, my kids are at school, and I'm listening to Metallica at an unreasonable volume through my Homepod speaker. For some reason, loud metal music helps me concentrate.

There are only so many power chords you can take, and I've found Brain.fm to be very useful. Brain.fm uses "neural phase-locking" via music to help you focus. I have no idea what that means, but it does help me get into the zone on days where I struggle with productivity.

I have the attention span of an anxious squirrel. It can take me a long while to get into the zone and mere seconds to pop back out.

When I'm writing code, it's less of a problem. I just put on Brain.fm or some music, and I get lost in time and space as I build complex constructs in my mind before bringing it together in my code editor.

However, when I'm writing articles, helping support, hopping between tasks, or doing general administration work, I rely on a Pomodoro timer. The idea is that you work in sprints of 25 minutes, followed by a short break, usually 5 minutes. You repeat this cycle four times and take a longer break.

Many apps can track your time in this way, including web-based tools such as the amusingly named Tomato Timer.

Using this technique helps me get into the flow by giving me "permission" to take breaks but only once the work block has finished. I might pop out of focus and think about checking up on our community or Facebook and get back to work when I realize I've still got 12 minutes of work left.

Work/life balance doesn't exist
You'll often hear people talk about their work/life balance. You are better off thinking in terms of work/life integration.

Now, I'm not suggesting that you work all day and night. I'm not one of those "sleep when you're dead" people. I like to sleep. I have a partner and two kids I want to enjoy and passions outside of my computer (although my guitars are gathering dust again).

The reality is that when your workstation is just a door away from the rest of your life, you're going to work outside of the traditional 9-5 routine despite how rigorous you may want to define a working day.

This might be because you took the morning off to watch your kid's school play or you may have booked a haircut during the day as it's much quieter. My advice would be to look for pockets of time that won't impact the rest of your family or free time. I tend to earmark an hour once the kids have gone to bed as potential "work overflow" time. This allows me to integrate my work schedule with my home schedule without it taking over my life.

Avoid Coffeeshops
Working with your laptop in a coffeeshop is a massive cliché. Every single time I've walked into Starbucks, there have been dozens of people at tables squinting at laptop screens.

It's an attractive idea. You get to mingle with fellow humans. You get a change of scenery and a decent cup of coffee.

You also get a constant source of distractions, poor quality and insecure Wi-Fi and sideways glances from staff who'd love to free up your table. 

Also, what do you do with your laptop when you need a restroom break? Do you take it with you? What if someone sits at your table while you're gone?

It's just not for me.

Exercise and movement
I won't lecture you about health and fitness, but I do want to highlight one downside of having no commute and office building to move through: being super-sedentary.

If you used to clock up 10,000 steps walking to the train station, walking to your office and then clocking up steps as you moved between meeting rooms and social areas, then expect that number to drop sharply.

There are days where my Apple Watch tells me I've done less than 1500 steps during the day. To combat this, I make time during the day to go for a walk or to exercise. I'm fortunate that I have a treadmill in the garage along with some weight lifting equipment. If you don't have any equipment, then a short walk is better than nothing. As a bonus, you'll get some fresh air and vitamin D from the sun.

I also have a standing desk so that I can get on my feet during the day and an exercise bike I can use while working with the desk at its highest position.

Find ways to incorporate movement into your day for your own mental and physical health.

Conclusion
Despite the many challenges working remotely can cause and the learning curve of taking your work home, the vast majority prefer to work from home. In a study of 100 remote workers, only six said they'd return to the office if given a chance.

If you're new to working remotely, then there will be mistakes. There will be days when you feel that you've achieved very little and probably yearn for some human interaction and be told what to do next. It's all part of the process.

Keep lines of communication open, check in on your colleagues and embrace the freedom working remotely gives.

CEO Mark Triggon, previously the chief merchandising officer at Target, laid out his plans to turn around the beleaguered American retailer Bed Bath & Beyond.  Part of that plan was reducing the number of can openers from 12 to 3. 

