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5 Benefits of Community Involvement for Businesses

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By Kayla Matthews

Volunteering is a great option for businesses across all industries. Whether you run a small, local salon or manage an extensive team of chefs at a well-known restaurant, every company can benefit from community involvement.

Not convinced? Here’s a look at five reasons why you’ll benefit from offering your support to the individuals that define your local area.

1. Let the Community Know You Care

One of the most obvious benefits of community involvement is giving back to the people that define your area. Giving back deserves a spot on our list of the top benefits of small businesses in a community.

For example, you may decide to donate toys during the holidays or host a canned food drive in your area. Any effort you make to give back to those in need is sure to be warmly welcomed by your community. Since the people in your county likely make up the majority of your clients, it’s always nice to help these very same individuals when they need it most.

2. Give Employees More Incentive to Get Involved

While community service is known to benefit your surrounding city or town, it also positively impacts your company’s work environment.

In fact, there’s research that supports the idea that giving back as a business helps enhance company culture. When your workers feel like what they do has deep meaning and purpose, they’re much more likely to want to give it their all.

If you’re planning to host a charity event or provide a service for your community, be sure to run your plans by your workers. Not only will you find that many are more than happy to help, but you may also see a positive impact in how they feel when they return to the office.

3. Build Stronger Community Relationships

How well do you truly know the faces of your community? When you decide to volunteer, host a charity event or partake in a community service event, you get up close and personal with the people who make up your city or town.

Aside from getting to know residents, you may have the opportunity to connect with other small-business owners in your area. Simple connections such as these can lead to an endless array of opportunities regarding counseling, mentorship and general business connections.

4. Seem More Appealing to Prospective Customers

While it certainly isn’t the only motivating factor to help out your surrounding community, giving back makes you seem more appealing to potential clients as well.

Whether you’re sponsoring an event or plan to partner with other local businesses and run a charity, getting involved in the community spreads the word about your company.

Local newspapers and magazines are always looking for positive news to cover. The exposure your business generates from doing services for the community can be astonishing. It gets your name out their while convincing new clients to invest in your company, too.

5. Help Promote Business in Your Community

Did you know that giving back can help promote your city? You may be wondering how your effort has such a profound impact. Believe it or not, even the smallest things can create the biggest waves of influence.

When you do your part to make your community more welcoming, safe and clean, it helps make your city at large more inviting. This means residents are more likely to stay within the community and invest in local businesses — which helps with the economic development of your town.

Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and give back to the community that’s helped your business thrive? Offering your help is a win-win situation for everyone — so how do you plan to get involved?

 

About the Author: Kayla Matthews writes about communication and workplace productivity on her blog, Productivity Theory. Her work has also appeared on Talent Culture, MakeUseOf, The Muse and Fast Company.

Photo by Nathan Lemon on Unsplash

Customer engagement on a budget

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Customers typically want two things when they seek out your company online:

  • fast answers to their questions
  • someone to listen to them

If you’ve delegated your customer engagement to a “free” social network, you’ve automatically made it more difficult to accomplish either of those goals.

Have you ever tried to search for something that was posted a while ago in a Facebook Group? You know, that amazing answer you wrote to that customer who wanted to know if you offer discounts to dog owners? Go ahead and try it…I’ll wait…

No bueno, right?

Now try digging up a Tweet or a Twitter DM in your corporate account from a month ago where you solved that nagging login question.

See what I mean?

What if you had a space that you controlled, where you and your customers could easily find answers? A forum gives you a central hub, connected to your website, where PDFs, images, tutorial videos, Q&A, ideas, and more can be found.

The bonus? If you’re using your own domain, all of that useful information is also helping your SEO.

Some customers who have incorporated your brand into their identity (how awesome is that) may want to reinforce that by helping other customers. Research shows that customers who participate in an online community stick around longer than those who don’t.

revenue attributed to community members

This article will show, using Convolio forums as an example, how you can engage with your customers like a boss (even if you’re an army of one). These same tips apply, regardless of your community platform; the bottom line is to provide value to your customers.

Make Your Customers Insiders by Sharing Useful Resources

Set aside one of your forums for resources. You can attach files, embed media, and include pull quotes in your forum topics, which makes it easy to share all sorts of information in one place. It’s all searchable (including the attached files)!

