If you are considering adopting some or all of the features of a social/community of practice for your members, may I recommend you take a moment to look internally at your own organization?
Developing a membership network or community is about enabling your members to help each other and help you. Part of that process involves changing traditional roles and breaking down barriers. For example, if your community includes self-help forums, member blogs and so on, you are changing the relationship between your organization and your members to something that is more complex and more democratic. Members will now contribute to, interact and collaborate with each other. Your role in this process has changed from guardian, expert and service provider to that of facilitator and enabler. The process itself is no longer one that you control.
Communication is now, no longer a linear process between you and individual members (or your members as a common group) that is initiated and planned by your marketing or membership departments. Members have a voice in the community and speak and listen to other members.
Communities and networks are part of a process of change. How will this new relationship and your changing role within it be expressed in what you provide to your members? What are the opportunities and risks associated with this transformation? What would you like to do differently in the future and what will you need to do differently?
As the community enables you to communicate with individuals from within your member organizations, so it creates the opportunity for members to interact with other people from within your own organization, beyond those who are immediately ‘member-facing’. This can be alarming to organizations and the individuals within them but, on the plus side, the opportunity to connect everyone in your organization to your members – essentially your single most important stakeholder group – can help ensure that what you do and how you do it is informed by and designed with your members’ needs at its heart.
Remember, you are asking your members to learn a new skillset and adopt a new culture, when you invite them to become part of a community. If you haven’t realised this or you haven’t considered how your own organization needs to change to support this culture, then take time to do so. Your understanding of exactly where this is going to take you is likely to be incomplete, uncertain and subject to change but that’s the whole point; align your organization to the world of networks and communities and you will be able to adapt to this, wherever it takes you.
Jonathan Norman facilitates a half day workshop for The Publishing Training Centre ‘Creating a Strategy for Peer and Professional Networks and Communities of Practice’. https://www.publishingtrainingcentre.co.uk/courses/short-courses/strategy-and-list-building/item/professional-and-peer-networks
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