Creating engaging digital communities for public-private co-operation
An engaging community for busy professionals must go beyond social networking to focus on goal achievement.
Project details and story
- Industry
- Not for Profit
- Year
- 2020
Context
Our client, a unique international organization for public-private co-operation, engages the foremost political, business, cultural, and other leaders of society. These "constituents" get together to shape global, regional, and industry agendas.
Challenges
Our client, an NGO whose members comprise the world's largest corporations, wanted to create a digital platform for members to collaborate, communicate, and achieve their digital goals. Because of the extremely high-profile and busy nature of the users, it was necessary to provide each of them with a unique experience through the channel of their choice without overloading them with information.
Approach
We conducted a series of workshops, analyzed communities and related experiences, and built detailed profiles of the different user types to better understand their needs, motivations, and goals. We recognized that to build an engaging community, we had to go beyond merely providing social media-like features and make the interactions highly personalized, contextual, and goal-driven.
Solution
Windmill was commissioned by this client to design a highly specialized community for these constituents. The key goal was to facilitate interaction, event, and knowledge management. We focused on three aspects:
First, we recognized that communities that fail to create a unique and valuable experience for their users cannot deliver on their original promise or vision. Users quickly lose interest when the information shown can't motivate them to explore. Users then tend not to spend time on the community or interact with others.
Second, we acknowledged that an overload of information can compromise the constituent experience. Useless chatter obscures truly important things and increases the risk of missing out on important information.
Third, considering that the constituents may be pressed for time, providing the convenience of an omni-channel experience is essential to drive active user participation and engagement.
Professional collaboration driven by context
Engagement happens among professionals when it helps people achieve their purpose.
Context-driven collaboration takes into consideration the users, their workflows, and strategic objectives, and the role of other constituents in taking forward the combined agenda.
Achieving a personal digital agenda
Based on the tracking and analysis of users' actions, constituents are matched with each other based on common interests and goals. The objective is not to "socially interact" but professionally collaborate to achieve specific outcomes.
Inspire actions with gamification
Through an intuitive interface, constituents can easily socialize and share knowledge. This allows them to make meaningful connections and communicate with intent. A gamification element rewards engagement and motivates constituents to publish content and communicate.
Impact
The digital platform created significant engagement in the community, reflected in a dramatic increase in the number of posts created, messages shared, general flow of communications. There was also a significant increase in people following each other and connections being established between users. The users also started engaging much more with the content published in the community.