Sales rose. 

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Tritton explained how tests conducted in his first few months at the company showed that less is more when it comes to product assortment.  “The big takeaway: Selling too many items in stores that are overcrowded leads to ‘purchase paralysis,” Mr. Tritton said. 

Bed Bath & Beyond exploded across the American landscape in the 1990s and 2000’s with its focus on opening new “big box” stores for home merchandise where it was meant to be a category killer – consumers would shop in stores that offered them anything and everything.  It was famous for its floor-to-ceiling options, and a simple trip for a new shower curtain turned into a shopping spree for every room in the home.  In recent years though, that approach has soured on consumers.  A Business Insider reporter commented on her latest trip, “From our first steps in, the store was overwhelming. There was merchandise packed top to bottom on shelves that lined every wall.” 

The tides have changed.  Consumers are being offered – and overwhelmed – with more choices than ever before.   

PARADOX OF CHOICE

One of the great benefits of the modern web is a proliferation of choice: choice in sprawling ideologies, choice in niche interests, and choice in shopping for thousands of products at a click of a button.  All of this, every day.  Unfortunately, that abundance of choice can stress and even paralyze our ability to make decisions. 

Psychologist Barry Schwartz coined the term Paradox of Choice in a 2004 book by the same name, where he advanced the idea that eliminating consumer choices can reduce anxiety for shoppers.  In other words, instead of offering 12 options for can openers, offer 3 options.   

What does this mean for online communities?

LESS IS MORE

Across the spectrum of communities and forums, some of the biggest critical mistakes are forum creep and feature bloat.  New features are mindlessly added thinking it will lead to higher engagement, new forums are added for every conceivable discussion, and design choices are automatically enabled at the default without aligning to your strategy. 

Your initial goal is to sweep through your entire community and identify the areas that align with your community strategy.  For categories and boards that are low-value, low traffic, or not aligned with any strategic objectives, you should aggressively consolidate or eliminate. 

There’s no hard rule when it comes to design choices, although 7 has been touted as a magic number for short-term human memory.  You can use this magic number across a range of design decisions. For example:

• At most 7 Reactions
• At most 7 Primary Menu options
• At most 7 major sections or content hubs

THE JAM EXPERIMENT

Choice overload can actually lead to less sales.  In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper of Stanford University led a much-recited study where they presented passerbys at a food market with two tables: one with 24 fruit jams, the other with 6 jams. 

The one with 24 different jams generated more traffic to sample and taste.  But guess which table generated more sales?  The other table with fewer jams, which had ten times more purchases!   

The moral of the story? At junctures of your member journey where you ask users to make a critical decision such as user information when registering, subscriptions, or selling products, don’t be the table with 24 jams to sample, but never able to sell.      

BIG BOX & SMALL BOX

Invision Community offers an interesting approach where you can act like both a “big box” community for your general audience and still offer “small box” cohesiveness for more intimate groups. The feature is called Clubs, which empowers smaller groups to form and split off from the main audience.  This is an especially consequential feature for mature and large communities looking to organically cultivate their next generation of engagement.   

Indeed, this is a trend happening in a large way among next-gen consumers, who are realizing the perils of broadcasting and oversharing.  In a 2019 white paper “The New Rules of Social” led by youth creative agency ZAK, nearly two-thirds of the under-30 respondents said they prefer to talk in private message rather than open forums and feeds. Facebook themselves launched head-first towards social groups back in 2016 after the US Presidential election.  In a 6,000 word essay called "Building Global Community," Zuckerberg sermonized on the importance of building connections in meaningful groups:

Quote

“There is a real opportunity to connect more of us with groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our lives ... Going forward, we will measure Facebook's progress with groups based on meaningful groups, not groups overall.”

Forum administrators on Invision Community have been building meaningful communities since day one. When properly deployed, Clubs will allow you to cultivate – and retain – users in a more focused environment without the distractions of your larger community. 

