Community culture is the shared set of beliefs, values, expectations, objectives and rituals that influence the way in which your participants interact with each other and collaborate to achieve common goals.
It’s important that your community members understand why they are taking part in your challenge. It may be obvious to you, but once the excitement of joining something new wanes, participants will need reminding of the bigger picture. With this in mind, it’s important to make the purpose clear at the top of your platform, whether that’s “you are part of a community building a smarter and low-carbon transport system in Kuala Lumpur” or “this community is dedicated to finding the best conservation projects for New Zealand”.
While you can't dictate how you want your community to look and work, you can certainly encourage habits and lead by example. Where a large sum of money is attached as a challenge prize, a competitive culture is likely to arise, although you can reduce this by ensuring the prize money covers the project costs only.
It’s important to remind members of the challenge guidelines periodically and when moderating, including what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
Beliefs
It’s a good idea to share a short statement with your community about your beliefs when it comes to collaboration and the challenge process. You could say something along the lines of: “when we work together, and use common tools to collaborate, ideas for change become stronger and are more likely to be implemented.”
You could also explain your belief alongside some constructive feedback, giving examples of helpful advice and questions posed within the community.
Values
There are a few ways to share the values of the community: perhaps write a list of values and post it up on a separate page in your challenge space, add it to your FAQs or even crowdsource them as a starting activity with early members (of course, this depends on how much time you can spare).
If you choose to publish a page listing the platform values, you’ll have a point of reference to which you can direct disruptive members. Remember not to make the list too restrictive, though – it could be something as simple the following:
These points sum up the spirit in which we take actions in this community:
With open mindedness
With transparency
With a collaborative mindset
With respect
With encouragement
Expectations
It’s important for the community to know what’s expected of them. Many people are burdened from information overload in their day-to-day lives, so we shouldn't assume that everyone who signs up will immediately understand what they can do to help.
It’s a good idea to offer members a helpful reminder about which role they can play (you can use standard emails to support this), such as:
Submit an idea
Offer advice and/or feedback to an idea or team
Join a team
Offer help or resources
Share useful information or links
Connect members with each other or your network
You might want to assign role names to this list and allocate “badges” to members accordingly. Many platforms will allow you to create your own badges, but if yours doesn't, you can edit user-profile photos to add a title or use the Mozilla Openbadges scheme; with this, you can create “mentor”, “innovator”, “supporter” badges, and so on. This allows members to record and display skills and achievements in a digital way and, in some cases, can act as an incentive to participate. We’ve found that badges are particularly attractive to students, as they can add these to their LinkedIn profiles or résumés.
Remember, it’s best never to push participants through negativity; instead, try to use words of support along with reminders of what happens if a phase passes or a milestone is not met. You want participants to take responsibility for their idea, but if they’re only responding because you’re pushing them, you may find they aren’t willing to turn it into a real project later down the line.
Objectives
You have seen it mentioned a few times that a challenge is more effective the second or third time you run it because you will spend less time on attracting people to join as you are starting with a group of interested members. To keep this community interested and stick around it is helpful to make the objectives clear. Asking a community to just share and collaborate may not be enough of a motivation.
What are the common objectives the community shares? Highlight these objectives and make them visible.
For example:
What we are working towards together
Objective 1: Implementing low carbon travel solutions in Kuala Lumpur
Objective 2: Reducing carbon emissions in Malaysia
Objective 3: Identifying and developing entrepreneurial climate solutions
Read more about Community management here
Rituals
These will include the actions your community members regularly take. The moderator will often lead as a guide here, but instead of offering to do everything for your members, you should try to empower them.
If necessary, create helpful templates that make it easier for them to build a certain habit. For example, if you want members to share news about the challenge or a new idea, offer a sample tweet or Facebook message. You could also write a blog on what types of questions can be helpful to ask an idea-submitter – you could take some questions from the Business Model Canvas as an example – as it will encourage constructive questioning among members.
Ideally, you want members to:
read and comment on each other’s ideas and blog posts;
share their best practices and success stories;
and ask for help and offer support.
You can recruit challenge champions or buddies to help the community manager promote this behaviour. It’s also a good idea to send reminders to the community about how they can be helpful to each other beyond voting and sharing generic messages like “great idea”, by including examples of insightful questions they could ask.
