What should an initiative proposal have to be compelling for casual visitors of an online community?
What should an initiative proposal have to be compelling for casual visitors of an online community?
Tl;dr; When reaching out to casual visitors, rely on heuristics.
Casual visitors do not tend to do in-depth analysis of the proposed initiatives. When you want to reach these users, your communication should be as simple and short as possible. Reasons and rationale in this case do not cause a better response. Moreover, they sometimes cause users to perceive the arguments as hidden manipulation.
Additionally to the when you talk to casual users, use simple and short requests when communicating initiatives related to:
- Something that the users do not have a strong personal view about.
- Something that assumes a small contribution.
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.