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The people who make up the initial membership of a community set the tone for its future growth through their common interests and values, and how much they contribute to and promote your community. Be deliberate about recruiting your membership even before you start your online community. Here are some tips to get you the right membership.

  1. Review your group’s mission statement and target audience – If you haven’t yet finalized that, you can review an earlier post on the subject. It talks about who your target audience is – what types of people or groups you want to support and who your constituents are.
  2. Get specific about your membership criteria – What kind of people do you need in the mix to achieve your community’s purpose? A list could include specific and complementary
    skill sets, geographic representation, and cross-membership with other influential networks or organizations. Even if the group is ‘open’ to anyone to join, you still need to recruit people to fill gaps. Here is a example checklist for coalition building on Underage Drinking Prevention that might be useful: html doc.
  3. Look for the right member ‘DNA’ – In her excellent book, Patti Anklam talk about the need for: Commonality – sharing a uniting passion in the community’s purpose, focused on the same interest area, holding a similar experience level; Diversity – a mixture of differences in cultural, gender, age, and professional background to bring different points of view into the mix, and a Collaborative mindset– looking at the community for ‘what’s in it for us’ rather than ‘what’s in it for me or my organization’.
  4. Decide how open you want to be - Depending on your community’s purpose and the kind of work you are doing, you may want to be very open or more discriminating about how someone joins your community. For example, if you’ are working on women’s empowerment in Afghanistan you probably want to be more careful about who joins your group than a local parent-teachers association in San Francisco. Options include: Open – anyone can join; Open to apply – people need to apply to an administrator for membership, Member referral - people need to be referred by existing members, Invitation only – people have to be invited by an administrator; or Closed – not accepting new members.
  5. Start in quiet mode – The first 10 members of a community set the tone for its community norms, future membership, and standard of engagement. Among the initial ‘founding’ members, there should be at least two or three exemplary practitioners who set the standard for participation and achievement.
  6. Build from your existing community - It’s far better to start an online community building off an existing offline community. Patti Anklam says that communities that evolve organically from existing relationships and a history of working together are more likely to last than ones created in a top down manner.
  7. Co-create expectations – Clay Shirky uses the term ‘bargain’ to describe ‘what you can expect of others and what they can expect of you’. Your community members can help shape that bargain, so do allow for varying degrees of engagement, especially at the start until the core membership shakes out.
  8. Recruit the willing – Martin Reed has a great post about engaging bloggers, Facebook, Twitter, and competitor communities to listen, learn, get involved, reach out and then invite people to your community.

For specific tips for WiserEarth Administrators on how to invite members to WiserEarth Groups check out the Group Tutorial.

Related Posts: 7 Steps for a Compelling Purpose for your Online Community | Photo Credit

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