CONCLUSION

For community managers and forum administrators who have run their Invision Communities for many years, you know first-hand that the power of community doesn’t come from adding another feature, another board, or another category.  Happiness and fulfillment come from actually connecting with members, through education, enlightenment, problem solving, and teamwork.  Overloading your community with theme options, excess reactions, and overbuilt boards get in the way of your true goal. 

Become the CEO to reduce the overwhelming options of can openers.  Sell more jam by offering less of it.  And unfetter yourself from unnecessary choices to discover a clearer connection to your members.   

Executive Summary

• Bed Bath & Beyond CEO declutters stores, sales rise
• Concept of paradox of choice: users can become overwhelmed and stressed when presented with too many options
• Jam experiment: table with more jams gets more traffic, but table of less jams gets more sales
• For large and established communities, use Clubs to offer intimate and uncluttered experiences.

The goal of every client here in the Invision peer community, myself included, is to launch and run successful communities. 

Whether I’m going to be able to achieve that success in the new year depends entirely on trying these 10 steps.  I know if that if I stick to these steps, then my community will grow – and I know if you follow along, your community will too. 

10. Ignore Google

Google makes me laugh; Google makes me cry; Google makes me want to pitch myself into the freezing icy waters of the San Francisco bay.  But focusing on Google’s up-and-down volatility isn’t what is going to make my community successful.  It’s a distraction, and at worst, a wrong commitment of attention. 

9.  Remember My Past Sins

I’ve made every mistake imaginable – including over-the-top themes, too many customizations, and chasing after dream goals.  The very worst is not making a database backup, then losing everything. Most of us came up through the School of Hard Knocks, and we should learn from those experiences.

8.   Treat Every Person as Gold

Members are the beating heart of your community, and are truly what makes your community special.  I’m committed to taking time out every day to message, comment, or reply to 3 new people to cultivate new relationships. 

7.  Practice x3

Nobody is perfect the first time they try something.  Thomas Edison famously stated that he found 10,000 ways for a lightbulb to not work, and 1 way that it did.  Whether you’re publishing new content or designing a template, refine it multiple times.   

6.  Start as a Guest

I don’t do this enough and I always find something surprising when I do. Either something is missing, something can be improved, or something is wrong.  The guest experience is the very first impression a visitor will have, and it can shape all of his future expectations. 

5.  Less is More

It’s easy to get sidetracked and to let your community get bloated with content and features.  It’s better to be amazing in one domain expertise: you offer the most authority, the most trusted content, the latest news, or the most comprehensive overview.  Excite members by being the best at what you do.  De-emphasize, consolidate, or archive everything else as needed.  

4.  It’s Not the Feature; Its What the Feature Does

It’s easy to think that because Invision Community ships with a new feature, then you should use it.  You don’t.  You should always pre-qualify the feature by asking how the feature can help you better engage with your community, how does it engage, and how can you customize the feature even better for your members?

3.  Bring Your Superusers Along

Even though I invite my superusers into a special private feedback group, I don’t leverage their knowledge, experience, or perspective enough. I recently asked for feedback about a particular feature, and it turns out none of them use it!      

2.  Experiment & Learn

There’s always something new to learn, explore, and implement.  It's my personal goal to enrich my personal skillsets in areas like leadership, team building, mentoring, emotional intelligence, organizational behavior, and psychology for more effective community management.  On the promotion side, you can learn about email marketing, digital marketing, social media, creating rich media, and more.  On the content side, you can always improve your content writing skills, emotive writing, keyword research, and the conversion of one content piece into multiple media and formats.  

1.  Enjoy the Journey

For any community admin who sticks with his community for several years, you can get burned out.  I know the feeling, and I like to periodically remind myself about what I enjoy running the community.  There’s so much to learn and do that it can feel overwhelming, so it’s important to take every day in 2020 one day at a time. 

