When someone thinks about starting a new community, the first questions that arise are: What will we get at the end by having a community? What resources do we need for this? How to launch a community effectively? Since I wrote a whole book about how to launch communities, let’s try to answer the other two questions.
What will your future community look like in, say, three years? What will it take to be there?
Usually, to answer these questions, you need an experienced community manager who can roughly estimate the resources and time needed to achieve desired outcome. What to do if you do not have such a person? And even if you do have them, how to check the estimates they made? Well, the simplest way is to look at how other online communities have been developed!
Please let me introduce the very first basic version of a tool that allows you to do exactly that, to plan communities based on real past data: http://planner.practical-cm.com/
What can the planner do now?
At this moment, the planner can roughly estimate the number of topics that will be created on a site depending on two initial parameters: the number of seed content and the number of “our” people who will create new discussions at the very beginning of the community.
What do you need to do to get an estimate?
To get an estimate, you need to input a few parameters
First, input the number of seed topics.
When we are about to launch a community, it’s a good practice to populate the site with some initial content before opening it to the public. The first parameter of the tool is the number of topics that you would add to the site before the launch.
Second, input the number of people who are going to post new discussions
To run a community, in addition to the original content, you need people who will create new discussions. These could be existing users of your product, friends, colleagues, or hired content writers. What is important is that you have someone who intentionally creates new discussions for some time after the launch.
To get an estimate, you need to specify the number of people you are able to add to your community, then indicate how many discussions each of them will create per day, and the period during which they will post. For example, 3 users with 2 topics per day for 30 days is equivalent to 180 topics total (3230).
Third, input the simulation period
Input the period for which you want to get an estimate and run the simulation!
What happens next? Based on real data from different online communities, for a specified period of time, the planner will add initial content and first users and then it will simulate visits to the site, which will lead to organic growth (i.e. new user and new topics)
The current result of the simulation is a chart of topics on a site. The peak at the beginning is “seeded content” and discussions from “initial users”. Everything else is organic growth of content due to incoming traffic to the site.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful”
When I was working on the current version of the planner, I made a number of simplifications. For example, at the current version of the tool I believe that the number of views per discussion is linear, which in reality is not the case. Or, for example, the community does not have growth saturation, which in reality is also not true.
The purpose of the first version of the tool is to spark your imagination and how you can utilise such a tool at your work!
Please do tell me what you think!
If you think that the tool might be useful for you and would like to see its development, please tell me what you need and possible use cases. You can write here on the site, email me or subscribe to updates.
I will be very glad to hear your ideas and suggestions!