Bristol Enterprise Network

Facilitated by the University of Bristol and with a membership of over 1,500, BEN is a cross-sector online network for knowledge-based organisations in the South West, providing a forum to share news and information and to provide mutual support between its members.

Facts

With a diverse membership spanning business, industry, entrepreneurs, investors and the substantial research community in the South West, developing a successful online community strategy to satisfy the needs of a wide range of stakeholders demanded an externally-facilitated programme of consultancy and planning prior to the delivery of a flexible social media platform.

Challenges

With a strong existing membership base, good SEO, the ability to attract quality speakers and a reputation for delivering interesting events, the development of a new online environment presented BEN with the opportunity to strengthen its position in the South West, expand its face-to-face networking opportunities beyond events and into conferences and workshops, and develop new products whilst capitalising on its individual members and connections with the University of Bristol.

Delivering a solution

Stage 1 – Developing the strategy 

Many organisations find themselves with a large volume of demands from their members and internal stakeholders for online capabilities but with a limited budget to deliver them. Focussing on the areas that deliver the greatest benefits and satisfy the largest number of users seems obvious, but requires a structured approach. By calling upon the knowledge within BEN and a selection of its external partners and stakeholders, we developed a range of personas to represent the wider BEN membership throughout the planning and design process and to validate all decisions made.

Testing the extensive selection of potential content and commercial offerings that could be delivered by BEN provided some unexpected outcomes. The second most popular activity for BEN members, workshop or round-table meetings between members, was something that was not currently on offer by BEN and the traditional events facilitated by BEN fell outside the top five activities. The redevelopment of the online community offered a prime opportunity to address these concerns and to validate which offers would ultimately be available to the public, and which would be restricted to BEN members, striking an important balance between offering SEO-friendly content to attract new members and offering enough additional value to encourage potential members to join up.

Stage 2 – Design & Build 

The creative workshop and design process led to a clean, strong design aimed at attracting the core audience and aligning with BEN's corporate identity.

With an Information Architecture, module set, permissions model and registration and profiling process agreed, we delivered an online community and content site on the Drupal Open Source platform, delivering iteratively to enable early review by BEN and to support any desired changes to the requirements and layout. The Agile project management and development approach embraces change, accepting that it is an inevitable and valuable part of any project, and that by facilitating controlled change throughout the duration of a project, the eventual outcome is more likely to deliver against the evolving requirements than a traditional, waterfall approach.

Sustaining the community 

A successful online community requires careful seeding and nurturing; simply providing technology is not enough to attract and retain members. Understanding members’ motivations to network allows a considered approach to be taken not only to selecting the areas of community technology to focus on, but also the community management activities to undertake to encourage participation.

Review of the personas’ motivations highlighted peer-to-peer networking and participating in Q&A activities as key attractors to the BEN site. The recommended resources needed to manage the community on an ongoing basis were an online business manager, and a content & community manager, with presenting a public face to the site and overseeing the implementation of the content strategy being central to the success of the site.