When the clocks strike midnight on New Year's Eve, we will enter the third decade of producing Invision Community.

A lot has changed since we set up in 2002. Our team has grown and our product matured. In a world where online startups explode and die within a few years, we're something of an anomaly.

We still have the same love and passion for creating the very best tools to build a community, and we have always ensured that Invision Community is in touch with modern demands.

This decade has seen Invision Community go from strength to strength. In 2010 we were one of many forum systems catering to smaller niche audiences. In 2019 we're powering discussion for many international and well-known brands.

Online habits may have changed in this time, and social media may have swallowed up smaller informal communities, but the need for independent community platforms remains strong.

2020 will see us release 4.5 which will bring another round of essential updates to existing features and a fresh batch of new features.

But first, let us climb inside our Delorean, rewind the clock to 2010 and start from the beginning.

As the sun rose on 2010, Bruno Mars was singing about parts of the human face in "Just the way you are", Katy Perry irritated Microsoft Word's spellchecker with "California Gurls", and CeeLo Green was trying to "Forget you" (at least in the radio edit).

Christopher Nolan's boggled all our minds with Inception, James Franco lost the ability to clap in 127 Hours, and Colin Firth stammered his way through The Kings Speech.

Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad to a collective snort, moderate derision and questions over just how useful a giant iPhone will be.

President Obama, just a year into office warns of "Snowmageddon" that eventually dumps up to 40 inches of snow on the east coast of the United States.

We lost comedy legend Leslie Nielsen (we'd never dream of calling him Shirley), and we gained a small child named Ryan who in just nine years would be earning $29,000,000 by opening boxes of toys on YouTube.

62% of us were using Internet Explorer to the chagrin of most web developers who wished that Chrome's 5% market share was more significant.

Facebook celebrated its sixth year by reaching 400 million users (a far cry from the 2.5 billion it currently has). Twitter, just four years old hits 30 million monthly active users (and none of them talked about fake news).

And how about Invision Community?

2010

We hit 2010 running by releasing numerous updates on IP.Board v3.1, including finally using long-established web standards, and share features now that "social networking is all the craze these days" noting that "friends and colleagues often share similar interests, after all."

How innocent we all were in 2010.

Back then, each product had its own name and release cycle. IP.Gallery's new features included being able to rotate images by 90 degrees. Honestly, people used to go crazy for this stuff.

In May, we released a brand new application called "IP.Commerce". A few months later we renamed it "IP.Nexus" and years later, it was changed back to "Commerce". Naming things is hard.

The announcement contained exquisite details such as "It's hard to say when it'll be available" and "we don't know how much it will cost". We were so sure that it would be accepted positively, we removed the ability to post comments to the blog entry.

As summer turned to autumn and the end of the year loomed large, we released news about a significant update to Gallery called "IP.Gallery 4.0" which pre-dates Invision Community 4 and confused customers for years (so IP.Board 3 works with IP.Gallery 4, but IP.Board 4 works with Gallery 4?). Numbering things is hard too.

The last blog entry was about an app called 'IP.SEO' that I had utterly forgotten existed. It was written by Dan who once locked Lindy out of his own datacenter, but we don't talk about that.

2011

Charles opens the year by managing expectations for IP.Board 3.2 by outlining our three key goals (promotion, usability and modernization). The last one was us removing the "back to top" button and then spending the next eight years explaining why we removed it.

Our spam monitoring service processed 300,000 requests in the first two weeks of 2011. 30% of these requests were deemed to be spam and blocked (0.1% was probably an administrator registering 50 fake accounts before being banned from their own site).

I posted about "exciting new technology" in our new "WYSIWYG" editor (although what you see is sometimes close to what you get) would be more appropriate but slightly less catchy. We spent the next eight years explaining why no one uses BBCode anymore to almost everybody.

Brandon closed out the year with a blog promising "new toys" for IP.Content 2.3 (now called Pages, keep up!) which promises a "who's online" widget and a "shared media field" that was not only complicated to explain, but also use.

