Setting Goals For Building Community
I’ve found that setting goals around my communiteering efforts can be an effective tool for keeping motivated, especially in those “plateau” periods of community growth when all your efforts seem to be for naught.
Here’s a simple 4 step program for improving your community through careful goal setting:
Step 1 - Choose One or Two Areas to Focus On
Keeping your focus narrow is critical, especially in the beginning when you’re just getting used to setting and reaching your goals. If you are creating a new site or maybe finally getting serious about growing your community, the amount of work to do can seem daunting. Are you trying to grow the average number of comments on your blog posts? Are you trying to kick start your empty forums?
Step 2 - Write Effective Goals
Mark and Mike from Manager-Tools.com have a great podcast series on setting effective goals. Effective goals are measurable and time-bound. That is, they clearly state what the objective is and the time by when it will be reached. They don’t say anything about how you’ll reach the goal - that comes next.
Here are a few sample goals to help get you started:
- Average at least 5 new blog posts per week by the end of this month
- Grow RSS readership to 500 subscriptions by the end of May
- Enlist 3 new “key players” in my community to be guest bloggers by the end of June
Step 3 - Plan How to Reach Your Goals
Once you have the end-result in mind, come up with your plan for actually reaching the goal. Separating the actions from the end-result is actually really easy, but many people find it difficult for some reason. Assume, for example, you want to learn how to speak Spanish. Your goal is to speak Spanish by a certain date. Your action plan may involve starting with Spanish classes at the local community college, listening to Spanish radio and television, getting together with Spanish-speaking friends regularly to practice conversation, and finally booking yourself a trip to Mexico where you only speak Spanish the entire time!
Depending on which aspect of your community you’re trying to improve, your action plan will vary. Pay attention to this blog and others in our blogroll for specific actions you can take to help build your community.
Step 4 - Check Your Progress Regularly, but not TOO Regularly
This part is like the weekly weigh-in when you’re in an exercise program. Set a regular time of the week when you’ll check in to review your progress against your goal. This can be motivating in multiple ways. First, if you’re behind goals, you’ll see it sooner than later and will feel pressure to get caught up. Second, if you’re on track or ahead of target, you should feel motivated to keep going because obviously whatever you’re doing is working!
Be mindful not to get caught up in the trap of checking in on your goals so often you lose sight of the general trend. Your time is probably better spent each day working towards reaching your goals than repeating your check-in process over and over.
What’s Next For Your Community?
So what are your communiteering goals for this week? This month? This year? Got any great success stories of goal setting for communiteering you’d like to share?
