Understanding Member Needs
Summary:
- Communities of Practice are ultimately about their members, and members have varying needs or reasons why they are joining a given Community.
- To build a successful Community of Practice, you need to truly understand and get to know your Community's members.
- There are a variety of methods and tools available to understand Member Needs. Pick the ones that make the most sense in your context.
Resources:
What are Member Needs?
Communities of Practice (CoPs) take a wide variety of different forms and attract a wide variety of members. Some CoPs might be small and intimate and consist of a few members who work together and know each other well. Other CoPs might include thousands of members representing hundreds of different organizations.
What is common across all cases is that CoPs are ultimately about their members, and members have varying needs or reasons why they are joining the CoP. A given member may need more professional development opportunities, or access to experts in certain areas, or opportunities to discuss and debate relevant topics.
Why are Member Needs important?
A successful CoP is one that responds to its members’ needs. The more you are aware of what a Community’s members need and make conscious efforts to address those needs, the higher the chances they will engage, share knowledge, and connect with each other. This in turn will make for an effective and vibrant community. On the other hand, if you don’t make a conscious effort to design the community in a way that is responsive to members’ needs, it is less likely that they will stay or participate.
Keep in mind, however, that member needs are not static: as a community evolves, its membership evolves. Members’ preferences, behaviors, and needs continuously change over time, especially as some members leave (or become less active) and new members join.
How do you identify Member Needs?
There are several ways to learn more about your Community’s members and discover their needs such as one-on-one conversations with members, surveys, focus groups and more.
However you go about this process, remember that it is a continuous one and that it is really a mindset rather than a one-off task you complete. It is important that you use a combination, and that you prioritize talking directly with members. The Core Team should agree on questions, decide on a list of members to talk to, and then divide among themselves. After that the Core Team comes together to analyze the findings and identify patterns and trends.
One-on-one conversations with members
One-on-one conversations help you build and deepen relationships, as well as validate and expand on any survey results. The community’s Core Team could schedule 20 – 30 minute conversations with different segments of your membership to learn about current needs, challenges, and preferences.
Make it recurrent and allocate time every week or month to connect with a few members. For example, for a Core Team of three, if each person has ONE conversation per week, you could collectively talk to 12+ members in a given month!
One-on-one conversations among members
In addition to scheduling one-on-one conversations with members, think about how you could facilitate one-on-one conversations between members. Your ultimate goal is to build and deepen relationships and trust between members because that’s what fosters a sense of community and engages people with your community. New members will likely be hesitant to randomly reach out to other members in the community. You can facilitate that for them. You could offer to introduce members to each other in a deliberate way, or you could do it entirely randomly, such as by organizing “randomized coffee trials”.
Surveys
Surveys are widely used and just as widely misused. Everyone knows how to send out a survey, but not everyone knows how to design a survey that collects relevant information. Furthermore, surveys alone are an insufficient tool so we highly recommend that you use them in combination with other tools.
Consider these tips when creating your survey:
-
Prospective member survey: when you are first creating the concept of your CoP, you may want to design a survey that goes out to a group of prospective members. The results of this survey would give you a good sense of whether your initial concept (or Minimum Viable Community is solid.
-
Onboarding / new member survey: create a form with a few questions that anyone who wishes to be a member of your community has to complete prior to joining. The survey also serves as an extra filter - it may filter out people who are not really that interested in your community.
-
Periodic surveys (quarterly / semi-annually / annually): you can send short and sweet ‘pulse’ surveys every quarter to gauge your members’ engagement. You can send more detailed semi-annual surveys that show in greater depth how your CoP is providing value to your members. You definitely want to send annual surveys that close out a year and offer space for reflections. The annual survey results can then be used for your Reporting.
Community Focus Group / Kick-off meeting
This is a great way to follow up a survey. If you send out a survey to prospective members, for example, you’ll get a broad sense of needs, aspirations, challenges. You will get immediate reactions, but you will likely not be able to tell why your survey respondents gave you the answers they did. So to bridge that gap, you could extend an invitation to a select (but random) group of people who filled out your survey to be part of a focus group where you could ask follow-up questions, let people converse with one another. You could start by feeding back the survey results, and getting participants’ reactions and interpretations. Then you can probe deeper for what’s beneath the surface, and wrap up by engaging participants to be co-creators with you, and not simply passive respondents to a questionnaire.
One last consideration: identifying member needs is another way of expressing what value members see in the community. Also, as well as providing value to members, remember that at the same time, you must provide value to the organization that sponsors your CoP in order to ensure support for the CoP. The combined value a Community brings to its members and to its hosting organization is called Shared Value.
