Monday 21st November 2011 by Nick Torday

As you may be aware if you’ve visited siftgroups.com or seen our tweets over the past few days, last week we released our very first Community Report: Benchmarking Online Community for the Charity Sector.

Through our research, we set out to discover what’s key to running an online community in the Third Sector right now? What are people measuring? What would they like to measure? What issues keep cropping up?

Our findings made for fascinating reading; did you know, for example, that 81% of community managers have to regularly deal with problematic members? Or that 9 out of 10 of us have no means of measuring the financial contribution of our community to the rest of the organisation? The report contains a thorough exploration of all our findings, and digs much deeper.

To celebrate the launch of the report, we also held our first Community Huddle last week. We brought together many of those who took part in our research, and a few extra Community Managers with more than a passing interest in our findings. The resulting discussions were fascinating, and we have loads of thought provoking findings to share over the next few weeks.

So, plenty more to follow very soon, but for now, based on the insight we gained from across the sector, here are five key tips to consider before setting up your own online community:

• Ensure that the whole organisation is behind the proposition: don't be tempted to set up a community silo "just to see if it will work". It has to be at the heart of your digital communications/service strategy to really ensure your users and your colleagues adopt it. By doing so you will also be able to demonstrate how the community contributes to your organisation's ROI.
• Do some proper audience research and plan the function against audience need: in some instances a simple discussion forum may be the best approach yet in others more complex functionality like ask the experts or live chat may be required.
• Technology is merely facilitative, people come first: make sure that your internal resourcing is appropriate; you may be tempted to bolt on community management to an existing job description – really think this through. If anything, look to over-resource a new community.
• Identify community champions: as a part of your user research, look to establish key online advocates who will be the pioneers of your nascent community, creating conversation and mentoring others who join.
• Plan a comprehensive launch strategy and seed content: you don't want to go live with an empty wilderness, so plan your pre-launch activity carefully and work with your community champions to create lively dialogue prior to the full public launch.

To download the report, visit http://community.siftgroups.com/