Webinar: Building an Online Community

Date: September 28, 2011
Speaker:
Alexandra Bornkessel (ODPHP) - discussing how to develop a community, meet the needs of your audience, and measure success along the way.
If you have questions regarding this webinar or the HHS Center for New Media Webinar series, email newmedia@hhs.gov.
Transcript

For anybody who's joined a so far, this is Nick for the Center for New Media. We are going to wait a couple minutes for others to join. Just hang tight and we will get started soon. Thanks. 

This is me. It seems like we have a good amount of people onto we are going to start and first of all, thank you for joining today's webinar. It is on how to build an online community and I'm going to hand it over to Alexandra Bornkessel and she will introduce yourself and start a presentation. Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoy the presentation. 

Alexandra, I'm handing it over to you now. 

Hello, everyone. My name is Alexandra Bornkessel. Today are presenting on behalf of the office of disease prevention and health promotion about how to build an online community. They are going to be the different elements that help create a successful online community but the goal been provided with a few takeaways and tangible action items that you can start applying towards your own work. 

So on the menu today we will digest the following information and we will talk about how you define an online community. And how you plan and develop your community and then engage community members. Then we will touch upon how you measure progress and how you define success. Then of course, no recipe would be complete without knowing the secret ingredient so we will talk about that as well. 

Before we get into the meat of the presentation I wanted to review kind of the key takeaways. To better understand the importance of defining your goals and planning for success in getting consensus around that you will want to start potentially doing some research and asking the audience. You want to engage with their also in the portraits of it getting internal buying and writing and using content in being timely in your responses. And you what you want to underpinning and integrating the online community which are larger Communications plan. And also the importance of remembering to promote the community and how to put together kind of a growth strategy and that can include the collaborating internally and with partners. And as we go along, we will also realize that it is an ongoing learning process and the sooner that we embrace that the more success you will have in the long run. 

I'd like to start off with definitions because I think they help clarify expectations. So when starting the process of creating an online community that's a great first question to ask if someone approaches you and says I think we should have an online community. You can ask what you mean by that? What does that look like? Doing this can help -- and this is from the beginning versus trying to clarify or doing that the project because we note that is no fun. An online community is often fluid and can be developed in a number of ways using a variety of tools. For example, a listserv can easily develop into a online community as easily as a Facebook page or a meet up group. And in general, community whether online or off is a group of people growing ecosystem of people or organization who have shared interests and commonalities. You're challenge will be creating a community by identifying reaching and engaging stakeholders to participate in your group as well as developing the group to achieve a shared goal and outcome. 

So as I mentioned earlier, the main case study that I'm going to integrate into this presentation is the online community we will support the healthy people 2020 initiative using the link didn't platform. First provide some background, healthy people 2020 many of you have probably heard of it, but it is the nation's health promotion and disease prevention of agenda and was developed by HHS in partnership with other federal agencies with the broad crosscutting stakeholder input. For three decades, healthy people has provided a copy of the second national tenure health promotion and disease prevention objectives. Each decade the number of healthy people onto this has increased. But the people 1996 with 226 objectives and today, healthy people 2020 has nearly 600 objectives with 1200 measures. With healthy people 2020 we also see a number of new elements to the initiative for the first time ever, all the objectives and topics are listed online at the new healthy BP .-dot -- how the people.gov. The new website also includes a number of new content elements such as implementation strategies and evidence-based resources. 

But the new website and content, healthy people 2020 also utilizes webinars, events, e-mail marketing and social media. Currently our social media channels include Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. As we were developing healthy people 2020, putting together at the site and planning for our communication, we learned about a desire for increased community and collaboration amongst our stakeholders based on our formative research. This we conducted some additional research with two key hope the people stakeholder groups to understand what this all of community was that they were wanting. 

These two groups where the Healthy People Consortium and Healthy People state coordinators. An online community we know that as a minority of the group often develop and post the content, for us, this meant that for the group to flourish we need are most engaged stakeholders, people who are already aware and already involved in initiatives to buy in and be active participants. 