This article is part of the WBG Communities of Practice Toolkit licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The toolkit features practical resources to help you develop impactful Communities of Practice. 📖 Learn more about the Toolkit. ▶ Access the Toolkit.
Blog » Understanding Member Needs
Understanding Member Needs
Summary:
Resources:
What are Member Needs?
Communities of Practice (CoPs) take a wide variety of different forms and attract a wide variety of members. Some CoPs might be small and intimate and consist of a few members who work together and know each other well. Other CoPs might include thousands of members representing hundreds of different organizations.
What is common across all cases is that CoPs are ultimately about their members, and members have varying needs or reasons why they are joining the CoP. A given member may need more professional development opportunities, or access to experts in certain areas, or opportunities to discuss and debate relevant topics.
Why are Member Needs important?
A successful CoP is one that responds to its members’ needs. The more you are aware of what a Community’s members need and make conscious efforts to address those needs, the higher the chances they will engage, share knowledge, and connect with each other. This in turn will make for an effective and vibrant community. On the other hand, if you don’t make a conscious effort to design the community in a way that is responsive to members’ needs, it is less likely that they will stay or participate.
Keep in mind, however, that member needs are not static: as a community evolves, its membership evolves. Members’ preferences, behaviors, and needs continuously change over time, especially as some members leave (or become less active) and new members join.
How do you identify Member Needs?
There are several ways to learn more about your Community’s members and discover their needs such as one-on-one conversations with members, surveys, focus groups and more.
However you go about this process, remember that it is a continuous one and that it is really a mindset rather than a one-off task you complete. It is important that you use a combination, and that you prioritize talking directly with members. The Core Team should agree on questions, decide on a list of members to talk to, and then divide among themselves. After that the Core Team comes together to analyze the findings and identify patterns and trends.
One-on-one conversations with members
One-on-one conversations help you build and deepen relationships, as well as validate and expand on any survey results. The community’s Core Team could schedule 20 – 30 minute conversations with different segments of your membership to learn about current needs, challenges, and preferences.
Make it recurrent and allocate time every week or month to connect with a few members. For example, for a Core Team of three, if each person has ONE conversation per week, you could collectively talk to 12+ members in a given month!
One-on-one conversations among members
In addition to scheduling one-on-one conversations with members, think about how you could facilitate one-on-one conversations between members. Your ultimate goal is to build and deepen relationships and trust between members because that’s what fosters a sense of community and engages people with your community. New members will likely be hesitant to randomly reach out to other members in the community. You can facilitate that for them. You could offer to introduce members to each other in a deliberate way, or you could do it entirely randomly, such as by organizing “randomized coffee trials”.
Surveys
Surveys are widely used and just as widely misused. Everyone knows how to send out a survey, but not everyone knows how to design a survey that collects relevant information. Furthermore, surveys alone are an insufficient tool so we highly recommend that you use them in combination with other tools.
Consider these tips when creating your survey:
Prospective member survey: when you are first creating the concept of your CoP, you may want to design a survey that goes out to a group of prospective members. The results of this survey would give you a good sense of whether your initial concept (or Minimum Viable Community is solid.
Onboarding / new member survey: create a form with a few questions that anyone who wishes to be a member of your community has to complete prior to joining. The survey also serves as an extra filter - it may filter out people who are not really that interested in your community.
Periodic surveys (quarterly / semi-annually / annually): you can send short and sweet ‘pulse’ surveys every quarter to gauge your members’ engagement. You can send more detailed semi-annual surveys that show in greater depth how your CoP is providing value to your members. You definitely want to send annual surveys that close out a year and offer space for reflections. The annual survey results can then be used for your Reporting.
Community Focus Group / Kick-off meeting
This is a great way to follow up a survey. If you send out a survey to prospective members, for example, you’ll get a broad sense of needs, aspirations, challenges. You will get immediate reactions, but you will likely not be able to tell why your survey respondents gave you the answers they did. So to bridge that gap, you could extend an invitation to a select (but random) group of people who filled out your survey to be part of a focus group where you could ask follow-up questions, let people converse with one another. You could start by feeding back the survey results, and getting participants’ reactions and interpretations. Then you can probe deeper for what’s beneath the surface, and wrap up by engaging participants to be co-creators with you, and not simply passive respondents to a questionnaire.
One last consideration: identifying member needs is another way of expressing what value members see in the community. Also, as well as providing value to members, remember that at the same time, you must provide value to the organization that sponsors your CoP in order to ensure support for the CoP. The combined value a Community brings to its members and to its hosting organization is called Shared Value.
This article is part of the WBG Communities of Practice Toolkit licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The toolkit features practical resources to help you develop impactful Communities of Practice. 📖 Learn more about the Toolkit. ▶ Access the Toolkit.