Your customers will appreciate being able to comment or ask questions inline too. For example, if you post the menu for your upcoming event, they can ask whether there are gluten-free options (that’s always the first question, isn’t it?).

Collaborate with Your Customers by Getting Feedback and Suggestions

The only bad feedback is no feedback at all. Whether you’re building a product or providing a service, you should always be listening when your customers tell you things. You can give them space to offer constructive criticism, ideas, and real use-case responses. Because it’s a forum, you can actually have a back-and-forth conversation about the idea, gathering more details to flesh it out, and getting input from multiple different customers in the same thread. Best practice is to go back and let them know once you’ve implemented their idea. Customers who have contributed their own ideas to your business, and seen them come to life, become your most loyal fans.

Communicate Proactively and Specifically

You should be sorting and segmenting your members so that you can send customized emails based on their interests, or introduce them to other customers who have similar interests. When they join the forums, give them a quick dropdown menu to tell you something about themselves. That information then gets you closer to knowing them as people, and then being able to give them what they actually want, rather than just guessing at personas.

Create a New Revenue Stream with Premium Memberships

Use paid memberships to monetize your forums. Offer enhanced features or content to paid members of your forum community. You get to decide the rate, the frequency, and what is included in the membership. When you are offering so much value through your forums that members are willing to pay, you’re doing it right.

See How it’s going, At a Glance

You don’t have to be a Google Analytics junkie to see how your forums are doing. Use built-in Advanced Reports to see your member leaderboard, top topics, and more. In Convolio, it’s all downloadable if you want to go all spreadsheet on it.

How does this serve your customers? Double down on the topics that are seeing the most traction. If forum content that offers how-to information is getting the most page views and comments, make more of it!

Clone Yourself with Automation Tools

The secret recipe is….Recipes! In Convolio, you can automatically screen out posts that include specific words, take a look at posts that include images before they go live, reply to someone who’s made their first post, and ban spammers who get in the way of real customer engagement. Use your community’s moderation tools to create a fun, interactive space for your customers.

Subscribe to administrative email notifications and get alerted when new members join, when someone mentions you, or when there’s new content that needs review. That means you can spend more time working on your real job, which is making cool things for your customers, not dealing with forum technology.

Conclusion

It’s time to stop blurting out marketing messages all over the web, and hoping your customers will bump into them. Time to provide real value for them, in a place where you can give customers the experience that fits your business promise, without algorithms dictating your reach.

Convolio is the new low-cost hosted forum from Social Strata, the pioneers of engagement software. Some other forum options include Discourse (open-source software) and Vanilla Forums (priced  for the Enterprise).

How are you engaging with your customers?

 

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is Co-Founder of Social Strata, makers of Convolio forums and the Hoop.la community platform, and Narrative, a new social content platform for consumers.  You can find Rosemary on Twitter as @rhogroupee.

Featured Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

How to Kickstart a Product-Based Business

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This week I’m pleased to interview the two creative minds behind the Ryo adaptor (launching today on Kickstarter), Lori Liu and Kevin Lieber. Crowdfunding is a great way to road-test an idea, gauge market demand, and obtain financing for your project.

I thought it would be interesting to get the insider scoop on what it’s like to take the leap from idea to Kickstarter campaign.

Ryo adaptor

1. What are the backgrounds of your founders?

We are a team of four made up of a creator/entrepreneur, a legal adviser, an auditor, and a Youtube channel producer and host. It’s a good mix of creative talents and business acumen.

2. How did you come together for this project (since some are in New Zealand and one is in the US?)

The three of us in New Zealand are associates and we came together because we believed in Julian’s idea and also because we just wanted to go all in and take a real shot at creating something outside of our day jobs. We needed a US partner to be able to launch a US based Kickstarter project, so we pitched our idea to Kevin as he is active in the science and tech space and seemed like somebody who would be interested. Our pitch was honest and personal, and Kevin jumped onboard quite quickly. We’ve found that if you are open and honest with people, you will get the same back.

