The mission is the destiny of a community, something big that we strive for but nothing big can be accomplished until we do it one step at a time. Goals define the steps the community needs to take to achieve the mission. The evolution of what the community works on occurs through continued iteration of achieving the current goals and then setting new ones.
Goals are what the community is currently working on
Community goals change dynamically and are aimed at achieving something in the short term, since what you can achieve depends heavily on what you have here and now: the current state of the community and its current active users.
Goals activate and unite users
-
Activation. Essentially, by defining goals you are saying, “It would be great to do this because it will help us get there. Who’s ready to help?” People who have personal motivation to achieve the goal become more active and more involved.
-
Unity. Users see the same reality in different ways, placing their emphasis on different aspects of the community. Common goals bring users with different views together and allow them to move in the same direction as a group.
Choose goals that are achievable, finite, and beneficial to the community
-
Achievable. Goals form feedback loops. When users achieve goals together, everyone gets a positive collective experience. Users begin to have more faith in themselves, other users and the project as a whole.
-
Finite. Users must clearly understand if a goal has been achieved or have not, how much and what needs to be done to achieve it. Otherwise users might lose their interest at some point.
-
Beneficial. Our task is to help the community achieve its mission. Any initiative that the group undertakes must be somehow related to the end mission of the community. Users must have a good understanding of how the community as a whole will benefit if they invest their time in achieving a goal.
Look for goals that users are interested in
You can build a large community only in one case: if all the work is done by the users themselves. You need to focus on finding initiatives that users are interested in and will benefit the community, communicating selected initiatives, assisting volunteers, and keeping users interested in the initiative until the goals are accomplished. This is the essence of community management.
The interests of the users always have the highest priority
Online communities compete for the people’s attention. To join your community, people must see some value in what you offer to work on on your platform and, importantly, this value should be bigger than anything people can get anywhere else.
If there is a need to choose between the interests of the company you are working for and the interests of your users, always try to find a compromise! If the compromise is difficult to achieve, give priority to users’ interests. Users are driven by internal motivation, which often has nothing to do with the company that owns the platform and its success. Too many initiatives that are not related to the mission of the community and users will lose their interest in your platform.
Any goals are better than no goals
Frequent drama and lack of unity are the signs of a lack of goals. Goals focus users’ attention on solving specific applied problems, set the direction for collective action, and give people reasons to work together and find compromises. If there are no goals in your community, uncertainty arises, and users begin to fill the emptiness with very arbitrary ideas. These ideas are sometimes good, sometimes not. Over time, this leads to drama and destruction of the relationships between the users.
As a community manager, you must set the growth vector for the community either yourself or with the key volunteers’ help, but you need to do that. Any goals, even the simplest and not optimal, are better than the absence of 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.