Growing Online Community With Volunteer’S Help

Practical Community Management

What you'll learn

How communities grow

Which initiatives lead to growth and which don’t

How to write initiative proposals that activates users

How to get volunteers to do what the community needs

What to pay attention to make your proposals persuasive

How to get volunteers to organize proactive groups

How to enable volunteers to become the leaders of the community

How to use goal setting to guide the community to fulfill its mission

How to refine the help center of a community as the community grows

Requirements

No special skills are required except the wish to understand how online communities work.

Description

Any social system has only two states. It either grows or dies. If you do not work on growing your community, it will begin to stagnate and then degrade. Running initiatives aimed at growth is the only way to keep a community healthy. In this course, we discuss how to properly create community goals and approach creating initiatives to achieve those goals, how to communicate with the community to keep users active, and how to update community rules to support the growth.In the beginning of the course we do a quick recap of the essentials of online community management and how to reach a critical mass of users in an online community. Then we are going to deep dive into the following topics:How communities growWhich initiatives lead to growth and which don’tHow to write initiative proposals that activates usersHow to get volunteers to do what the community needsWhat to pay attention to make your proposals persuasiveHow to get volunteers to organize proactive groupsHow to enable volunteers to become the leaders of the communityWhat software one needs to be able scale a communityHow to use goal setting to guide the community to fulfill its missionHow to refine the help center of a community as the community growsIf you have a working community and your primary goal is to make it grow, this course is for you.

Overview

Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 Introduction

Lecture 2 Introduction to this course

Lecture 3 Recap of the essentials of online community management

Lecture 4 Recap of how to reach a critical mass of users in an online community

Section 2: Community growth

Lecture 5 The growth of communities is cyclical

Lecture 6 Three critical growth points: incoming traffic, new users, and engagement

Lecture 7 All activities on the platform should be carried out by the users

Lecture 8 Interim summary

Section 3: Asking for help: How to write posts about community initiatives

Lecture 9 How to write posts about community initiatives

Lecture 10 If it is worth communicating, it is worth a story

Lecture 11 The most important thing you want to share

Lecture 12 Narrowing the discussion

Lecture 13 Other tips and tricks

Lecture 14 Interim summary

Section 4: Designing activities yourself

Lecture 15 How things get done in online communities: Working with volunteers

Lecture 16 Be persuasive when inviting users to participate in initiatives

Lecture 17 Volunteers need to know what help is needed and how they can contribute

Lecture 18 The sufficient minimum to activate users

Lecture 19 Initiative must be seen as valuable by the users and the general public

Lecture 20 Explain the reasoning behind your requests when reaching out to regular users

Lecture 21 When reaching out to casual visitors, rely on heuristics

Lecture 22 Make the work of volunteers visible to the other users

Lecture 23 Ask specific people for specific help

Lecture 24 Fear and hate are the strongest activators

Lecture 25 Other advice

Lecture 26 Interim summary

Section 5: Helping users to connect and form groups based on the shared interests

Lecture 27 Help users to connect and form groups based on the shared interests

Lecture 28 Keep an eye on users’ interests and needs that can complement each other

Lecture 29 Create opportunities for joint activities

Lecture 30 Tell users about other users

Lecture 31 Interim summary

Section 6: Find leaders among the users and help them with the initiatives they propose

Lecture 32 Find leaders among the users and help them with the initiatives they propose

Lecture 33 Look for volunteers proactively

Lecture 34 Encourage users to become volunteers

Lecture 35 Make it so it is safe for volunteers to make mistakes

Lecture 36 Volunteers must be autonomous

Lecture 37 Recognize volunteers’ contribution to successful initiatives as much as you can

Lecture 38 If something goes wrong with an initiative, cover for the authors and volunteers

Lecture 39 Maintain trusting relationships with volunteers

Lecture 40 Volunteers are a community within a community

Lecture 41 Interim summary

Lecture 42 Interim summary (together)

Section 7: Community Goals

Lecture 43 Community goals

Lecture 44 Goals are what the community is currently working on

Lecture 45 Goals should activate and unite users

Lecture 46 Choose goals that are achievable, finite, and beneficial to the community

Lecture 47 Look for goals that users are interested in

Lecture 48 The interests of the users always have the highest priority

Lecture 49 Any goals are better than no goals

Lecture 50 Mission is an immutable characteristic of a community

Lecture 51 Interim summary

Section 8: Social norms and rules

Lecture 52 The only source of new rules is the real cases in your community

Lecture 53 Hosting public discussions of the rules makes the rules legit

Lecture 54 Users must understand and support the rules you create

Lecture 55 Keep the list of official rules short

Lecture 56 If one wants to change rules, they need to prove that the change brings benefits

Lecture 57 Maintain the culture of welcomeness and kindness

Lecture 58 Interim summary

Section 9: Final overview

Lecture 59 Final overview

Lecture 60 Overview of the first three courses of the Practical Community Management series

This learning series is designed for community practitioners of all sorts, starting from community volunteers and up to executives, who are involved in building and running communities on a daily basis and would like to understand the core principle of how online communities work.