Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

For many membership organisations, there are very good reasons for wanting forums on their own websites rather than using LinkedIn.

Some membership organisations have very successful vibrant online forums. Some other organisations I come across have spent a significant amount of money without any meaningful take up.

For a professional membership organisation the potential advantages of "owning the forum" are significant:

• it provides a membership benefit
• it drives the web traffic to your website rather than to LinkedIn
• it gives you the opportunity to cross-sell (books on this topic, events on this topic, etc)
• it gives you material you can use for your website
  • at the simple end of the spectrum it can be latest posts
  • at the more complex end it can lead to new content for the website - summaries of discussions for example

A really good example of a successful vibrant forum is the Chartered Society for Physiotherapy. They have a significant proportion of their membership subscribing to a wide range of communities of interest across their clinical areas.

Another organisation I know of (but probably shouldn’t name) spent six months and a considerable amount of money on forum functionality on their website … which 18 months later is used for only one or two posts per month.

The key issue is that to get successful forums, you need to facilitate them and this probably means having a full time facilitator whose job it is to engage and connect community members by encouraging participation, facilitating and seeding discussions.

We held a seminar on online communities last autumn (the slides are available).

One of the speakers at our seminar and UK experts in this area is Steve Dale. Steve is the architect of the Local Government Communities of Practice initiative which has over 96,000 members across more than 1,500 communities. A recent blog post of Steve's discussed some of the issues around facilitation and success factors.

One of the key points Steve makes is that your own community is likely to be more trusted than an open community because the participants are all members (or potentially members and interested non-members who have registered with your website).

This blog post has been prompted by an interesting discussion on MemberWise ... actually on MemberWise's LinkedIn forum. This draws an interesting distinction - that LinkedIn works really well for MemberWise and is absolutely right for them. LinkedIn is a free resource and MemberWise has no budget for IT or for facilitation (other than the founder, Richard Gott's free time).

My conclusion is that onsite membership forums can be very successful and an important element in a membership association's business, but the investment has to be carefully targeted and managed - on facilitation as much as on IT.