Benchmarking your community app using a Maturity Model
What is a community app maturity model?
A maturity model is a way to think through the level of maturity of a system or process in your organisation. You might have applied a customer experience maturity model to assess your organisation’s effectiveness in delivering a great customer experience and providing a roadmap for areas of improvement. The same approach can be applied to your community app or communications app.
Why is a community app maturity model important?
You have implemented your community app to assist with communications, community management and building a better community. To maximise the investment you have made from a time and cost perspective, you want to ensure it is effective. The reality though is you can’t do everything at once and sometimes it’s hard to know what next steps you need to take. As a leader of a community you want to ensure your use of your community app is optimised but it can be hard to know whether the use of your app is working as it should. We see lots of communities in action and have built out this maturity model based on what makes a community thrive. It’s designed to be a navigation tool to help you figure out where you are on your journey to maturity. This model is not for every community and your community may have very specific needs that mean it’s not necessary to mature through all of the stages or only for certain elements. At the very least, it would prompt you to reflect about where you are, compared to other communities and what your next steps might be to advance areas that are most important to your community.
Once you have identified which stage you are at, you can use our tips below to work out how to move to the next stage of maturity. If you are not convinced of the need to mature, then we provide some reasons why you might consider it. We have also included planning steps you can take for each area of maturing your community.
There are six areas to assess your community app maturity model stage: contribution, governance, engagement, metrics, revenues and integrations. Each area helps contribute towards the development of a thriving community through the use of a community app.
1) Contribution
This is about the number of users involved in contributing content and using the platform to manage and run the community.
Why do it?
Increasing the number of people contributing content and taking responsibility for different parts of community management helps you in a number of ways.
It shares the load. You don’t need to be doing everything.
It encourages ownership and community building. People feel valued when they have a chance to contribute.
How do I do it?
Progressively involve more people in creating content. For example, if you are running an event, ask for a couple of volunteers to take photos and upload them into the app or to write a brief news post about what residents got up to during the event. It could be as simple as a one sentence description. They could even do it while the event is taking place. It only needs to take a couple of minutes.
Have a chat to the social committee or residents committee about contributing events and important resident news. Change user types for certain users to be power users. This way they can create content from within the app and it’s work flowed through to a staff member for approval.
Provide some training for residents and members on how they can create and contribute content. During an event, encourage everyone to get out their phone and take a photo and upload it into an event folder you have set up.
Consider adding a second news channel that could specifically be resident driven content related to buying, selling or swapping second hand goods.
Planning steps
What level of contribution maturity are you aiming for?
Who are you going to ask to contribute?
What are you going to get them to do?
How do you know when you have been successful?
2) Governance
Governance is about the rules and guidelines that shape the norms and values of your community. It’s a way of reinforcing those norms and helping people feel safe and valued.
Why improve it?
To create a thriving community, your members need to feel safe, know what it means to belong and how they can interact in the community. Good governance provides the framework that sets the norms for participation and shared values. If you improve your governance you get the following outcomes.
Members feel safe and supported.
Less complaints.
Higher member satisfaction.
A framework for enforcing rules if things do go wrong and you need to address concerns or inappropriate behaviour.
How do I do it?
Use our guide for building out a code of conduct to create your own.
Educate your residents or members on what the code of conduct is, where they can find it within the app and how it is enforced.
Educate your members on how to flag inappropriate content or block users. Also let them know what steps they can take if they need to complain.
Encourage regular reviews of the code of conduct at resident meetings and talk with residents about what steps can be taken to continue to encourage adherence to the code of conduct.
Planning steps
What level of governance maturity are you aiming for?
What are the three next steps you need to take to mature in this area?
When are you going to have these steps completed?
How do you know when you have been successful?
3) Engagement
Engagement is about the level of participation of your residents and members in the content and features of your community app for the purposes of community life and building a thriving community.
Why increase it?
The benefits of engagement are similar to contribution in that they help increase the sense of community amongst your residents and members. It also encourages a sense of belonging and ownership of the community. A high level of engagement gives you:
Stronger advocates amongst your community that encourage others to join. This means your residents and members are talking about your community positively. That can lead to higher net promoter scores and increased customer experience metrics if those scores are relevant to your community.
A community that is thriving. Your residents and members will be looking out for each other and making sure everyone feels like they belong. Your members will feel proud of your community and they will treat it with respect and like they own it.
How do I do it?
Use community engagement posts, like the conversation starters to encourage residents and members to comment with their responses. This increases the depth of relationships. To help this along, take the time at an activity or event to show members or residents how to add their answer through comments.
Use the event booking feature to have your community book into events. It helps show the community is active and increases event participation.
Keep your content fresh and up to date.
Use the notifications system to be regularly engaging your community about important information and what’s going on.
Use a content calendar to plan out your content for the month. This makes it a lot easier to have lots of content.
Involve your community in creating content to ensure there is lots of content that is engaging.
Use the survey and live poll tools to get ideas and feedback from your community. It helps them know you value their opinions.
Encourage members to be setting up social and activity groups through the app. Get the social committee and residents committee to lead the way.
Planning steps
What level of engagement maturity are you aiming for?
What are the three next steps you need to take to mature in this area?
When are you going to have these steps completed?
How do you know when you have been successful?
4) Metrics
Metrics are the points of information available to you for the purposes of tracking and measuring the performance of the community.
Why measure it?
The community manager portal has lots of tools to help you understand what is going on in your community. But it’s easy to ignore them and just keep doing what you have always been doing regardless of the results. Here are some reasons why you should pay attention to the analytics.
In setting goals for your community you will want to measure the success of achieving those goals. The more you measure, the more likely you are to improve the sense of community amongst your residents.
Using the analytics in your monthly reporting demonstrates your commitment to building a thriving community and improving satisfaction levels amongst residents and members.
The analytics can give you insights into where you need to improve and which features are of most importance to your members. If you have set goals to increase engagement but you are not reviewing the volume of commenting or the responses to alerts, then your efforts are not being maximised.
Reviewing your metrics gives you a sense of how the community is functioning and whether there are any changes in sentiment or participation. You can find early warning signs that your sense of community is in decline.
How do I do it?
Plan out what metrics you want to track and why. This works best if you are connecting your metrics to your goals for the community.
Increase user participation by reviewing the number of users who have logged in for the first time. This gives you a list of users to follow up to see if they are having any issues with getting setup up. You could increase community participation just by sending a follow up email to the residents or members who have not set up their profile yet and making the community aware that you are aiming to increase participation from 60% to 80% over the next month.
Review the number of people booking into events vs the number of people attending the event. The more you get people to use the event booking and payments system, the less event management your staff need to do.
Track the number of posts and whether the level of engagement is changing over time. Note the volume of commenting over the months. If it’s trending down, consider a general encouragement to community members to continue to engage with each other.
Planning steps
What level of metric maturity are you aiming for?
What are the three next steps you need to take to mature in this area?
When are you going to have these steps completed?
How do you know when you have been successful?
5) Revenue
Revenue is the income that is possible to be generated in the community through your community app. It can be through direct means using specific features in the app, through integrations or through links to other sites.
Why generate revenues?
It almost sounds like a silly question but in many communities, we can feel like we can’t be making money off the members. There are other ways to think about revenues that can benefit the members.
Charging for events helps to cover the cost of running the events in the first place and makes the event much easier to administer, saving staff hours of time every week.
Funds raised can go back into covering special events and towards special projects that residents and members feel are important for the community.
Generating additional revenues through the app can help contribute to your bottom line and make the community more sustainable.
You can drive fundraising for causes and charities that are important to the community.
You can provide a mechanism for cross selling and promotion of services that might be important and useful to your members.
How do I do it?
Use the event payments tool to enable residents and members to book into and pay for event participation.
List services your organisation offers in the app and encourage members to book through the app.
Speak to local businesses about having their products or services listed in the app through the offers feature and charge those businesses a small monthly fee to be the exclusive listing for that type of business.
Add sponsors into the app as another way to demonstrate their value.
Planning steps
What level of revenue maturity are you aiming for?
What are the three next steps you need to take to mature in this area?
When are you going to have these steps completed?
How do you know when you have been successful?
6) Integrated
Integrations are other systems and platforms that help you run your community and are important to your residents and members that you know will improve your resident, member and staff experience if you integrate them with your community app.
Why integrate your systems?
If you are aiming to drive a better resident and member experience then you are very conscious of reducing pain points. One of those is about bringing everything into one place and centralising your communications. You potentially have lots of systems in your organisation that have information you want to share with your community and that your community wants to access. Contact the Pluss team about integrating your systems.
How to do it?
Develop a list of systems you would like to integrate with your community app and prioritise. Consider what can be done quickly and cost effectively, that delivers an improvement in your resident and member experience.
Map out what will be done when. Not everything needs to be done at once.
Contact Pluss for what system integrations have already been completed. We have a roadmap for integrations that could influence the timing of your own roadmap.
Planning steps
What level of integrated maturity are you aiming for?
What are the three next steps you need to take to mature in this area?
When are you going to have these steps completed?
How do you know when you have been successful?