The perfect community tool is...

Continuous Community Clue #035

I think a lot about community tooling and my thoughts are always somewhat shifting.

These days I believe that the perfect community tool, for me and for my context, is a website builder that has a few “community” features.

The reality is that communities need similar things to what most business, bloggers and creators need. To publish easily, to have good ranking content, and to have top of funnel leads (emails, members, subscriptions, or whatever you may want to call them).

Part of what we need may well be members contributing too, but honestly, there is far to much emphasis on that over good context, navigation and UX between those two things.

So mostly when people ask me what I’d love to see a community tool be, I often say I want a website builder that enables easy creation of a website that converts, but to then have the ability to add in a small space to converse, list events, have a directory and the ability to curate and share information. This approach would help us to stop focusing too much on conversations.

This does not feel like rocket science. Perhaps we’ve seen some progress with many website builders having the ability to have ‘paid membership’, really, the standards have to be higher.

Paid membership is great, but it is not enough. We need the other features too and because we don’t get them, we end up trying to bridge the frustrating gap.

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