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(This is the second part of a two-part interview with Jennifer Ragan-Fore, director of new media and member communities at ISTE. Part I of our interview is here.)

Have you had any situations where an early, prominent volunteer who was instrumental in bringing a community together is now transitioning out of that community?

Interestingly enough, we’re in the middle of doing that right now. It’s someone who’s been instrumental, both in helping us set up our volunteer programs and also in some of our professional development sessions that we’ve offered in our Second Life community. He’s an early adopter, and he’s ready to move on to some other technologies—which doesn’t mean that he won’t continue to be involved with ISTE, but he’s just ready to move on to other opportunities.

I think that’s one of those things that sometimes makes people very nervous, but you just have to be cognizant going in that part of the opportunity in being able to offer these kinds of informal volunteer roles means that people are going to drop in and drop out. It’s not as tidy as, say, being in a professional interest section, where we say, “Your term is a year and then you can re-up at the end of that year.” You may have a volunteer say (at a very unfortunate time), “You know, I need to step back from this, because this is going on in my life.” You have to be aware of that and have some plans in place for it.

That’s part of the beauty of being able to offer these opportunities, though: People understand that they can sign on for a short period of time and then go do something else that interests them, and they don’t feel like they’re letting anyone down. It’s much easier to get a potential volunteer involved these days if they don’t feel like they’re signing over the next three years of their lives in order to commit.

Are you doing anything with the early adopters as they move out?

We try to give them different and new opportunities, not always with the same tool or community. We’ve had a strong group within Second Life, and it’s opened up so many opportunities there that we could juggle [early adopters] around if they were still interested in Second Life as a tool. This is the first time we’re coming to the point where people are saying “OK, what else is out there?” So we’re trying to find different ways to engage these volunteers.

One of the things we’ve just done internally is to form a social media steering committee that has representation from all the different departments within our organization, and then a larger stakeholder group that meets a little bit less regularly but is even more broadly based. We’re going to be adding members into those groups, to give us some added perspective, and it will be some of these first-mover, early adopters who can help us really strategize. What are the tools our members are using? What are the things we should be adopting? I think there are many leadership roles they can play.

Is there anything we haven’t discussed that has been critical to ISTE’s success with building member communities?

I think the biggest thing has been the volunteer piece. If you’re successful in using any of these Web 2.0, social media tools, you have to have a base of members who are actively engaged and feel ownership—people who can be your evangelists and who can put in the hours that are going to be required to jump-start the community. You have to create engagement opportunities. You can’t just set up a tool and hope that the community is going to know what to do with that tool. You have to have some people who are willing to put some skin in the game.

Any success we’ve had with this has really been about the core group of volunteers who have been willing to not just help us staff it and improve it and think about what else we should be doing, but also who will go out there and talk about it and be very authentic about why it’s a good thing. I think if you have the organization saying “This is a cool tool you should be using,” and you don’t have that group of really delighted members who are out there saying it themselves, it’s hard to gain traction and momentum.

I think that’s the biggest thing: Start with the members, continue with the members, finish with the members. It starts with having that core group of people who are so excited about it that you don’t even have to do marketing for it. It’s them out there getting their networks excited about it. And then you can pick those threads up when it becomes a little bit more mainstream and your marketing message already has really great results built in.

(If you’re interested in more of Jennifer’s thoughts on building member communities, she has a great slide deck available on Slideshare. She'll also be speaking at the ASAE & The Center Annual Meeting this August on volunteerism and Web 2.0.)