3. Any tips or advice on working together remotely with a business partner?

It really isn’t hard if everyone shares a common goal and is invested in the project. The logistics are a bit more difficult than working with local people, but we’ve found that there’s almost nothing you can’t sort out over email and Skype (of course, Julian had to fly over to the New York to shoot our video with Kevin). The only difference in working with a remote partner is that there needs to be a clear division of labour so that he can be a lot more independent in what he is doing. Back home we just tag team a lot and pick up the slack for each other whenever it becomes necessary.

4. What made you decide to use Kickstarter to get the product launched?

We are a small startup working on a very tight budget. Kickstarter is fantastic because it is basically free market validation, and it’s a great platform for newbies like us to build a following for future projects.

5. Any tips for someone considering going to Kickstarter with their project?

It’s still a bit early for us to be giving advice as we’re still testing the waters ourselves. Rather than a tip we can share the approach that we’ve taken with Kickstarter. We have invested a LOT of time and energy to create a good Kickstarter page. Everything from the video to the visual assets and the text has been created with the utmost care and attention to detail. We believe that while the idea itself is important and is obviously central to the project, it takes a good looking campaign page to give people that extra push to really want to check out what you’re doing. At this point we just really really really hope we’re right.

6. How do you go from product to business? Do you have a strategy in place for how you will scale and grow?

We have a business plan for taking the product to retail after the campaign. Of course that will depend on the success of this campaign. If we are successfully funded we will be able to do our first run of production and get the ryo adapter and kushi out to our backers. If we get a decent amount of funding we will be taking this to local retailers here in our relatively small New Zealand market. If we raise a significant amount of funding we will be well placed to take this to the larger retailers overseas. We have also looked into exit strategies for our worst case scenarios. We are all at pretty critical points in our respective careers so if we don’t hit certain targets, then this project will not be worth quitting our day jobs for. In this case we will have to look for a buyer to take over. I think if that happens the best deal we could reach would be agreeing to a majority takeover with the original founders taking reduced shareholdings as silent partners.

7. Can you share any tips from your marketing plan? Any successes so far?

I don’t think our success can be measured until we launch. As a startup we aren’t too focused on a commercially driven marketing campaign that shoves the ryo adapter down people’s throats. We really just want people to know we exist and we’ve basically tried to use every avenue available within budget. One thing we’re definitely limiting our spend on is banner and sidebar ads. It might have been good a while back, but if you think about the sheer number of startups we have today vying for ad revenue versus the slower growing target audience, it just doesn’t make financial sense. We were pretty blown away by how much these ads cost, the prices have been driven up by the fast growing number of startups and other ad sellers all chasing a limited pool of money.

8. Anything I forgot to ask about that you’d like to share?

Yeah, my credentials! I’m so new at this myself and I don’t feel qualified at all to be giving any tips. I hope my answers are of some value to your audience. You should hit me up again after the campaign and hopefully then I’ll have some gems to share!

I think that’s a great idea. Look for a followup article here, once the campaign closes!

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

How to toot your own horn with humility

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By Diana Gomez

It’s okay to take pride in giving back to your community.

Research has suggested that volunteering and donating money to charitable causes not only increases emotional well-being, but physical health as well. And when hungry people get to eat or when a family in need gets a brand new home, why not spread the good word?

dropping a heart into donation can

In today’s online reality, it’s easy to share your rewarding volunteer experiences with your Facebook friends.

However, the lines of humility here are blurry. Does posting that you’ve donated $1,000 to the Make-A-Wish Foundation come off as sweet, or just bragging? Does anyone really want to see a photo of the three new rescued greyhounds you are fostering?

Here are four questions you should ask yourself in order to maintain your humility when sharing what you’ve been up to in the community.

1. Why am I sharing?

This is a pretty good way to initially approach any social media post. Simply ask yourself: “Why am I posting this, really?”

Here are some possible answers to this question:

  • “I want to share my experience.”
  • “I want to inspire people to do the same.”
  • “I want people to know I’m a good person.”
  • “I want people to think I’m accomplished.”

Now here’s a surprise: None of these are a bad reason to write up a post.

Whether you do it purposefully or not, social media paints a picture of you as a pared down “brand” of a person. So it’s important to realize your true motives when publicizing this simplified version of you.

If you realize that your true answer is, “I want people to think I’m a good person” and that makes you feel icky-don’t rush to post. Keep that “goodness” to yourself while you think about it a little longer. If you recognize that is your motive, and you feel okay about it-because chances are, if you donate $1,000 to cancer research, you probably are a good person-then it’s okay to share! Just keep reading.