The research in this group was participate and welcome an online community because they had a desire to connect and collaborate. About implementing Healthy People in addition are researched show many were already using LinkedIn and interested in using it to connect with others working on implementing health -- Healthy People. We also chose LinkedIn as our platform choice based on the longevity and recognition given that it is been around since 2003 and has over 100 million registered users. Around the time we were doing our research and planning for the group [Indiscernible] 2010, LinkedIn also updated its group which enabled increased functionality for a low hello eat. But also look into creating a custom community or other out of the box platforms, however, given our limited resources and that are sequels are already interested in using LinkedIn, there was an -- it was an easy choice. We often get asked if we consider Facebook at the time, face the group was not limited -- in addition research showed our stakeholders use Facebook for more personal reasons and not necessarily professional reasons. So that we also recognize the importance of building community through face-to-face interaction. Many of the people that implement Healthy People have limited resources which is another reason an online community was attractive, but we are in the works are planning to meet up around the time of the Healthy People conference next year for online communities to actually come together and meet each other and person. And when our team actually goes out and does different presentations of different events we will try to attend a different meet ups and trade ups and invite our community members to as well so we can meet them in person and get their feedback and insight and how we are doing. 

What this means for you listening is that it is important to clarify what you mean by a online community and to determine your goal. We will want to do your research and get input from the audience and what they need and what goals they are looking to achieve. Of course, we all know budget and resource limitations which includes staffing and your staff time and availability. For instance, we looked into LinkedIn version of professional groups and future resources decided to use the free group option instead. You'll also want to build consensus within your organization and get buy-in from leadership and from your staff and this might mean that you need some added education and training to get everyone on board. Not just brought into the group but brought into being active participants and members of the group themselves. 

It might be very tempting to start thinking we need a link group now as well and before going there, or even saying they support me now for different tools, I'd recommend first set out your requirements could what functionality does your group need to? Do you need conferencing? Do need to be able to be no them? Or video? Once you determine this then you can see what technology solutions is right for you. And performance metrics we will get into that later but you'll want to determine your metrics that the best and how you'll measure them and if you can measure them. 

Going back to our case study, once we identified our goal, talk with the community and sent into LinkedIn it was time to develop the group could we watch the group at the conference in November 2010 a month before Healthy People 2020 was launched. We invited key stakeholders to join the group and sent to solicit invite to attendees. We did this because on the date of the big launch, we didn't want people to join the group and find [Indiscernible] we wanted them to join and immediately find people they could connect with and discussions they could comment on and learn from. So come time for the launch we had sent out a couple of you blessed and promoted the LinkedIn at the live launch event. So from November to December we saw an official spike at about 200 members and today we have about 2000. 

So when developing any online community you will want to consider size and components. When it comes to branding you will want to investigate all the different groups settings and customize them to work for you. This includes any images and design features. And as we know, you cannot have a good community without having it will staff and have operations. Every online community should have at least one dedicated community manager. For Arlington group we have one main community manager with a team of 46 people on a given week watching and participating in the group. You'll also want to determine your engagement guidelines and your comment policy for your community managers and other team members know how to respond and what the pro- pig versus not. And the comments to monitor based on a consistent policy. You'll also want to consider moderation process and decide who has the ability to approve comments and discussion post and who has the authority to approve membership and make the judgment calls. You'll also want to consider content development and this includes both content planning and your content approval process. You want some flexibility because as we know, new events happen and things change so you probably won't want to plan out an exact year worth of content, but you'll want to at least know what types of content and what content sources meet your general approval and that will help make your content process a bit smoother. 

When it comes to outreach and promotion, he will want to see if you're online community has a URL that you can direct people to. This was kind of a slight lesson learned for us, LinkedIn doesn't provide URLs to its groups so we have to create a link that when it is short and shows its LinkedIn so that was a slight limitation, but it works still just as fine. But it is key when you are doing your outreach and promotion. You'll also want to consider where, when and how to launch your community as well as put in place and on going promotion plan for growth strategy and the last bullet, I'm sure, most of you know quite well which is the compliance and the [Indiscernible] is a wealth of resource providing guidance on current policies and engagement guidelines. Archival needs, but online communities you also want to keep in mind 508 compliance and privacy as well. 

