For quite some time now, many rodinhooders have been reaching out to me requesting me to share some learnings on community building. While community management is an evolved & recognised industry in the US, it’s still at a nascent stage in India. So all my learnings are by trial and error :). I didn’t attend an online course or workshop on community building & management. I just went with the flow and grew along with our awesome community!
In the last 5 years I have had the good fortune to learn how to build and keep TheRodinhoods (TRH) engaged. Here’s my humble attempt to share some of my learnings with you!
So while starting a community is a big project to undergo, keeping it relevant and engaged is a greater challenge!
Personally speaking…
I have shared a few hits and a whole bunch of misses, but personally, I think my biggest miss in these 5 years was trying to do everything all myself :(.
On the other hand my biggest hit I feel, is the fact that Rodinhooders have become my extended family and whichever city I visit, I do meet at least one Rodinhooder. And folks visiting Goa always make the effort to meet me! I also believe Rodinhooders bond with each other similarly, and meet each other socially very often. How cool can that be?! That, too me, is the power of rocking communities!
What it takes…
If you’re an aspiring community manager or looking for one, in my experience, these would be some of the desired skills:
- People’s person
- Problem solver/trouble shooter
- Patient listener
- Effective communicator
- Multi-tasker
- Fast fingers – quick response time keeps things flowing!
- Pro-active, likes to take initiative and ownership
- Maturity to moderate and keep the community clean & relevant
- Inclusive
- Always, always in help mode!
Contests help Engaging!
One slide I missed including in this presentation on some tips to keep the community engaged:
Try including contests! A brilliant example of a great contest we had on TRH was Share your Bloody Good Luck Story with Ashwin Sanghi!
This ppt is dedicated to every single Rodinhooder who has helped us grow together!
This PPT covers some points I could think of. Please add your own tips/insights. Also, feel free to ask me questions in the comments below. I shall try and answer them!
SPECIAL THANKS & MENTIONS
I need to thank Ashish Dasharathi of 24 adp for inviting me to make this presentation a few months ago at the incredible Digital Marketing Conference in Pune. That’s how I finally kicked myself to make this ppt :).
Also, Prateek deserves a shout-out ‘coz he chatted with Akshay & me which actually got me to jot some points down!
In case you already haven’t read Alok’s lessons while building TRH – YOU MUST!! Gratitude to Alok for allowing me to use his beautiful PPT template :). You will notice a few of our slides are similar. Well, we’ve built the same community together, so there will be some similarities :).
Many many many thanks to Sushrut for adding his refined finishing polish on my PPT!