2. What should I post?

Short text, photos, walls of text, and videos are all relevant methods for sharing your charity experiences.

Take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, for example. Over $100 million was raised through this viral video campaign-with much debate over the ice bucket dumpers’ humility. Detractors thought it was over-the-top and self-serving; the supporters thought it was just clever and self-deprecating enough to work. I think you can tell here that I’m trying to get you to be introspective again. What did you think of it?

Feel free to be creative with your post. Something that’s engaging for your readers, like a photo, can seem less like bragging than a straight-to-the-point status update.

3. How will people feel?

The language that you use for a post or photo caption is key.

“Just finished my 100th hour volunteering at the soup kitchen. It feels so good to give back!”

“Met a Vietnam veteran who once sang backup vocals for Elvis tonight. #100hours #soupkitchen”

“Feeling so blessed and humbled to have met so many amazing people. Message me if you want to come with next week!” (Location tag: Baltimore Food Pantry)

Again, no wrong answers! Can you spot the differences between these posts?

As the first puts focus on your own feelings, it is honest and relatable. The second is removed from the charitable aspect of the experience while still publicizing that you participate. The third puts the focus on the people you are
helping while gently inviting others to do the same.

Think critically about how your Internet-using friends will feel upon reading your post. Are you attempting to guilt or inspire?

Finally, It is important to remember that the only true way to help disadvantaged people is to empower and dignify them. How would the recipients of your good deeds feel if they saw your post?

4. Where should I post?

After you give to a cause online, there is usually a button to “Share” a boiler-plate post on your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. This is an easy way to maintain humility, as it’s coming from a third party. You can’t help it if someone else says something nice about you!

Otherwise, you can craft your own post. Besides social media, you could blast out a mass e-mail, a private message to just a few people, or as a blog post on your website.

5. When should I share?

The most basic rule of humble charity work is to keep the publicity to a minimum. Although you may be incredibly proud of each fundraising goal you reach, it’s good to keep these tips in mind before posting about it every single day.

Just because you do something altruistic doesn’t mean you have to keep it to yourself. Posting with care can inspire others to give back as well-and that’s the “share” that keeps on sharing.

Author’s Bio: Diana Gomez is the Marketing Coordinator at Lyoness America, where she is instrumental in the implementation of content marketing strategies for USA and Canada. Lyoness is an international shopping community and loyalty rewards program, where businesses and consumers benefit with free membership and money back with every purchase.

Best practices for building an integrated business community

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What is an online community?

Online community is an organized group of people connecting and sharing online on a regular basis. It’s generally accepted that members of an online community have the ability to communicate with each other as well as with the operator of the community. Most communities also have their own set of guidelines or rules, visual signals, and peer support.

A true online community builds equity over time, and can be classified as “owned media.”

welcome mat

What is not an online community?

Broadcast-only or broadcast-centric platforms, such as an emailed newsletter list, Twitter accounts, or company Facebook pages do not constitute communities. Those tools, while worthwhile, do not make good standalone community platforms because they do not allow full expression of interpersonal relationships, and their content tends to be transitory. Participants in those platforms are more audience than community member, even when they are given the opportunity to comment…it’s generally in response to a trigger from the operator, not a topic of their choosing.

When a business decides to invest in managing an online community, ideally it will take advantage of the tools that suit the business purpose best. But there must always be a home-base, or core, to which the other social accounts contribute. This home-base should be part of the business’ own website, where it can control the branding, messaging, features, customer data, and analytics.

Social tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are great for reaching the audience, but then there must be a place for members to return again and again for deep-dive content and lasting relationships.

A very high percentage of users abandon Facebook fan pages after a campaign is over; however members stick around brand-owned communities for years, building equity and value that endures. In addition, and most importantly, you have no ownership of the community data or content on these third-party networks.

“Facebook is more effective at driving brand sales via a brand’s website than on Facebook itself.” The Evolution of Facebook Brand Fans, AdAge White paper, Sept. 2011

Best Practices for Building a Thriving Business Community

Destroy the internal silos

Prepare all departments to participate: marketing, PR, customer service, sales, product development, and management (for example, if PR is planning a big social stunt, be sure to bring the YouTube viewers back into the home base for discussion and long-term mileage from the event).