So how do you grow your group and grow participation? For our LinkedIn group we found many key public health leaders joined on their own. Such as the dean of the University of Maryland school of public health. We -- posting frequency to match the group level of participation as a way to introduce growth and engagement. We were planning on posting a discussion to the group every two weeks and because the group ended up being so active we found that we needed to increase that to at least once every week. 

We also found some additional engagement tactics to be helpful such as setting group rules, this includes any disclaimers, current policy, privacy policy, we also communicated our shared goal and purpose as part of the group's description. So when people read about our group and were thinking about joining, they knew what they were joining and the general goal of the group. We were to post engaging content. As of July 2011, nearly 100 discussions have been made to the group. 50% of those were initiated by the group's members versus us. With over 450 comments. Just a couple of examples on what I mean by this and I will get into that the next slide more, but in some and joined our group we actually have an introduction post. We encourage people to tell us what their background is, where they are from and what topic -- in Healthy People they look to implement and we've gotten over 150 comments on that thread and that's really helped us better understand the wide variety of people that are interested in implementing Healthy People and their backgrounds and kind of their needs and their individual goals so it helps us provide better content and value. 

We also have a discussion post about Twitter because we want to integrate our communication as much as possible. So people can post their Twitter account on our group and then we will follow them on Twitter as well. And we have a Twitter list and then another post we are about to put up is asking people if they have a blog and asking for their blog URL. We also work to be responsive and we can be responsive and a variety of ways. We could like the post being the way to be responsive meaning that when you're responding to a comic and it is and always have to be an actual textual type of response. It can be a like -- depending on your groups functionality. 

We also some members will post discussions that we find interesting ourselves and so we will make those they featured discussion as well. And part of what makes an online community successful, I mentioned earlier doing the internal buy-in and when you want to respond it is good to have people from your organization actively involved so far multiple community managers and participants are all responding and that shows a genuine engagement in the group and in the Healthy People mission. He asked members for feedback. A great example of this was a couple months ago we noticed we got four different job opportunities and announcements submitted and posted to the group and this wasn't initially in our set of approved content. But there was no necessarily definitive reason not to have those in the group. So we thought let's ask the members if they think this would be helpful or if there would -- or if it would be distracting and we got over 40 comments and overwhelmingly, everyone wanted to post job announcements posted to the group and some people even brainstormed and maybe we should have a subgroup about how you get a great public health career. Maybe that should be a whole different group. But in general, most people were open for jobs and also wanted them to monitor so that [Indiscernible] announcements weren't posted. 

Before group has a job cap so we activated that tab and any job announcements that get posted we could mark them to be listed underneath that tab. We also work distinct mutation and that helps with the help we. For example, when someone joins the group they automatically get a welcome e-mail and the welcome e-mail automatically has linked to the introduction post. So they don't just join and never hear from us again. They join and they immediately asked to participate with a link to do so. 

So I mentioned that in writing engaging content is critical to your success. That's why I should these 10 tips and ideas with you. You can utilize the like button with LinkedIn becoming discussions and we can link people's comments so we often do that as a way of recognizing people contribution to the group. The easiest way to engage people is just thinking them. Thank you for your comment, thank you for your suggestion, thank you for sharing this resource. It might seem kind of trivial, but just recognizing that people have contributed really goes a long way and I touched on already, how you can ask for feedback. You can also ask specific questions. You can ask a yes or no question such as yes, no fiscal laxity is easy to promote. And anyone who is then that would probably say no and then elaborate on why. But the yes, no it is an easier asked to respond within a yes or no and potentially elaborate on that. First is asking open ended questions and someone has to really think about what how to put together a response. This is same for the true false questions and he fell in the blank post. You can easily say Bill and the blank, X is our biggest opportunity here. Our biggest challenge is fill in the blank. And it is just an easier prompt in the open ended question. Timely questions and I'm going a little out of order so I apologize for that, we try to tidy news events and research has discovered -- you can also ask questions and -- but I just mean kind of like the example I just gave yes, no, physical activity is easy to promote. Which like I said, is not necessarily the case so it is kind of been more edgy and kind of treating your title of your discussion post like a headline. To get attention. Some of you can also ask about preferences. Do you prefer working out with their friends or do you prefer working out with your family and you are giving people an option on which choice to choose and their response which makes it easier for them. To actually respond. 

