Mis à jour le 16/04/2024 – L’animation de communautés peut recouvrir plusieurs réalités : animation des collaborateurs, des partenaires, des clients, des talents, etc. Malgré la pluralité des publics, il existe des clés et des bonnes pratiques applicables sur chacun d’eux.

Are you wondering how to animate your communities (employees, customers, partners, talents, etc.)? As a specialist, Beeshake takes a look at the features you need to successfully animate your communities.

1. Structure your communities

Segment your community to make it easier for them to find information 

On your participative innovation platform, you can create your communities and then animate and structure them. Beeshake offers you a module designed for this purpose. You can create your communities in the form of "groups". Whether by BU, region, specific theme, etc., you're free to define the theme of your group.

To do this, you need to fill in a number of details about your community. First of all, a title and description to help users understand the purpose of the community you've created. You then associate your community with one or more themes.

When you create your community, you can define its confidentiality among 4 options:

• Official community: the community is open to all users. They are members by default
• Public community: the community is open to all users and anyone can join at will.
• Private community: the community is visible to all users. But they can only discover its content and interact if their request to join the community is accepted.
• Secret community: the community is invisible to all users and accessible by invitation only.

There are several ways of inviting users to your community. You can invite them by custom fields, via one or more events to which users are invited, by importing a CSV file, or by clicking directly on the user you wish to invite to the community.

You've just created your first community!

Encourage exchange and interaction

Each community has its own exchange spaces. Your users can interact with each other, soliciting other users, commenting and liking. They can also create polls and even share documents, which they can find in a dedicated tab.

In your community, you will find :

• A "Conversation" space, like a news feed, where everyone can post community-related publications.
• An "Articles" area where users can propose and share articles they find relevant and interesting with other community users.
• A "Projects" area where users can propose and share ideas and best practices around community-related themes. Anyone can ask to join the project team in order to enrich it through collaboration.
• A "Surveys" area where you can propose surveys to users in the community on a specific subject in order to gather feedback.

Beeshake also gives you the option of creating Save The Dates in each group. These allow your community to exchange and interact on a specific topic for a limited time.

What's more, you can create as many sub-groups as you like to refine the themes of the main community. For example, if your main community is the "CSR Community", you can create an "Environment" sub-group, a "Quality of Life at Work" sub-group, and so on.

2. Community management: Communicate and promote

Community animation: keep your communities informed through content distribution

As we've just seen, each community has its own "Articles" space, enabling the distribution and sharing of community-specific content. Here, Beeshake offers you a module visible to all communities, where you can post content accessible to all (monitoring, news, portraits, etc.) .

On your participative innovation platform, you can fully customize the module to suit your needs. For example, you can decide on the number of articles per page, manage user roles and create tags and headings to classify your content.

Once the module has been set up, you can distribute your first content. Communicate the various information relating to your articles: title, description, topics, tags, etc. Each article can take any form you like: images, videos, GIFs, podcasts, etc.

Community management: cultivate your communities and develop their skills

Beeshake also enables you to distribute content to your communities in the form of acculturation or skills enhancement courses, thanks to the "MOOC" module. On your participative innovation platform, you start by creating your course and integrating the relevant information.

You can define a validation method for the course, allowing your communities to obtain a certificate: either when all the resources in the course have been completed, or if the user has obtained the validation percentage when taking a quiz.

You then create publishing sessions for each course, made up of text, multimedia content and quizzes, which you then distribute to your communities.

3. Stimulate collective intelligence for community animation

Encourage the emergence of innovative ideas all year round

Collective intelligence is a powerful lever for animating communities.

Your participative innovation platform offers you a module to encourage collective intelligence throughout the year. The "Projects" module, visible to all, enables your communities to propose and share ideas, solutions and best practices in a dedicated space.

To begin, you need to fully configure the "Project" module:

• You create innovation categories: when a project is created, these categories enable users to classify the proposed idea according to theme.
• You set up the project form : you define mandatory or non-mandatory fields to be filled in by your users when submitting an idea, enabling them to provide detailed information about the project.
• You define the moderation mode: either a priori moderation. This means that projects must go through a moderation workflow before being published. Or a posteriori moderation. This means that projects can be published by project teams without moderation.
• You choose to create jury groups: depending on a specific theme, you can delegate project moderation to groups of experts.
• You decide to activate additional functionalities such as the support kitty, enabling users to support and vote for the projects they want. Or the roadmap, giving users access to a list of tasks linked to their project.

Once your module has been set up, your users can propose ideas, solutions and best practices, either alone or as part of a team. They fill in the various fields of the project form and add the users they wish to their project team.

Everyone can interact with the project, commenting, liking, challenging other users and enriching the projects. They can take part in polls to gather their opinions on project direction. Each user can allocate votes or endorsements according to the parameters defined. They can allocate several supporters within the limit of the number available in their kitty.

Generate commitment around special events

Beeshake lets you create ideation campaigns in the form of events, hackathons or calls for ideas. You can then animate your communities around a specific theme during special events, and generate engagement.

On your participative innovation platform, you can fully parameterize your campaign. This includes defining a start and end date, the content, the associated category(ies) and the type of invitation that will be sent to your users.

Here again, once your ideation campaign has been created, your users will find spaces for exchanges, articles and project proposals, enabling them to interact, share and propose innovative ideas or best practices during this important time.

These ideation campaigns, whatever the format, bring communities together and enable them to focus on strategic issues. Everyone contributes their experience and knowledge, enriching the event and generating innovative solutions and ideas.

You've just created your first ideation campaign!

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