Online communities are vital for businesses, content creators, and associations. With a community, you can depend on your followers and a consistent stream of income from subscriptions. However, you have to improve community experience to get the best results from your members.
Community experience is the experience that your members get for participating in your community’s activities and using its features. So, when you improve community experience, you can increase the value that members get from your community.
This article will show you the factors that influence community experience and how capturing accurate data and utilizing it will improve your member’s experience.
Why data is vital to improving community experience
To improve community experience, you have to know the members of your community. You cannot create a better experience for people you don’t know. By knowing what they want, you can create it for them
This is what makes data vital. By collecting the right kind of data, you’ll know what your members want. For example, if you want to hold a virtual event, you should invite a speaker who will connect with your community members. But, how do you know who they’ll love to listen to? This is why you need to know your community well and pay close attention to the data collected.
Types of data you can capture from your community
There are different types of data that you can collect from your community. To understand them, we use an insights matrix. This matrix sorts information according to whether you asked for it and if the audience knows they are providing that data.
Each of these data types matters because the information you’ll get when you ask what people want is different from what you get when someone is complaining furiously.
Here’s a pictorial representation of the insights matrix created by Feverbee:
The type of data you can capture from your customers include:
- Solicited and aware
- Solicited and unaware
- Unsolicited and aware
- Unsolicited and unaware.
To understand your customers perfectly, you need to collect all these data types and process them to understand what your customers want, thereby improving community experience.
Find out how Raklet helps you understand your members and build a better community. Schedule a demo today.
How to utilize data to improve community experience
After collecting the right information from your community, you need to use it correctly to create a better experience for your members. Here are a few ways to do that:
Create better content
If you understand what your community is interested in, you can create more content in that direction. By creating the kind of content that your members would love, they’ll have a better experience.
Take a look at seven other things you can offer to improve community engagement.
Build a robust FAQs section
To improve community experience, you need to provide answers to the problems that your members face. This is where a FAQs section comes in.
By paying attention to the questions your community members ask, you can create an FAQs section that answers them. This way, they can have most of their questions answered and won’t overburden your support team.
Increase interpersonal communication
One of the most important features of a community is the ability for members to talk to themselves. You can improve that experience by creating discussion forums around a topic they’ll love
Give your community members a place to discuss with each other and create discussions on interesting topics. This makes their experience richer and more valuable.
Create better virtual events
You can also use your community’s insights to create virtual events around the topics that members are interested in. You can also invite speakers to address topics they care about, giving members more reasons to engage with each other.
Without these insights, you’ll be making random decisions that are not supported by data and are ineffective. To avoid this, your membership platform needs to capture and analyze data to provide useful insights.
Capture more information from your community with Raklet
Raklet is a community management platform that allows you to manage your online community. We have many other features that make the management process simple.
Raklet allows you to capture all kinds of data from your community. You can request and collect customer information with customizable forms, and can also track membership engagement with your community’s features.
All these data can also be displayed on customizable dashboards, so you can see what your members are interested in. Then, you can make smart decisions based on that data.
In addition to this, Raklet also provides businesses, associations, and content creators with various features that make managing their communities a breeze.
See how Raklet can help your community.
To read more about memberships and how to make the best of them, check out our comprehensive article: Making the Best of Memberships.
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