Said going back to our case study could we mentioned earlier that important to measure progress and four Arlette -- ours before group initial goal of having 1500 members by the end of 2011 and as you can see it reach that goal with six months early which was a nice surprise. So this was largely achieved without any added promotion. In August 2011 we did post an e-mail to the HHS media listserv which some of you might have seen to help us promote the group and thank you for those that have done so. And even two or three weeks after that we continue to see added growth and we are actually just a couple members short of the 2000 mark which is really interesting. 

For comparison, the White House has a link in group and they have a subgroup named health care and that group has about 3200 members and CDC national prevention information network has a LinkedIn group with about 570 members in both of those have been around longer than our LinkedIn group. 

Search elaborate more in how to measure a progress in general, we used the framework of exposure engagement, influence and action. And exposure is another word for reach. Use them synonymously. Engagement is any way that someone has engaged such as posting a comment or if they like one of the post is you are looking at Twitter can be a favorite data like that. Influence is looking at how the different members are influencing each other kind of in regards to [Indiscernible]. An action is that people are taking the desired action in general but you are looking for out of your community. 

So even though the last slide talked about exposure and reach and a number of members, our actual goal is around engagement. You're initially launch the group as a credit to see people would actually use it to connect and collaborate since that was the main meat of our stakeholders. We already knew people knew about Healthy People and were implementing it and we wanted to meet the need to help them be able to implemented even more. So after launching the group we did see increased engagement because this was the first time the stakeholders have a place where they could connect and discuss and lamenting Healthy People and an open and ongoing form. One of our biggest moments of success came from two of our members meeting the other group and they both resided in Minnesota and there was an event happening there that one didn't know about. The one person learned about the event to our group because we -- the other member posted about it. The member ended up attending the event and met up with another member colleague and they were all able to discuss their Healthy People topic areas and how they can apply that to Minnesota and improve certain public health issues there. And following up from that, someone even suggested a possible subgroup as part of our group solely for public health professionals in Minnesota working on Healthy People. So we are continually exploring the subgroup idea and which actually posted that to our group to get feedback on it. But just in general, that people are meeting virtually to the group and that coming to in person interaction that can lead to a no exchanges and new resources being found to help people address the health issue that they are working on is a huge success for us. Kind of words of advice I know our team offers up to look at both qualitative data and quantitative data to help measure your success. 

As I mentioned earlier, every recipe has a secret ingredient so I'm going to tell a little story that I swear has a point. My grandparents found in Mexican restaurant growing up as my great grandparents originate from Mexico and I would tell my grandma in the kitchen and learn how to make her Mexican soup. She's known for her guacamole, her it is a lot is, -- in July does is make amazing food. IPAWS because the mouth is watering. She's mostly known for its a lot is mainly due to her Malay sauce and it is a recipe that her mom taught her whose mother taught her. It is been passed to the family so you can imagine my excitement that mnemic Remicade species to choose going to teach me the secret family sauce recipe. So went in anticipation looking to learn it and she shall make a secret ingredient and the secret ingredient is the same ingredient that will help make your own community Fleur -ish. And that is love and it is my grandma is actually in this picture here. Holding the love sign. But when someone makes you dinner you can tell if it is made with love for its been sloshed together at lease I know I can. The thing -- your community can tell you a few action share their passion and motivation or at least recognize them -- the group's goals and mission. And they can also tell if you want to be there and if you want to be an active participant. The way to successfully show your group that all three of those points are true is to add a little love and to -- to people in the group how you connect with them just showing how you're passionate about the mission at hand. That you believe in the purpose that it has and that you are authentic and your communication and this means you can be human. We have our limitations as humans so some of us might not want to admit them but it is okay to admit you may not -- might not know something or you want them to verify what they are trying to communicate or that you will get in touch with someone and follow up shortly. You don't always have to have all the answers right on the spot. You can be authentic and be human. Someone shares a great achievement, our wonderful resource you can say depending, thank you for that great resource, I'm really going to use that. Stuff like that when you're looking to build your online community. 

