Updated 16 / 04 / 2024 – Community animation can cover several realities: animation of employees, partners, customers, talents, etc. Despite the plurality of audiences, there are keys and good practices applicable to each of them.
You wonder how animate your communities (employees, customers, partners, talents, etc.)? As a specialist, Beeshake takes stock of the essential features for successful community management.
1. Structure your communities
Segment your community to make it easier for them to find information
On your participatory innovation platform, you have the possibility to create your communities before animating them in order to 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, on a specific theme, etc., you are free to define the theme of your group.
To do this, you provide several pieces of information about your community. First, the title and description that allow users to understand the purpose of the community created. You then associate your community with one or more themes.
When creating it, please note that you have the possibility to define the confidentiality of your community 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 their leisure
- Private community: The community is visible to all users. But they will only be able to discover its content and interact if their request to join the community is accepted
- Secret Community: The community is invisible to all users and is accessible by invitation only.
To manage invitations to your community, there are several ways to invite your users. 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 want to invite to the community.
You have just created your first community!
Encourage exchanges and interactions
Each community has its own exchange spaces. Your users can interact with each other, solicit other users, comment, like. But also, create surveys and even share documents that they then find in a tab provided for this purpose.
In your community, you will therefore find:
- A “Conversation” space » like a news feed where everyone can post publications related to the community
- An “Articles” space in which users can propose and share articles to other users in the community that they find relevant and interesting
- A “Projects” space in which users can propose and share ideas and good practices around themes related to the community. Anyone can ask to join the team of the project in question in order to enrich it through collaboration
- A “Surveys” space where you have the possibility to propose surveys to users present in the community on a specific subject in order to collect feedback
Beeshake also gives you the opportunity to create “Save The Date” in each group. They allow your community to exchange and interact on a specific topic for a limited time.
In addition, you can create as many subgroups as you want to refine the themes of the main community. For example, if your main community is the “CSR Community”, you can create an “Environment” subgroup, a “Quality of Life at Work” subgroup, etc.
2. Community animation: Communicate and promote
Community animation: inform your communities through content distribution
We have just seen that each community has its own "Articles" space allowing the dissemination and sharing of content specific to a community. Here, Beeshake offers you a module visible to all communities where you can broadcast content accessible to all (monitoring, news, portrait, etc.).
On your participatory innovation platform, you have the possibility to fully configure the module, according to your needs. For example, you decide the number of articles per page, you manage user roles and you create tags and sections to classify your content.
Once the module is set up, you can distribute your first content. Communicate the various information relating to your articles: title, description, themes, sections, tags, etc. Each article can take any form you want: image, videos, GIFs, podcasts, etc.
Community animation: acculturate your communities and help them improve their skills
Beeshake also allows you to broadcast content to your communities in the form of an acculturation or skills development course thanks to the “MOOC” module. On your participatory innovation platform, you start by creating your course by integrating the information corresponding to it.
You have the possibility to define a method of validation of the route allowing your communities to obtain a certificate: either when all the resources of 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, consisting of text, multimedia content and quizzes that you then distribute to your communities.
3. Stimulate collective intelligence for community animation
Encourage the emergence of innovative ideas throughout the year
Collective intelligence is a strong lever for animating communities.
Your participatory innovation platform offers you a module allowing you to foster collective intelligence throughout the year. The “Projects” module, visible to all, allows your communities to propose and share ideas, solutions and best practices in a dedicated space.
To begin, you fully configure the “Project” module:
- You create innovation categories : when creating a project, these categories allow users to classify the proposed idea according to themes
- You set the project form : you define mandatory or optional fields that are filled in by your users when submitting an idea allowing you to detail information relating to the project
- You define the moderation mode: either a priori moderation. This means that projects will have to 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 have the possibility to delegate the moderation of projects to groups of experts
- You decide to activate additional features such as the support kitty, allowing users to support and vote for the projects they want. Or the roadmap allowing users to access a list of tasks linked to their project.
Once your module is configured, your users can propose ideas, solutions and good practices alone or in a team. They fill in the different fields of the project sheet and add the users they want to their project team.
Everyone can interact around the project, in commenting, liking, engaging other users and enriching projects. They can participate in surveys to gather their opinions in the orientation of the projects. Everyone can assign votes or support depending on the defined settings. They can allocate several supports within the limit of the number available in their kitty.
Generate engagement around key moments
Beeshake allows you to create ideation campaigns in the form of events, hackathons or calls for ideasYou can then animate your communities on a specific theme during key moments and generate engagement.
On your participatory innovation platform, you can fully configure your campaign by defining a start and end date, the content, the associated category(ies) and the type of invitation that will be sent to your users.
Again, once you have created your ideation campaign, your users will find spaces for discussion, articles and project proposals allowing them to interact, share and propose innovative ideas or good practices during this key moment.
These ideation campaigns, whatever the format, bring communities together and allow them to focus on strategic topics. Everyone brings their experience and knowledge to enrich the event and bring out innovative solutions and ideas.
You have just created your first ideation campaign!
If you'd like to explore building lasting connections within your communities, don't hesitate to schedule a meeting with an expert to discuss your projects and challenges, with no obligation!