How does everything get done in an online community?
As soon as a group of regular users has formed in your community and there is a stable influx of new users to the platform, you need to start working with volunteers.
The main driving force of any community is volunteers. Volunteers are people who care about the mission of the community and the community itself and have the time and energy to help you grow it.
The primary value that volunteers get from online communities extends beyond the physical world. Those values are an opportunity for self-improvement, decision-making autonomy, a sense of belonging, access to interesting people, etc. To start participating in your community, volunteers need to find the community more valuable or more unique than others.
Working with volunteers comes down to finding such activities that allow the users to satisfy their mental needs and at the same time benefit the community. There are three primary ways to look for the activities and engage volunteers in them. You can try the approaches one by one or all three at the same time. They are not conflicting and complement each other.
1. Design activities yourself and convince users to participate.
Often there are enough people who potentially are ready to help you with the community, but somehow they are idle. They may not know that help is needed, doubt the success of initiatives, lack motivation, or something else. Your task is to enable people, make them enthusiastic and convince them to take an active part in one of the suggested initiatives.
2. Help users to connect and form groups based on the shared interests.
Connecting users to others is one of the most powerful ways to keep people in the community and stimulate their activity. The more effectively users create connections between each other, the faster the community will grow. Relationships (the connections) are created through shared positive experiences. A user’s feeling of belonging to a group directly depends on what kind of relationship and with what kind of people they will have.
Usually connections occur naturally by chance when users with similar or complementary interests happen to be in the same place at the same time, have the opportunity to act, and are not afraid to do so. To accelerate the growth of your community, you need to intentionally bring together users who can positively influence each other and create opportunities for them to interact.
3. Find leaders among the users and help them with the initiatives they propose.
To continue to grow the community you need to identify volunteers who want to lead the content initiatives and organizational meta-work like initiating meta-discussions, compiling FAQs, hosting meetups, etc.
Any initiatives will be more successful if they are proposed and led by the users themselves. Initiatives led by users who have popularity, authority, or some other special social status in the community, as well as by users who actively help other users, will be especially effective. The more users feel sympathy towards the author of an initiative, the greater the activation will be among them.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.