Choosing a Platform For Your Community

Request for Proposal - Your Guide to Selecting The Right Platform For Your Community A COMMUNITY BUILDING TOOL BY CLI

TOOLS/RFP

Note: Qs marked * will immediately help narrow your options. So if you have a long-list, look at these questions first, and narrow down your selection before asking vendors the other questions. Functionality and Features

Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

Use case*

Who are the primary users/clients of this platform, and are they like you?

There are hundreds of vendors available - some specialise in Associations, others in virtual events. Some are Learning Management Systems that have added a forum, others may be built specifically as Community Management platforms - but for specific types of community, eg Tech Support or Product Advocacy. The development and focus of these platforms will depend on who their key clients are - are they like you?

Testimonials (but Once you know who's using the the real ones)

platform, speak to them

Integrations*

What integrations do you need

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Vendor 3

The vendor will have a dozen shining testimonials, but skip those and speak directly to the Community Manager of a few of the organizations you've identified as clients, to get the full picture

Examples: Your CRM (like hubspot or salesforce), Learnng Management System - if separate, Email marketing (like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign), Finance & payment systems (like Xero and Stripe) Social Media (like facebook or twitter). Also think about other apps like messsenging apps - what'sapp or wechat, your email system etc

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TOOLS/RFP

Functionality and Features

Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

Sign-on Capabilities*

How sophisticated do you need to be

For example, do you want people to be able to sign-up/in using their social channels? Does sign-in to the community have to be part of their sign-in to your other systems/offers?

Customisation of layout and functionality

How important is bespoke customisation?

Is customisation important to you- do you need it to work in exactly the way you envisage, or are you happy to fit your requirements into the an existing solution?

Branding and Design

How important is customisation of design?

Similarly, how customisable does the look and feel need to be? Do you mind if there's visibility of platform brand or do you need full white-label?

Mobile Capabilities

How responsive is the system?

Most systems offer a fully responsive system that is as clean and elegant on mobile as desktop - so often the differentiator is whether you need the mobile capability as an App, or whether web-based is preferred/suitable

FOR MORE INVALUABLE COMMUNITY BUILDING TOOLS AND INSIGHTS JOIN THE COMMUNITY LEADERS INSTITUTE FREE OF CHARGE TODAY www.communityleadersinstitute.com

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Vendor 3

Functionality and Features

TOOLS/RFP

Profile capabilities

Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

How customisable should profiles be

Most systems have customisable profiles, enabling you to add or remove fields. More sophisticated systems have the ability to pre-populate member profiles from your CRM. Also question what members can access and control in their profile

Peer to peer communication

P2P Comms is at the heart of most communities, so the level of functionality here is important

Question whether abilitys can send each other private messages, whether adminsitrators can message members or send announcements, whether and how admin messages get displayed. Consider how group discussions look and feel, and how visible they are/where they sit within the platform and whether members can get notified of new conversations/messages etc to pull them in to the community - how flexible is the set-up of this, can members control what they see?

Moderation and Engagement

How much control and visibility do admins and users get?

What level of control do admins get over posts? What level of segmentation is possible - can users create sub-groups, or conversations by topic? Can private groups be created? Does the platform have the means for members to host their own video calls through the system? Can access to members be restricted to specific groups? Can specific groups have specific moderators?

User admin priviledges

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What level of control For example, is it possible to set up communiis availble over difty wide admins, but also to set up admins who ferent user types manage certain sub-groups? Is there flexibility to control access and control priviledges for different levels of admin (this is particularly important if you intend to empower community members to become admins)

FOR MORE INVALUABLE COMMUNITY BUILDING TOOLS AND INSIGHTS JOIN THE COMMUNITY LEADERS INSTITUTE FREE OF CHARGE TODAY www.communityleadersinstitute.com

Functionality and Features

Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

Post Visibility

How does the forum part of the community look and feel?

Can members amend their view to reflect their preferences or do they all see the same thing? Can members vote or like for posts to boost them? Can members create polls or add other multimedia content? Do older posts get auto-archived?

Tools/Resources/ How much flexibility Library/Articles is there for adding

Can users add content, or only admins? Can subgroup libraries be set up and/or can content be shuffled based on most consumed? What file types are supported? Can video be embedded? Can content be categorised or tagged? How effective is the content search bar?

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content - and are there storage limits?