Old bottle; new wine
You might not expect an organisation founded in 1754 to be a leading light in innovation, but you’d be wrong when it comes to the Royal Society of Arts. Unlike many, more traditional, membership organisations, the RSA is smartly keeping pace with developments in customer and member engagement strategies. It has recently launched an online community for their members (or, as they call them, ‘“Fellows”) to connect, chat and collaborate together, both digitally and at the live events they regularly organise.
Faye Brookes, RSA’s Community Manager, filled us in on the background. “Our old approach was linear, opaque and somewhat clunky.” She explained that Fellows were only able to connect with each other by searching through a fairly hefty database and sending emails to those who consented to receive them. Their research showed that many Fellows wanted a better way to connect and engage with each other, and were also hankering after a deeper, more meaningful connection with the RSA itself.
Ask and ye shall receive. Now Fellows can chat in open spaces or via individual or group direct messaging. They can form groups around shared interests; the AI group - established only a few weeks ago - is already organising its third event. The RSA team were delighted when the first ever wholly Fellow-organised in-person event was held; this was only possible because they could collaborate directly and develop the idea without fuss or major interaction with the central team.
Although the demand for this change came from the Fellows, the RSA acknowledges that the new, more engaging experience should help foster growth, retention, loyalty, satisfaction levels, and lower the geographical barriers between London-dwellers and people who cannot conveniently use the RSA headquarters near Charing Cross.
It’s still early days for the community, but initial results are beyond the RSA’s expectations. They now consider the community as being the main vehicle to drive the organisation’s overarching mission of a world where people, places and planet flourish in harmony. It’s a prime example of an organisation steeped in history finding a way to stay relevant to the needs of today.
Key stats:
· Size of membership – Over 30,000 “changemakers”.
· Community platform is built on Circle. Faye says, “it proved the most intuitive and accessible platform to meet the needs of our diverse community. Excitingly, Circle is also a relatively new platform, meaning there is a steady stream of new features and functionality”.
· Cost – membership to RSA is £ 198 pa and the online community comes as part of the offering.
· Geographical spread: global, as is the membership.
Top tips from Faye for other membership organisations considering developing an online community offering:
Bring whoever is going to be part of your community with you – get them involved from the start and let them help guide the development of the product. After all, you are building it for them, so they probably know what they value most. We worked with a dedicated group of beta testers and conducted countless sounding sessions and interviews, continually playing back what we were doing to ensure we were heading in the right direction. We launched in a staggered way, too, to give Fellows time to feed back their opinions.
Don’t forget to bring your own organisation with you. Community touches so many area, from marketing to product, development, even to finance. So make sure your colleagues know what’s going on, and not only get excited about the potential of the community, but start using it themselves.
Not everything you want to do will take off, so go in with a mindset of test, learn and, if necessary, iterate. See it as a developing offering, rather than something that needs to be perfect from the start.
Building on that point, be prepared for things to change and develop. Community is not a “build and be done” product - it should constantly evolve as the needs of your members change and develop.
Your community needs stewardship and guidance. Even when you see great engagement and interaction happening within the community, it will still need to be properly resourced. From the start it should be a full-time job for at least one person, and will require additional staffing as your community grows.
Don’t forget about tracking and reporting. Try to decide on what you need to track before you get started. Since our community is relatively new, we are now mainly concentrating o tracking sign ups and active users. But other metrics will become just as important later on.
Don’t let the community sit in a silo as something “digital”, or off to the side. We’ve baked it into everything we do now, so it has really become the place to get involved in the RSA. As an example, after all our events we have a “continue the conversation” thread to bring Fellows together with speakers and keep the energy and value going.
For more information about the work of the RSA visit https://www.thersa.org/.
With thanks to Faye Brooke for sharing her experience.
Other “stuff” going on around the web:
We were at the launch of the Community Leaders Report launch last week (at the RSA as a matter of fact! Great venue for launches too 😉) which is a serious tome of information and top tips for anyone interested in building a brand community. Get yours here.
Circle ran a Community Summit the other day and there were some good talks by leading community builders during the two day event. You can watch it back here.
There are a couple of morning and afternoon slots left for the forthcoming Community Pros of London co-working day in London on the 10th October. If you happen to be in town and free, do come along! We’d love to see you there.
This newsletter is brought to you by www.customer-ization.com. We work with B2C brands to activate and empower customer communities to deliver growth, retention and satisfaction. To find out more why not book a call to explore how we can help you harness your customers’ enthusiasm and achieve a step change in your business outcomes.