2012

We start the year with news on IP.Board 3.3. This release was to feature essential updates such as the "Remember me?" checkbox on the login form and emoticons in signatures.

Despite being constantly told that we don't take SEO seriously, we round up the latest serious SEO changes including tags, soft 404s and micro schema.

We also celebrated our tenth year in business.

Something terrible must have happened to one of our competitors because we asked if you'd like to switch to IPS.

The year ends with IP.Board 3.4 being released for beta testing. This being a rare year where we release two major versions in less than 12 months.

2013

Brandon has eight coffees and tries to explain what it's like to be a developer: "us developers are a strange bunch. We have a lot of crazy thoughts that just don't make sense to anyone else. Our brains are wired differently. We get from point A to point B by going around point Z and bouncing off point M first.", he closes the blog entry by urging you to ignore us.

The big news is that work on 4.0 is officially underway! Don't get too excited, releasing two major versions in 2012 clearly fatigued us as "IPS Community Suite 4.0" is not released until June 2015, over two years later.

4.0 was our first complete rewrite in years. We threw out all our stable and tested code and started over with an empty editor. It was a vast undertaking that consumed us completely. The result was worth it as we had a new modern framework that still serves us today. But we're getting ahead of ourselves a little.

Back in 2013, Mark talks about trees. Not the kind you find laying around in forests, but rather the programmatic type. It's just a way for Mark to show off how beautiful his code is.

IP.Board 3.4 still gets many updates (along with IP.Gallery, IP.Blog, IP.Content, IP.Downloads and IP.Address (ok that last one was made up)).

We spend the year talking about various new things in 4.0, including a new-new editor and various special features (and no one noticed we started calling it "IPS Social Suite 4.0" - it just rolls off the tongue!)

I introduce the new theme engine for 4.0, and this time, my code is not deleted by Mark (true story).

2014

We didn't know it at the time, but 2014 was not the year that IPS Social Community Suite 4.0 (naming things is hard) will be released. Still, Rikki talks enthusiastically about "extending JS controllers and mixins"  a way of coding so complex, to this day you can count the number of people who truly understand it on one of Rikki's fingers because it's only Rikki that understands it.

Determined not to be outdone in the confusing customers' stakes, I go on about how important it is to convert your database to UTF-8 when upgrading from 3.0.

As 2014 neared its inevitable end, we did manage to put up a pre-release testing site and release Beta 1 a release so unstable; it makes the current political climate look absolutely peachy.

2015

Finally, the year that 4.0 is to be released! We released six betas and a few release candidates before nervously hovering over the 'release' button (actually it's a collection of git commands and 'to the letter' instructions I ignore).

After a  year of training customers to call our forthcoming release "IPS Social Suite 4.0," we release it as "IPS Community Suite 4.0". Lindy writes a lengthy blog article that sounds like a cross between a technical discussion of the Brother 8987-A printer and an award acceptance speech.

Quite frankly, after nearly two years of development, we're just relieved to have finally released it.

The year is spent refining and fixing 4.0 and culminates in the news of 4.1, where we add activity streams and a menu manager. We also talk about the new-new-new editor.

December 16th marks the time that IP.Board 3.4 officially dies as we declare it "end of life" and no longer support it. That shiny new release we were excited to talk about in 2012 is finally put out to pasture. The last we heard, IP.Board 3.4 moved to a farm and is doing well.

2016

Now that IP.Board 3.4 is end of life; we do the sensible thing and make a few minor IP.Board 3.4 releases to improve security.

IPS Social.. sorry, Community Suite hits version 4.1.17 (confusing Lindy) before the year is done with many new improvements, including embeds, warning notes and the new leaderboard.

We're still mostly undecided what to call the product, so we avoid trying in all our blog entries.

In fact, looking back, it's quite remarkable how often we changed the name of our product. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it was a robust and well-considered attempt to prevent Google from serving up relevant search results and to confuse potential customers.

