CIWM Community

While the Coronavirus pandemic is challenging us all, the impact on the NfP and charitable sector has been pronounced. Events, benefits delivery, culture and bottom lines are threatened across organisations. The UK professional membership sub-sector is particularly challenged. While in- person events are no longer possible, adoption of online community and member engagement platforms lag in comparison to other territories, such as North America.

From 15th March 2020, online facilitation of broad member sharing and access to programmes has been an urgent priority for many UK membership bodies. The impact of the coronavirus crisis on professions served by individual membership bodies has been significant, with committee work, special interest group (SIG) participation, online learning and similar functions being urgently transitioned to virtual environments.

CIWM leaders and members quickly recognised multiple substantial threats presented by the coronavirus outbreak. By mid-March it was clear that the impact on organisational events, training courses and meetings, as well as the subsequent revenue would be significant, but also that a dedicated channel for rapidly responding to the crisis was vital to organisational relevance during the pandemic. While resources and waste management are broadly vital to the economy, it is critical to pandemic response as signified by essential workers status being assigned to sector professionals. Industry best practices and news evolved by the hour. With hundreds of members on the front lines, communication and information sharing among members to distribute these learnings was essential.

Members recognised this and reacted, requesting more robust member sharing opportunities from the organisation. A handful didn’t wait, starting up a Slack instance for a vital knowledge segment. Over 100 members and non-members signed up for the Slack channel within weeks. This clearly indicated that getting online sharing right was both a response to a threat and an opportunity for CIWM.

CIWM turned to Cantarus to seek pragmatic, expert advice on delivering a sophisticated online community offering as quickly as possible. Initial conversation centred on goals, member value, timeframe, integration and price. Mark Eichler, Cantarus Principal Consultant and lead community strategist, guided the process. “We understand online community, community strategy and related technologies intimately,” Mark said. “CIWM brought three final critical pieces to the project – capable staff, leadership buy-in and member appetite. The combined CIWM/Cantarus team had all the elements to make the project a success in a very short timeframe”.

Cantarus listened and proposed a community adoption strategy tailored to CIWM’s needs:

Platform: Discourse
The leading open source online forum platform was seen as the right fit for features and time to deliver. The open source price point allowed budget to be applied to critical integration work, branding and support.

Integration: CRM
CIWM adopted iMIS as its CRM years before the project was initiated. Cantarus proposed providing an integration to populate the community, confirm member security, and utilise the existing login platform. Cantarus technical staff would achieve the integration with minimal staff time and without staff interaction or support from the CRM vendor.

Community Strategy
CIWM and Cantarus confirmed key performance indicators for community success. Guided by Cantarus, the multipoint strategy based on industry best practices included:

• Members Only – The future goals for CIWM’s online community include surfacing community content to non-members, with an initial focus on members to own “their space” before inviting in others.
• Community Structure – An initial “all members forum” would offer a single primary place for members to interact and engage. Rigid segments for specific subgroups would be avoided at the initial launch and brought following initial adoption.
• Community Management – Staff “owners” of the platform and specific tasks to perform across community lifecycle stages were confirmed; training provided.
• Seeding – Resources of high value are often the best conversation starters. The community would be pre-seeded with documents, links and conversations to ensure every community visitor’s first experience was of value to them.
• Influencer Recruitment, Training & Tasking – Nearly all membership bodies have members and leaders who are well known and trusted. Recruiting these influencers to act on the seeded content and offer new knowledge enhances immediate value and establishes the community as a place for thought leadership.
• Multi-part Launch Strategy – All available marketing resources, including the website, email marketing channels, public social media and the newsletter would be leveraged to drive adoption. Community management time commitment in the first two weeks would be increased and then tapered thereafter.

With key CIWM staff, including CEO Sarah Poulter, taking a personal interest, the project progressed rapidly. Within two weeks the community platform was live, branded, and the initial integration performed. Key pre-release strategic objectives on content seeding were achieved and stakeholder recruitment had begun. Working closely as a single team allowed iteration on community and launch strategy on a number of points:

• More categories for community conversations including a “strictly social” channel for non-professional exchange and sharing
• A fully branded video tour of the platform offered to all members
• A home page welcome banner featuring a personal greeting from the CEO
• Launch day inclusion of an all-members webinar by CIWM staff and Cantarus
• The launch timetable would be expedited

Immediately following launch, it was apparent that the community offered a compelling and useful enhancement to CIWM member benefits. Reflecting a fully-formed community strategy, immediate utilisation was robust with member feedback strongly positive.

• Time to Launch: 17 business days following project initiation meeting
• 4,667 logins on launch day, over 10,000 within first week of launch
• Over 20,000 unique page views within first week of launch
• 119 new unique posts on launch day, over 300 within first week of launch