Open Community is your people
I'm pleased to post this guest post from Maddie Grant & Lindy Dreyer on their new book Open Community (we're honored to be the first post on the tour!). Be sure to follow the tour as it heads to a lot of the really great blogs we're lucky enough to have in the association space.
Acronym is the first stop on the virtual book tour Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer are doing to explore concepts from Open Community: a little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web. This post is Lindy's take on the open community concept and why it's important.
For association executives, community is old hat. It's what we do. It's central to our work. And yet, for some reason (actually a lot of reasons) what we know about community isn't always translating well to building community online. Maddie and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web--from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff and members, to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that's just the beginning. It's easy to get bogged down in the newness and the detail, and miss the bigger picture--not the 10,000-foot bigger picture, but the "just high enough to make practical sense" bigger picture.
So we started writing the book, and the idea that kept popping up is the concept of open community. We added the definition of open community on Associapedia, but here's the gist. Your open community is your people who are bonded by what your organization represents and care enough to talk to each other (hopefully about you!) online.
To be clear, the open community concept is not about building an online community platform or internal, private social network. That could be one tactic in your arsenal, but one of the most important first steps toward building community online is accepting that your open community is out there, not just on your website. Your stakeholders are connecting on their own terms in the social spaces where they spend the most time, and you need to be where they are. Sometimes, rather than hosting every conversation and leading every initiative, your organization can (and should) simply be present as a supportive participant.
It's really important that your association figures out how to connect with and support your open community, because if you don't, someone else will. I know that's not news to you Acronym readers, but it bears repeating. And repeating. And repeating, again.
How is your association building community online? What's your strategy for connecting with and supporting your open community? Is it working?
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