HOW TRUSTWORTHY IS YOUR ONLINE COMMUNITY?

By Todd Nilson, Clocktower Advisors

Todd Nilson is an experienced digital strategist with over 25 years of consulting experience, specialized in community-building, digital workplace transformations, and marketing strategy. He has additional background in competitive intelligence research, gamification, recruitment, employer branding, and virtual collaboration. For more information visit www.clocktoweradvisors.com

“Engagement cannot happen if your online community doesn’t seem like a safe or trustworthy space.”

Over the years, I’ve come to see how organizations can overlook one or more areas of the community architecture that can result in a loss of member confidence. To help address this, I’ve created a three step framework for assessing levels of trust and safety in your online community.

Check your community by assessing these three critical levels of safety.

1DOES YOUR TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM INSPIRE TRUST?

At its most fundamental level, the technology upon which you’ve built your community needs to make people feel safe. Ask these questions to ensure that your community’s technology does not send prospective members fleeing in the other direction:

• Does the community domain have a valid security certificate? • Is it easy to sign up? • Is the user experience consistent? • Are subgroups used sparingly? • Does your gamification match the community tone? • Does your platform guarantee 99.9% uptime? • Does the platform cache member post data?

2DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION INSPIRE TRUST?

Your members have a reasonable expectation of knowing why you’re running an online community and how you might use their unique contributions. Ask the following questions to make sure your members know exactly what to expect from you as the host of their community.

• Does your organization clearly disclose the purpose of the community? • Does the community regularly remind members about this purpose? • Does the community clearly explain how and when member content may be used? • Is the community visibly and responsively defended from spammers and other bad actors? • Does the community have a visible, responsive, and empathetic community manager? - Who regularly participates? - Who encourages sharing diverse and inclusive opinions and ideas? - Who recognizes great contributions? - Who models kindness and reciprocity?

3DO YOUR MEMBERS TRUST EACH OTHER?

A community that has a trustworthy platform and demonstrates organizational transparency can still fail when it comes to engagement if its members fail to trust one another. Most communities operate under an assumption that its members are reasonably benevolent because of a set of shared values.

But that’s not always the case.

Here are some questions you can ask to assess the level of trust between your members. • Do members show that they are empathetic and reciprocate kindness to one another? • Are your members tolerant of new ideas and diverse opinions? • Do members use inclusive language so that newcomers feel welcome? • Does the community have established etiquette for posting (not rules but unspoken or spoken guidelines for getting good responses)? • Do community members regularly welcome newcomers? • Do community members share their profiles? • Do community members regularly @mention each other to encourage conversation?

Conclusions

Checklists are a great way to assess your community for top performance, especially when you’re so close to the day to day processes that you may miss big things that could be going better.

I’d recommend a quarterly or at least annual review of these safety points that can help your members feel safe in your online community, especially if there has been a major platform change, reorganization or acquisition of your business, or influx of many new members.

Each of these situations signals a flashpoint for reevaluating and shoring up your community’s sense of safety and trust.