In average, a person has about 80-100 aps installed on her/his phone, of which about 30 are used on a monthly basis and 10 on a daily basis. And yet, many associations still create their own app to engage with their members. Full disclosure: yes, at AIPC, we also looked at creating an app.
However, we very soon bumped into a number of challenges for which we could not find a solution and the key reason for that is that we started by looking at technology and possible features. We then flipped it round at started by thinking about what the members would need, what type of behaviour would be required to make it work and how the community would need to “work”. But the result was the same: challenges we could not solve. Let me give you our top three.
First of all, AIPC is a small association with about 200 members at organizational level and an underlying network of 1000 individuals. This makes it difficult to reach the critical mass you need to make a digital community work. A great example is the Collabratec platform used by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which has 300,000 members and more than 130 communities. It allows to do a number of things – from following topics to sharing ideas with peers – but it basically turned the member network into a product. Its value proposition is very clear: use the platform, because that where the people you need professionally are.
Which brings me to the second challenge: what is the value proposition? As the IEEE example shows, simply creating a platform where people can connect will not do the trick. There needs to be clear and tangible value. And that can be a lot of things: exclusive knowledge, deals, support … – basically anything they can’t get easily elsewhere. In today’s world, that means that you need to beat AI-agents.
An association who managed to do so is the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), with their Collaborate platform (yes, there seems to be some consistency in the naming of successful platforms). ASAE does have the critical mass (50,000 association executives as members) and focused on a very specific value proposition which can only be found at ASAE: access to the community. Members can ask peers questions, exchange experiences, find examples/templates, access resources and build connections. ASAE revamped the platform with personalized news feeds, improved navigation and easier access to its resource library. This has resulted into an interesting behavioural loop: I have a problem, I ask the community, I get answers from peers allowing me to address the challenge (= tangible value which I cannot find elsewhere) and I will return the favour next time.
While I love the ASAE approach, it brings me to our third challenge: how can we get enough members to contribute (critical mass) quality content (value)? A great way of achieving this has done by the American Chemical Society (ACS). They have created a community-within-the-community model. Their platform allows the creation of many small communities around very (and I mean VERY) specialized topics. Members can create/join groups, participate in forums, ask questions, share ideas, maintain profiles, access document archives and follow specialized communities.
These examples demonstrate that creating digital communities beyond an app is definitely possible. But it does require a number of key success factors such as critical mass, which might be difficult to achieve for smaller associations, despite the specific value they could offer from a network or content point of view. And while we have not yet found the magical solution, we will continue to search, because we truly believe that creating a digital community on top of the physical one is the only way forward.
Sven Bossu is CEO of AIPC, which represents a global network of over 200 leading centres in 55 countries with the active involvement of more than 1000 management-level professionals worldwide.www.aipc.org