Building a community around any project is an arduous journey. It’s neither done in one day, nor does it stop at some point. It’s a continuous process and users, customers or stakeholders will not invest any of their time / capital if it does not pay out for them in some way. This is the reason why you have to carefully 1) THINK about what kind of community suits your business. 2) How you can CATER to their needs in order to have a flourishing and engaging community that forms the backbone of your venture.

Why a community is important

Without focusing on the right people you want to gather around your business, any kind of product or campaign launch turns out to be a rush into the unknown. Weakly prepared projects end up frantically spamming as many places as possible to try to catch the “buzz” needed for a successful campaign. Sometimes they are lucky, most of the time they are not.

This is especially apparent in the crypto industry, which is vibrant and in it’s infancy. Already because of this the ecosystem is over crowded with people who are looking for fast and easy money by starting either their own project and go for an ICO or speculating on one.

However, efforts and resources that are spent on community building are often lost on these kind of users who have no serious interest in the long term success of the business, but only care about making some quick bounty profits. For the business it can be a real pain, because it harms the atmosphere they are aiming to create. Moreover, it can mislead them into trying to connect with people who do not really believe in what they are trying to create.

Valuable community members will not only promote your business at any opportunity they can, even if there’s no bounty offered, but will happily take part in any discussion that comes up in your communication channels and even defend your business against potential FUD — and that’s the love you want to encounter.

When prospective associates are looking at a project, the most convincing is not the quantitative sharing and engagement statistic, which is just a door opener, but much more what is inside e.g. the contents people are releasing. Professionals can see through large marketing budgets and instead look for a strongly organically fostered community.

image source - https://ignitiondeck.com/id/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/crowdfunding-community-building.jpg

Reward the right or be left

Qualitative user engagement is more expensive than generic engagement. Plain rewards are not attractive enough for innovative users, the content must be interesting in the first place. When the right content is captured, good people can be lured and conversations evolve. There are certain techniques that must be respected for healthy and effective community building.

Instantaneousness is mostly the prerequisite for users to become active at all. However, a healthy portion of user investment is necessary to support a qualitative long-run evolution of the community. User investment describes the efforts required by a user after they fully arrived in the product environment and intends to trigger the user’s future commitment.

Bounty clickers are not a scarce resource and will always be around. What you really want focus on are qualitative users who seek a meaningful interaction with your company and have the potential to form a loyal user base. A loyal user base that is really engaged with your product is probably the most precious thing, especially for an emerging crypto project.

Community Building is wonderful

Building a community gives you the chance to get to know your audience and to communicate with them in different ways that can have many positive influences on your project. By always communicating openly and honestly you build trust between your project and its users and you enable yourself to receive valuable customer/user insights you can further utilise to improve your target marketing and product development. Not to forget that generally, identification of problems happens much more efficiently by leveraging outside perspectives.

The connection to your community must be fostered constantly in order to maintain it. It is vital that shared values are communicated to establish a deeper relationship.

Image source — https://ryanfportfolio.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/community-building-logo-copy.png

Content is king, community is queen.

You can push as much content you want but if there’s no community growing alongside then the effect does not reach it’s true potential. Content becomes extremely valuable when there is a community that shares it and backs it up socially. Your story must be told in a way people can adopt to. A rule of thumb is to act as the user who would want to share your content. Is it valuable? Is it interesting and thought provoking?

Below is a checklist to guide your own community development:

Start building straight away Know your audience Connect with common values Trigger engagement via interest Reward Encourage feedback Trigger user-investment

Crowdholding is designed to meet all community requirements in one place and even more. The tasks you can create enable to go into conversations much more intensively with a bigger group of people and to get customer/user insights that are valuable on numerous levels. Innovation is a state of mind and if understood correctly, companies can efficiently disrupt markets by utilising existing information flows online. Join our Telegram or follow us on Facebook to see how Crowdholding is changing the way we impact businesses by co-creating with them.