This is the 11th in my series of posts wherein I answer questions posed to me as a KM mentor. If you would like to submit questions for me to cover in this series, please send them to stangarfield@gmail.com.
I recently presented a webinar where I was asked a variety of questions about communities of practice (CoPs). I’ve included the full questions and my answers below.
Questions About Running Active, Sustainable Communities of Practice
“Do you have any tips for how to change course to adopt the ten principles for successful communities if the examples you gave of how CoPs fail are ones we’re facing?”
Bring in an outside speaker, consultant, or peer from another organization who is knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about communities. Ask them to help influence your current community leadership.
Form a community of community managers. Use this to develop better community leadership skills, share proven practices that can be replicated, and to provide an example of how to lead a community the right way.
Help nurture a few successful communities. Publicize these and encourage others to follow their examples. Encourage the leaders of these communities to mentor the other community managers.
“Are there any techniques in a community that work to increase activity among the lurkers, even temporarily?”
It’s impossible to overcome the 90-9-1 rule of thumb that says that 90% of community members will never post to the threaded discussions. So don’t waste time trying to do so. Lurking is not a bad thing; the so-called lurkers can learn and deepen their expertise by taking advantage of what the other 10% share.
To encourage members to post, make it safe for them to do so by creating a positive community culture. Thank those who post and reply. Make sure that all queries receive helpful replies. Discourage intimidating or snarky posts. When members have a positive experience and receive the help they seek, this should provide positive reinforcement for them to post again and for others to follow their example.
Even if 90% never post, make it easy for them to pay attention to the discussions and activities. Offer full email integration, digest and summary options, and mobile alerts for threaded discussions.
“What is the typical lifespan for these online communities? How can you keep the community alive for the long term?”
Communities can be sustained indefinitely if there is continued participation by the members. The SIKM Leaders Community has existed since 2005 and is still thriving. But other communities may become irrelevant, outdated, or unappealing, and if so, they should be retired.
To keep a community active, community leaders should SHAPE it:
- Schedule: Line up speakers and set up events.
- Host: Initiate and run webinars and face-to-face meetings.
- Answer: Ensure that questions in the threaded discussions receive replies, that discussions are relevant, and that behavior is appropriate. Don’t leave any questions unanswered.
- Post: Monitor the discussions, and if there are no new posts in the current week, post to share useful information, ask a question, or stimulate discussion.
- Expand: Attract new members, content contributions, and threaded discussion posts. Invite those asking questions or sharing in other channels to join the community and post there instead.
Questions About Choosing the Best Tools for Communities of Practice
“Are there any community platforms that you have found make it easier to do communities well?”
There are many community platforms, but most of them are focused on customer support and brand engagement. For enterprise communities in support of knowledge management, I recommend Microsoft Viva Engage (part of Microsoft 365), Lucidea Presto, and Groups.io.
“What file sharing mechanism tends to work best? Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, something else?”
Use whatever file sharing mechanisms are already widely in use within your organization. If there are multiple options, choose the one that is already integrated with the community platform you are already using. If there is none, then choose the one that can most easily be integrated. Microsoft offers integration between Engage, Teams, and SharePoint. Presto and Groups.io both include file sharing.
“Are there particular software technologies that enable CoPs better than others?”
Tools that offer the following functionality, either in single or multiple platforms:
- Site: a home page for reaching new members and sharing information with current ones.
- Calendar: community events calendar
- Events: webinars with audio, video, chat, recording, note-taking, summary, and transcript
- News: newsletter or blog
- Threads: threaded discussions with full email integration – members can post and reply entirely via email with no need to visit a site.
Microsoft 365 offers all this functionality through SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, and Engage. Presto and Groups.io do so if used in conjunction with Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, or equivalent web conferencing software.
“Can the 10 principles for successful communities and 10 tips for leading communities be applied to Microsoft Teams communities?”
The principles and tips can be applied to all communities, but Microsoft Teams is not a community platform. Teams can be used together with Engage to support communities, but if Teams is being used for discussions, then one of two conditions applies:
- It is not a community – it is a project, work unit, or other form of team. Continue using Teams for chat and team collaboration, but don’t call it a community.
- It is a community – it should be using Engage for discussions. Move the discussions to that tool.
Questions About Staffing and Membership
“The LoE (Level of Effort) you’re describing sounds like it could require FTE/WYE (Full-Time Equivalent/Work Year Equivalent). If my impression is correct, what tips would you have on advocating for resources to support running CoPs?”
Community managers don’t have to be full-time, typically needing about 20% of their time at startup and closer to 10% once a community is running smoothly. Leading a CoP program for an entire organization requires more time. In larger knowledge management programs, this should be a full-time position, but in smaller ones, it can be one of the responsibilities of the full-time KM leader.
Advocating for assigning a full-time resource for communities requires compelling use cases, success stories of how communities help to achieve the organization’s objectives, and a logical business case. In general, for any initiative to be done well, it needs at least one person dedicated to leading it. You wouldn’t expect the finance, HR, legal, or other functions to work properly if led by part-time resources, so neither would KM.
“I belong to 20 teams in my organization, none of which have 100-200 members. Why do you say that communities need this many members for critical mass?”
Teams are not communities. Smaller teams are common, and team members will interact because they need to do so to accomplish their mission. Communities are different, and only 5-10% of the members will ever post. If a community has only 20 members, 10% means that only one or two members will post, which is not sufficient to sustain the community.
In a community with 100 members, 5-10 will post, which is more likely to keep it going. But the larger the better, unless the volume of posts gets to be too great. In that rare case, the community can be split into two or more communities, each focusing on a subset of the original community’s topic. But the most common problem is that a community will have too few posts, not too many, and will become inactive.
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