I’m a big fan of custom built communities. Too often we limit ourselves to what the community tools can provide. We can be more creative with what we do.
Conversations are great, however often they lead to a lot of inaction and it’s difficult to efficiently make sense of what people talk about. Getting contributions towards specific data points levels up the whole experience and goals of the community and company.
It also makes everything a bit more tangible and measurable.
The Product Hunt example
Here is an example from Product Hunt, a website and community for people that love finding and building products.
On their homepage they ask guided questions about tools.
More recently I’ve noticed they ask a question when you upvote a product.
Clicking on the question about Notion brings a pop up with questions about the product.
Traditionally this might not be seen as community building, from my perspective it is. The members are engaging and responding to very relevant questions. I can imagine this data becoming very useful, powerful, tangible and ✨measurable✨ over time.
Perhaps doing these kind of things is more accessible and can become more valuable than other community activities like community surveys.
The questions then become:
how can you creatively ask your visitors or members questions?
how will you gather the data?
what is the point of the data capture?
how will this create value for the company, the members and the ecosystem?
how can you use “community tools” to replicate some of these concepts?
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