I’ve been involved in online communities since I can remember, having grown up with an Ollivetti PC with AOL dial up; forums, messageboards and chat rooms were all we had until MSN really kicked off. Building an online community at the British Heart Foundation has been a huge challenge; the community “soft” launched today, please do visit the site and tell anyone you know that is interested in the BHF.
Here is my (rather long) experience…It would be great to hear your thoughts!
For as long as anyone can remember our supporters have been asking for a space online where they could meet other people and share experiences. That might be talking to others about their heart condition, or talking to a group of people who are trekking to China to raise vital funds for our work.
Two years ago we began a global navigation review of our website. This was a nine month project looking into our website, how people used the site and how they wanted to.
We ran lots of focus groups with every person imaginable; teachers, current users of our site, doctors, professors, people who take part in events and even people who hated going online and found out what made them tick and what they wanted or didn’t want from our website.
We put our users at the heart (excuse the pun) of our website and it paid off hugely. We now have a fantastic website that was developed in partnership with our audience with innovative features like our patient pathway (the strap across the front page from Prevention to recovery).
People wanted to connect
The feedback from the review told us in no uncertain terms that our supporters wanted to connect with people in similar situations. Similar sentiments were coming in from all areas; focus groups with our Health at Work practitioners were telling us they wanted to talk about delivering Health at Work with other practitioners online. Our eventers wanted to share tips and meet others going on treks or taking part in marathons online. Our Facebook audience was increasing at a phenomenal rate (from 20,000 12 months ago to 98,500 today) and they wanted to share their stories and how they were feeling and we wanted to build these relationships between our supporters and with us. People were even going away and starting their own forums but without the infrastructure or man power to deliver. We knew we had to step in.
A year ago we started in earnest to look at what a BHF online community would look like and how that would work for us. Like many large charities we have a lot of audiences and we also have a lot of data which we wanted to make sure was connected. Someone told me (outside of the BHF) that if they wouldn’t start an online community in a charity today because it is a data and registration nightmare!
How do you solve a problem like “Single Sign On”?
We didn’t want the community to be an add on or a second thought, but rather a hub of conversation about people’s experiences and what people were doing so that people could build relationships with each other and with us.
The biggest beast to tame was “Single Sign On”. Because our community is a different platform to our main website and hosted elsewhere we wanted to make sure that if you were a member of any of our online environments that you could use 1 login and you could use them all and for that solution to be scalable for any other online space we may add in future. Trust me when I say that this was a huge project but one I was lucky to be managing.
The people and the platform
We decided to talk to 8 agencies that had experience in building communities. We knew we wanted a community for all, not just for an event or for delivering health advice. We wanted a community that was for the whole BHF and we wanted our users to be able to seamlessly be able to engage and use their existing membership with us.
We decided to pick SIFT Groups. They work on the Drupal platform which is open source and have experience in charity working. It seemed like a great fit, they also brought a vast amount of experience in community management and training. We were all especially impressed with Elena Goodrum – a community manager and how she trained and spoke so passionately about community.
We already had buy in from the very, very top, we knew our supporters were chomping at the bit and we had our platform. The next step was to work very closely with SIFT to make the user journey as simple as possible, using all the information we have from the past two years we stripped back the community as much as physically possible. Do we need this? Do we need that? Can we ask our users about this bit? We questioned everything. But when we got to UAT and live site, it was all worth it.
At the same time “Single Sign On” was ongoing as a separate project. We were working both with SIFT and our web development agency Positive Technology to make sure that we could build a “passport” for users who sign up to the BHF website (to register for events, order publications and our Heart Matters service) so that they wouldn’t have to login to a new website, this had to work and was a critical part of the tech side of the project. We also had to make sure if a supporter signed up to the community they could sign up to all the other great things our website offers. All on another online environment. Tricky stuff! But we got there, and I won’t bore you about the tech side. Feel free to ask me any questions though!
But back to the people… (The best bit).
We had been working with our staff from the get go. Now we started working with the whole organisation on the community. We trained up 20 Heart Health nurses on how to use communities, how to moderate and how to engage online. We then trained our events staff so that they could help in the community management of the site. We got our customer service teams involved, how to moderate, how to engage, tone of voice. Luckily we had social media guidelines done and dusted and we also had a tone of voice guide, so this was a bit easier than it may have been elsewhere. How useful they proved to be!
We then started recruiting champions outside of the organisation. We used our social networking channels, we used our emails lists and anyone who had shown an interest in the BHF and doing more. We then invited them in to meet us, and gave them a sneak preview of the community. It was difficult, but it was so worth it when they saw it, we speak to the regularly, updated them about progress. We just kept them up to date and they loved being part of something. Sounds so simple huh.
Only at the first step…
All through this process we had been tweaking and adding to our growth strategy. With the different types of audiences and the sheer number of people who we talk to on a regular basis we wanted to make sure we didn’t launch with a big bang only to whimper a week or month later. We decided to phase specific audiences on to our site at soft launch, we picked our heart health audiences and eventers will be sign posted to our site and then a gradual evolution both natural (them finding it on our site) and us prodding them via email. We have a plan from launch in June all the way through until November already and that is just phase one of our growth.
I am sure I have missed lots; it was a huge team effort with a lot of highs and a lot of lows. We have a lot in the pipeline and our site now is going to be very different in 12 months time. But it was a fantastic journey for me personally and one of the biggest projects of my career.
We have been on a hell of a journey already, and the first step only starts today.
P.S – if you’ve read to the bottom here – thank you!
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