We find time to update our own website and introduce a new developer's area.

2017

Barely 16 days into the new year, and we release news of the two-factor authentication feature added to IPS Community Social Invision IP.Board Suite 4.1.18.

When spring has sprung, Charles drops the news that we're working on 4.2, the main feature being a screenshot of the Admin CP log in. We promise that you will love it and that it will be released mid-2017.

Updates come thick and fast. Calendar event reminders, content messages, recommended replies, letter profile photos device management and delayed deletes all make the blog.

Still not convinced that people take us seriously when we say we're committed to SEO, we post about more SEO improvements.

This time, we talk about implementing JSON-LD, rich snippets, pagination tags and more.

We also squeeze another one in about the new-new-new-new editor.

We overhaul our own blog (using Pages because that's how we roll) and I start a hilarious series of blog entries where I troll our own team. Everyone including me loses interest early on in 2019.

During April, we do the sensible thing and change the name of our product once more. IPS Community/Social Suite 4.1 is out, and Invision Community 4.2 is in.

Just to recap: IBForums > IPB > IP.Board > IPS Social Suite > IPS Community Suite > Invision Community.

You're welcome search engines!

As promised, we release Invision Community 4.2 around the middle of the year. Well done, everyone! We finally hit a release date!

As is now tradition, we end the year with news of our next big release Invision Community 4.3 (and tease the new emoji feature). We also calm nerves about Europe's endless fascination with regulation (it's this kind of joke that caused Brexit you know) and wrote up a guide on GDPR.

2018

Phew. We're almost there, dear reader. If you skimmed through most of the blog to this point and expected me to finish with a bang, you'll be disappointed.

We start 2018 at full speed releasing feature news on Invision Community 4.3 including emoji, OAuth, community moderation, REST API, subscription manager, announcements and more.

Oh and we hit our sweet sixteenth birthday in February!

We release Invision Community 4.3 in April to rapturous applause after a short beta testing period. We all agree that 4.3 was a great stable release which instantly makes the developers nervous.

Towards the end of the year, we announce that work has begun on Invision Community 4.4. We talk about new features such as GIPHY integration, AdminCP notifications, Post Before Registering, Commerce Updates and more.

Still not sure if we care about SEO? Well, how about another blog entry on SEO?

The only thing missing this year is a new update on our editor.

2019

And we arrive back home in 2019. A week into January and I pull the massive twist that we're using Invision Community 4.4 on our own community. It's not quite up there with "Bruce Willis is a ghost" though.

In March we write up a case study on The Trevor Space, an LGBTQ charity set up to prevent suicide and to provide crisis intervention. TrevorSpace commends Invision Community for allowing anonymity online which isn't possible with social media.

Rikki drops a bombshell in September when he announces that we're actively working on native iOS and Android apps for Invision Community. Apparently mobile is a thing now.

November starts a series of blog entries talking about our new upcoming release, Invision Community 4.5. We talk about the Admin CP overhaul, Club Pages, RSS Feed Improvements and Club improvements.

And here we are. Right up to date. This decade may have only taken us from IP.Board 3.1 to Invision Community 4.5, but it really has seen a massive change in the company we are, and the industry we are in.

We have seen the inception, rise and stumble of social media. While it's true that forums are no longer the preserve of Star Trek fans obsessing over continuity errors and informal communities have been absorbed by Facebook and friends, spaces that you completely own to host discussions are still very much in demand.

Over the past year or so we've seen a sustained rise in the demand for independent communities. Brands especially like that you own your data and can use it to gain insights into customer habits. Just this year, we've launched communities for LEGO, HTC, Sage, Mattel, Gibson Guitars, Squarespace, and many more.

We are constantly evolving Invision Community (assuming we stick with that name) to be at the very centre of your online presence. We have tools to add discussion comments to any page of your site, to embed widgets with a few lines of code. We want to showcase your community throughout your site by adding multiple touchpoints to take your customers on a journey with you. Our native apps will offer new and exciting ways to interact with a community via new interfaces.

