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Are you proactively reaching out to your community members on a regular basis?

 

One of the keys to a successful community is how deeply you are embedded within your members' minds and habits. 

 send a weekly email to community members

While most of your members will be subscribed to the content that interests them, there's a simple way to stay top-of-mind. Send a weekly or monthly email. (Just make sure it's useful information, don't be tempted to self-promote or you'll be relegated to the spam folder.)

 

Ideas for what you can include in a community email:

  • Statistics on popular or trending content
  • Start a new conversation
  • Introduce new members
  • Talk about industry news that affects the community
  • Ask a question/send a survey
  • Solicit photos or videos
  • If you have a creative/artistic member, ask them to do a cartoon
  • Share any social media or news mentions of your community
  • Help members promote their own projects or news
  • Celebrate birthdays, anniversaries or family news

 

Depending on how transparent you want to be, you could share progress toward a specific goal. For example, if you're trying to build up community membership, share the number of new members. If you are hoping to encourage peer-to-peer support, share the number of resolved questions in the past week. You could even share metrics that may not be obvious to members, like number of page views (check your Google Analytics).

 

If you are a Hoop.la Pro customer using the Advanced Reporting option, you can grab any of your charts or graphs and include them in your newsletter too.

 

To send an email to members, you must be an Admin on the site. Simply go to Manage Members, choose all (or a subset), and either compose directly in the WYSIWYG box or export the list to the email client of your choice.

 

Bonus points if you give your recurring email a snappy name, like the "Weekly Bugle" or "Community Buzz." You could even ask your community members to name it!

 

How do you stay top-of-mind with your community members?

 

 

Photo Credit: Maddie Joyce via Compfight cc

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I'd love to hear your thoughts here in the comments, or connect with me on Twitter.

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Hi Chrissanne,

For your notifications, you might want to double check that your "comments/replies" notifications are turned on, in addition to the primary content ones. 

 

To gather up your latest content for a weekly update, the easiest way would be to go to your control panel, under Manage Content, and do a search by date. Make sure that you tick the box that says "include comments/replies." That will give you a list that you can work with. Then for the email, you can incorporate quotes with links (copy/paste).

 

You could also set up a trending content widget or a leaderboard widget and include a screen capture image of the widget in your email...just an idea. Using the trending content widget will make it easier for you to highlight posts that are getting the most attention.

 

Hope that helps!

Rosemary O'Neill

Thanks for this.  I am trying to incorporate this into my community. I find I am missing a lot of the content that my members are adding.  I have all of my email notifications on and I follow a large number of my members, yet I don't see when they comment or post until I happen upon it in my other engagement. Is there a way to make this easier?  And, what do you recommend as a way to aggregate the content being added for the purpose of sending a weekly update/email "Weekly Roundup" kind of message?  

Chrissanne Long
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