We also have additional online communities could we have a Healthy People Twitter community which has more of a consumer facing focus but we have a Twitter community which will also be having this Facebook entity coming soon and we also have the be active you way that focuses on promoting physical activity. Each of these kind of has their own different goals, different audiences, but some of the best practices that we've been talking about we still apply. So I just want to leverage a little bit on our team and connect the process we use. We feel strongly providing good customer service so we have the national health information Center which is are in query response kind of call center element to the organization. So we work with them often and are great resource. They provide customer support through e-mail, phone and fax and so it is a very easy extension to work as a team and provide that same level of customer service through social media including our LinkedIn group could we also work in collaboration with our content team to ensure the content stays accurate and actionable. And we have subject matter experts review content and responses if need be so it is kind of a three-pronged team that has the foundation that we use to manage all of our communities. 

So in review, the eight key ingredients to build a successful online community includes having defined goals, getting audience feedback and doing some research if need be. Working to get the internal buy-in from your leadership and from your staff. Deciding how you're going to manage your community. Planning your ongoing promotion and growth strategies and determine how you're going to measure success and evaluating that on an ongoing basis. Providing top-tier customer service and also realizing that you have to be a little bit flexible. I know sometimes things aren't totally black and white and we have to be a little bit agile to be able to respond and provide value to customers. And then if you. A little love on all of that, then you will have plentiful success in your online community. And be able to serve many. 

So I'm happy to take your questions. If we don't have time for questions, feel free to reach me at the e-mail address is shown or ping me on Twitter. Timber is also involved heavily in this online community as well and if you have questions about Healthy People or certain details you can also contact her. And if you'd like you can also share on Twitter, on Facebook but you just learned the eighth ingredients to successful online community. So Nick, I think that's a wrap unless people have questions. 

Yeah. Thank you so much. That was really good presentation. Look at the bit about love. I think it is so true when it comes to an engagement that you have to be passionate about what you are doing. And for anybody who is on the web and are right now, you can type the question in the question section of the GoToMeeting. We have a couple so far for you, Alex, -- is you on that -- required assuming your username and password in order to participate in discussions or post comments. Thank you know. Our only committed to does require that someone be a member on LinkedIn, but other than that there is no added username or password. And they are LinkedIn account is something they handle with LinkedIn, we just have our group. 

Okay, the next one is you might have mentioned this before what is KPI and how is action measured? 

KPI stands for key performance indicator. So those are kind of the key data points that you would look at to see if your successful and using that framework of exposure, engagement and influence and action. Action is going to differ depending upon your goals. And you're also going to have to differentiate between what you define as an engagement measure versus what you define as an action measure because those might differ for different people. For action for us for our LinkedIn group, and kind of as a whole, we kind of tie everything up and look at it as a whole. Selections for us that most advanced ideal action at the moment is if someone joins the Healthy People Consortium and that's kind of people that are already know about Healthy People and are already involved or get involved and often organization that are part of that consortium and then making the pledge to publicly to support Healthy People within their organization and their community. For us, that's a huge action because that's a group, the group that we can leverage and actually implement all being -- Healthy People 2020 on the ground. 

Okay, the next one comes from Oren. It is about the upcoming Facebook page, what content messages and discussion do you like to focus on with the upcoming Facebook page that you mentioned? 