As we move into our third decade, I can only see a resurgence for independent communities as we tire of the crushing intrusion of social media. We give away so much of our attention, time and information for very little reward.

We have never been more divisive and fiercely tribal.

It's time to come back together to discuss a topic with care and thoughtfulness. It's time to allow our personalities to take a back seat and let considered discussion live again.

And we'll be here doing what we have always done; creating the very best community platform possible.

I'd love to know when you joined us on this crazy ride. Was it before or after 2010?

The engagement trap is a race to community activity for the sake of activity.  It's usually measured by simple aggregate numbers like the total number of posts, topics, likes, or members.  

You don't want members to chat.  You want members to learn, to advocate, to innovate, to educate, to support, to problem solve, and to enlighten.

Many community managers and webmasters enjoy spouting engagement numbers.  It's an easy number to brag about.  It's an easy number to find.  It's also, unfortunately, a terrible metric to measure. 

Engagement metrics are exhausting since you're aiming for higher-and-higher goals, which grow into unreasonable levels over time.  It's misleading, because it's not indicative of information exchanges or quality resources.  And it's ultimately harmful, because it encourages participation in socially-charged conversation that are ever more entertaining, more controversial, and more extreme.  You don't want members to chat.  You want members to learn, to advocate, to innovate, to educate, to support, to problem solve, and to enlighten.

Engagement metrics are marketing numbers used to measure audience size and a currency of the attention economy where you're the product.  It's an entirely wrong metric for online communities where the goal is not how big you can get, but on how you can help your members.

Your Metrics & Your Strategy

There's a famous management quote from Peter Drucker that says, "what gets measured gets managed."  What you want to measure, and therefore manage and improve, is a reflection of your community strategy and your objectives. 

Here are some ideas of what you could measure:

• The number of questions or feedback requests that were answered in high-value boards of functional content
• The number of educational resources that were added to a certain category 
• The number of new topics that were posted in a growing section
• The selection of special keywords or tags that you want to track
• The number of informative reactions that were given out in a certain period 
• The participation of high-value experts in your community

Segment Your Community

Not all parts of your community should be treated equally, especially if you have a large and dynamic community with several apps and categories.  Your community may have a mix of one or more of the following:

• Educational and functional-value boards
• Social and member-based forums and boards
• New sections that are growing
• Mature sections that have leveled off
• Different content types and reactions  
• Different groups of members

Instead of evaluating your community as one entity, segment your community.  This allows you to hyper-focus your attention and grow specific areas that match with specific objectives.  For example, I always measure the number of new topics in boards that are educational and informative, since they're high-value functional content.  I don't pay attention to mature sections that have reached saturation, but I aggressively track new sections.  

Measurement & Analysis

Invision Community ships with a powerful set of Statistics in the ACP that cover every application.  I personally spend more time in Statistics than any other part of the ACP, because it gives me the data and research to inform my decision making.  It helps me focus my attention on the sections that matter the most to my community strategy and reveals unexpected insights.  

The ACP won't have all of the fine-grained filtering or data reporting that you may need.  Maintain your own recording, even if it needs to be manual.  

Conclusion

Trying to boost engagement is a race that you'll never win.  It has nothing to do with your community strategy; it doesn't measure the value you give and receive from your audience; and it can push you to drive empty traffic with unintended consequences.

Independent communities that focus on the hard, difficult work of offering communities of indispensable value will always find growth.  It will be the right kind of growth, in the right areas of your community, with the right audience.  That's a race that will meaningfully empower your members and your community to the finish line.  

What are the most important metrics that you measure?  Or are you in the engagement trap?  Share in the comments below and see how other IPS clients can help.    

Are you looking to start a successful community powered by the statistics and content management of a modern community platform?  Get in touch with IPS, Inc. for a discussion and product demo.