Community Content: Strategy & Planning

Mar 04, 2024

Happy March!

On this day last year, I shared my notes from a class I had with mentees of Community for Africa on Contents and Rituals. I was invited again this year to teach another class on the same topic and I’m putting out what I shared with them in today’s letter.

Definition

In community building, content is simply the content you create for and with the community in other to provide value and stir engagement.

It goes two ways- you create to provide value and get members talking and through their participation you get to create with them which can be expressed in various forms mostly UGC (User Generated Content)

There are various forms of content which include but are not limited to events, discussion prompts, rituals, long form written articles. It’s all dependent on the type of community you run.

Content is what drives engagement in any community- it is one of the things you have to look into whenever you feel people aren’t engaging or engaging enough.

P.S. “one of the things…” cause when it comes to engagement, a lot of factors have to considered 👀

As with everything, STRATEGY comes first!

A content strategy helps you to plan, create, publish and manage your content.

And a great content strategy should attract potential members, meet the needs of your current members, and drive community goals.

So, how do you create a great content strategy that does all of these?

Set clear goals:
What do you want to achieve through your community content, who is it for, and what do you want your community members to get out of it (i.e the value)?
Let’s break it down further!

What is the larger goal of this community? (E.g Increase engagement by 20% by June 30th, 2024)
Okay, how can we achieve this goal through our content? (E.g Increase member participation, create room for regular meaningful conversations, and encourage knowledge sharing)
What type of content do I have to create to support this content goal? (E.g Events, Q&As, conversation starters, etc.)
You can dig deeper into establishing who will be responsible for the content creation and probably distribution.
This is especially important for those of us who work with larger teams where you can delegate certain tasks like graphics, editing, transcription, and even subject expertise.
Finally, where will your content live- which channels will it be posted it to? (E.g the community platform, social media, website, etc.)

You need to outline all of these because this ensures that your content goal aligns with your community's larger goal.

Create content cadences

Content cadence is simply the frequency with which you will publish content in and for the community.

It includes;

Daily content like conversation starters and prompts
Weekly content like rituals (e.g welcome posts, weekly goal posts, etc.), AMA sessions
Monthly and quarterly content like challenges/contests, member spotlight, exclusive workshops
Yearly content like summits, conferences, reports, in-person meet-ups

And so the content types you listed when setting your goals, you just have to categorize them into cadences

Establish your content themes

Your content themes are basically the central topics in which your content will be organized around. They help you maintain a structured approach so you are aware from the start what will be treated and what won’t make a cut in your content. They make it easier for you to brainstorm ideas.

Your content themes are unique to you and your community- from the personas you created when putting together your community strategy, you can get ideas on what they will look like.

An example; A community for community professionals could have themes like strategy, growth, networking. It means that whatever type of content is being created in whatever format, has to border around strategy, growth and networking.

Create a content calendar:

It’s very important that you put everything you’ve planned together so you can stay on top of all of the content you’re responsible in your community.

Whatever tool you use for this is entirely up to you, because I imagine that some of you would have some tools that help with the whole calendar feature thing, but for me it’s the good old Google Sheets.

To create your calendar,

Document everything that your community will be pushing for in a quarter or the 1st half of the year or the entire year.
Why I’m using a lot of “or” is because I understand that some of you may be working in places where what you know is what you know as you are not privy to all the plans for the year. But then they are some of you who have access to all that info and know what’s in store already.
Whichever one it is for you, write everything from the content types to the content themes for that period of time!
Then categorize them into the cadence they belong to

Next up, spread the content into your calendar- starting from the yearly content down to the daily content.
Starting from yearly content helps you to work backward and plan for any smaller moments that leads up to the main content. For example, you have a summit in November, working backwards will entail putting down when registration begins, promotions, reminding people, and even post-summit tasks like sending out a replay, etc. You don’t necessarily need to have a date but you can get around it like 1 month to the event, 2 weeks to the event, etc.
You don’t have to fill up every date in your content calendar, you are running a community and so you have to leave some days blank for organic engagement.
Finally, ensure that you plan your calendar about a month in advance. By the last week of a month, the next month’s schedule should be filled out already so you can slide into the new month easily

Measure regularly

You need to measure what’s working, what’s not working, what needs to be improved on or tweaked.

One way to do this is to track the engagement on each content- at the end of every month, look back at your calendar and see what you have put out, then check on the engagement rate on each one and mark the ones that had the most or least engagement.

Another way you can measure is by asking members what they feel about the content in the community and allowing their feedback guide you further.

That’s it!

I have a Content Planner I put on sale every end of the year because I usually expect that someone will get it to plan from the beginning of the year. But if you don’t mind and would love to get something to organize your content, you can

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