The Facebook community is gorgeous or the help finder.gov mission which is as a mention has more of a consumer focus. Which is another reason why we ended up going with Facebook and we went through this process again of looking at who we want to reach and who are our stakeholders and what kind of information is valuable and what our others doing already and learn from them. But to go through all that straight to what we are going to be doing, it is not quite associated with Healthy People. It will be integrated, but not directly a Healthy People thing. It'll be focusing on prevention and wellness just like help finder does and are Twitter community does and we are going to be watching it around January with healthy resolutions. Again, it is going to be a six-week pilot where we post health challenges utilizing on Facebook you can have multimedia videos, photos, you can have asked for people to interact with you a little bit more easily and there's often more social support. People's friends on there and families are on there and they both play a huge role and being healthy and being active and eating well. The content focuses all in prevention and mainly eating healthy and being active and kind of posting different challenges and inviting people to do those each day or week. Some of the details are still in flex. I'm letting us know they can please them on Facebook as well. 

Okay. I have a question but before I say that I don't the people can copy the message from Twitter that you mentioned in the last slide so for anybody who's on the GoToMeeting, you can copy it from the question section if you want to tweak that out. To your followers could my question is in two parts. One is you showed us a graph that showed you reached 1500 people six bus before you expect it to. How did you change the way you engage with people to meet the expectations and the amount to engagement that you were getting. Did you expect to hit that much so early and how did you adjust to make sure that you are engaging with everybody on the platform was reaching out to you? 

Yeah, we weren't completely sure of what to expect. We did all the planning that we could do. We talk to other people that had groups, and different online communities on different platforms, but with LinkedIn specifically, we weren't quite sure what to expect because there's not a lot of government groups to start with on LinkedIn. There's only a few handful of public health groups on LinkedIn and not all of them were up to date or had a committed team manager or some of them are kind of maybe not official. We kind of a I guess set the bar at a realistic level and the response was just really a reflection of confirming the research we found that people wanted to connect and collaborate. We have a couple members on their they had never been able to talk to people about Healthy People that would really get what they were trying to do and tie it in and how to get people into what they were doing. We've all spent able to communicate number of different ways to actually implement Healthy People because there had never really been that focus on implementation. It was just Manly here's the objective. So that's been really interesting. 

Some ways that we've changed what we've done is I said we planned to post a discussion once every two weeks. Now we do at least 1A week, if not weeks we do have to a week. We also have got more people involved at ODPHP so we actually have two different people at ODPHP that consistently post discussion and comments and engage with the group. Then we have a few more people that come in every once in a while if they wear a certain hat under Healthy People to also participate in a group and respond to different questions. 

Have you changed your goals. You've already reached that 1500 Mark, have you sort of looked at your KPI and where you see your Outlook in the future and changed the goal that you have in hand? 

Yeah. We've kind of increased our goals in terms of kind of upping our exposure metrics and some of our engagement metrics and since we saw an increase in that, I would say probably moving forward we're going to be looking more at the influence and action. We have posted about the Consortium before and members of both the Consortium and the LinkedIn group have commented saying they are a member and we've had people comment saying I didn't even know the Consortium and exist. I've joined. So we kind I want to encourage that more and we are really looking forward to the Healthy People conference which will be in April and I will be in DC and being able to do more of the face-to-face community because for instance, we went to the CDC conference that was in Atlanta in August and one of our team members presented there and a few people went up to her and said I recommend your photo. And I'm a member. So we were able to talk with them and get feedback from them and then we also went to a tweet up for a conference but there were a number of the LinkedIn members at that is also we are able to get feedback from people. I would say those are some of the things we're looking forward to. 

Excellent. I think that's all we have for questions. I want to thank you again for participating today and presenting to us. If you could, everybody can see your you know information up there but if you can send that to the listserv and any other links you want to include, that would be great. And before I go I want to mention that the Center for New Media webinar series it happens once a month on the fourth Wednesday. Next month [Indiscernible] will be presenting on text for help. About two weeks we will have our monthly round-robin which will be on Wednesday, October 12, at 2 PM. So keep those dates in mind. Thank you again, Alexandra. 

No problem, thank you for the opportunity. 

Okay, thank you everyone for participating today.
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Webinar: Building an Online Community

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