Find a champion

Dedicate one overall administrator with authority to take corrective action. Even with the silos gone, someone needs to manage the community, from a strategic, technological, and staffing perspective. If the lights are on and no-one’s home, the community will not succeed. Ideally, the department whose budget is paying for the community platform is the same department responsible for administering it.

Remember the prime objective

Tie business objectives to the community, and for each objective, come up with metric for success. For example, if the primary objective of the community is to offer tech support to customers, it would be logical to evaluate the number of call center tickets/phone calls to determine whether the community is lowering that number. If the primary objective of the community is something more nebulous like “brand awareness,” then you could choose some indicator metrics like number of brand mentions, site traffic numbers, or reputation indicators.

Choose your platform(s) with the goal in mind

If you are using a flexible online community platform, you will be able to select which specific tools, singly or in combination, will support the goal. It could be a commented blog, it could be forums with the occasional chat event, or it could be some combination of tools. Consider how your audience prefers to interact and choose accordingly. If you are starting a community from scratch, sometimes it’s best to start with commented blogs and add forums once there is a core of active participants.

Along with the home base, determine which external social tools will be integrated. If your audience hangs out on Facebook, choose a platform with Facebook Connect and content sharing. If they are Twitter maniacs, incorporate a Twitter feed widget into the home base. Plan a two-way communication–encourage sharing content outwards, and promote the home base on the external social networks as well.

Don’t have a split personality

Think about convenience for your members, and they will love you for it. Use a single sign-on if possible, across your community tools. The same cohesive feel applies to the branding across platforms; use the same colors and theming on your home community and in external profiles.

Integrate social monitoring and measuring

Be sure to include your home base within your social monitoring dashboard. Whether you’re using an enterprise listening system, Google Alerts, or another tool, make sure that you are monitoring all of your key indicators across your social networks, including the community on your own website.

To summarize, your social presence should be an elegantly integrated, comprehensive ecosystem that encourages brand evangelists to re-visit again and again, and share messaging outward as well.

By bringing the conversation home, you solidify the relationship and provide lasting value to both the customer and the brand.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: chrisinplymouth via Compfight cc

Small actions, taken consistently, can move mountains

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When Rosa Parks decided she wasn’t going to give up her bus seat, she may not have had in mind kicking off a movement that would change life in America.

Herman Melville, writing the sentence “Call me Ishmael,” probably didn’t sit down to write “the novel of the century.”

Mother Teresa simply decided to care for one person at a time. She had no thought of becoming beatified by the Catholic Church.

We all have to find our own first small action.

One organization that is truly living this credo is Milaap. It’s a crowdlending platform that has raised more than $1.5 million, with a 98.48% repayment rate. They are celebrating their fourth anniversary with a 24-hour online conversation about sustainable giving.

Members of the site choose a project/borrower to support, and how much they wish to lend, and Milaap gives 100% of your loan funds to the borrower.

You then receive updates on the project via email, and get repaid. The funds can be reinvested in another micro-loan if you wish.

The concept is so simple. With each small loan, lives are changed. With each changed life comes promise and possibility for everyone touched by that life.

Reading through the available campaigns to support, you see families who can use a $100 loan to buy chickens to expand their chicken coops, to help abused women start their own businesses, or bring potable water to underserved areas. Each of these project groups are taking a single small action to improve their lives. The ripple effects over time will be enormous.

Maybe today you’re reading this post with a mountain sitting in front of you.

Is it a physical disability?
A financial hardship?
Do you have an enormous challenge at work?
A burning idea for a new business?

Whatever the mountain is, you can find a first step. Even if you’re moving it with teaspoons, you can make progress right now in this moment.

Maybe you can be inspired by Milaap and gather supporters to help you carry teaspoons.

Molly’s lovely post from this past Monday reminded us that we can’t do it alone. That’s even more true when the mountain looms large.

If you’d like to learn more about Milaap and the work they’re doing, visit their site at Milaap.org.

If you’d like to get help and support from your fellow teaspoon carriers, let us know in the comments. Let’s take the first action together.

Milaap infographic
Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee