Defining Your Community’s Purpose & Audience

Why do peo­ple inter­act online? Are these the same rea­sons for inter­act­ing face-to-face? These are two ques­tions I’ve been ask­ing myself while con­sid­er­ing a redesign of my social net­work­ing site, Sci­ence For Amer­ica. These are ques­tions you should con­sider before cre­at­ing your social net­work­ing space. By hav­ing a clear pur­pose that makes sense to you, the space designer, and the mem­bers, you can give your­self a head start in design­ing and run­ning a suc­cess­ful online inter­ac­tion space or community.

What I’m hop­ing to accom­plish with my social net­work is moti­vat­ing teach­ers to col­lab­o­rate online and share sci­ence teach­ing strate­gies. They are going to have to over­come time and tech­ni­cal bar­ri­ers to do this. I’m work­ing to demon­strate to poten­tial users how par­tic­i­pat­ing in the space will ben­e­fit them. Two of the best strate­gies to accom­plish this is defin­ing who exactly I’m going after, and what will be our community’s purpose.

How to Avoid an Online Ghost Town… Have a Well-Defined Purpose!

The pur­pose of your social net­work helps you decide both its struc­ture (what tools to use, how to apply them), and what resources (time, infor­ma­tion, and exper­tise) you will need to sup­port and facil­i­tate it.

To help you artic­u­late and clar­ify your pur­pose, you should ask your­self the fol­low­ing ques­tions (I’m cred­it­ing Full Cir­cle Asso­ciates for com­ing up with these):

• Does your com­mu­nity have a mis­sion or a vision that you can com­mu­ni­cate to poten­tial members?
• Are the ben­e­fits mea­sur­able and vis­i­ble to mem­bers and poten­tial members?
• Is the out­come deter­mined by the orga­nizer? Group mem­bers? Both?
• If the group is part of a larger orga­ni­za­tion, is it con­sis­tent with orga­ni­za­tional goals and culture?
• Is the group’s pur­pose some­thing that can only be done/accomplished online? Will it replace some­thing offline? Or is it some combination?

Pur­pose helps you artic­u­late your com­mu­nity story which helps attract and draw mem­bers in. It sus­tains inter­ac­tion. I’ve men­tioned the impor­tance of story in a pre­vi­ous post review­ing Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind.

As far as Sci­ence For Amer­ica goes, our pur­pose follows:

“To empower edu­ca­tors as teach­ers and learn­ers as they develop and imple­ment new themes, ideas, and cur­ricu­lum. Edu­ca­tors are given the oppor­tu­nity to learn and build net­works with lead­ers, experts and each other.”

I believe our pur­pose is artic­u­lated well in these two sen­tences. Our story is in our empow­ered mem­bers. Ideas to make this story stronger might be to include quotes from teach­ers who have used the web­site to make a dif­fer­ence in their class­room, or show a pic­ture of the net­work of teach­ers who have con­nected through the site.

Sight­ing in your Tar­get Audience

A tightly defined tar­get audi­ence will make it eas­ier when devel­op­ing con­tent for your site. You will be able to look at every­thing through a lens, ask­ing “Is this what my com­mu­nity mem­bers want?” While defin­ing the tar­get audi­ence for Sci­ence For Amer­ica, I found that defin­ing a sin­gle tar­get audi­ence was actu­ally impos­si­ble. Instead, I had to focus on two audi­ences– a group of expe­ri­enced sci­ence teach­ers (5 or more years in the class­room) and a group of inex­pe­ri­enced teach­ers ( 5 years or less in the classroom).

Here are some ques­tions to help guide you (from Full Cir­cle Asso­ciates, with some mod­i­fi­ca­tions by this author):

• How would you describe the website’s vis­i­tors? It may help to artic­u­late the dif­fer­ence between a vis­i­tor vs. participant.
• How moti­vated are your vis­i­tors to participate?
• What is “in it for them?”
• Do they have ade­quate com­puter equip­ment and Inter­net access to have a sat­is­fac­tory expe­ri­ence on your system?
• Do you tell them the min­i­mum require­ments up front?
• Do you want your com­mu­nity to be pub­lic or private?
• If pri­vate, what deter­mines eligibility?
• What is the ideal size for your group?
• Is there a limit to how many mem­bers can participate?
• Do you have a sense of how your com­mu­nity can expand if there is greater interest?
• Where might you find poten­tial participants?
• How might you com­mu­ni­cate with your par­tic­i­pants to mar­ket your online inter­ac­tion space? (If you build it, they may not come!)
• Are you build­ing from an exist­ing pool of par­tic­i­pants, or draw­ing in new people?

Of these, I believe the “What’s in it for me?” ques­tion should drive every­thing you do. Ulti­mately, all vis­i­tors, whether they are just pass­ing through or return­ing par­tic­i­pants, have come to your site with a pur­pose. Whether that pur­pose be to con­nect, or learn, or down­load or sub­mit con­tent (we’ll look at defin­ing WHAT your vis­i­tors do once they arrive at your site in a later post), the closer your site’s pur­pose is to their pur­pose, the more likely they are to become loyal participants.