¶ Aligning Strategy for Niche Communities
Hi, I'm Erica. And I'm Brian. And you are In Before the Lock. Welcome to Threaded, where we answer your community questions as quickly as possible. Gabrielle Lath writes in... How best to approach when you work for an organization that already has a wider community, but you're asked to build a secondary community for something more niche? The wider community will be managed by a different department than yours as well.
I like this question, Gabrielle, because I happen to be dealing with this right this second. So it's very timely. I'll say the first thing that I do in anything is whether I think I'm new or not, honestly, this would apply is do a round of stakeholder interviews and get aligned.
on what exists, what's everyone doing, what's working well, what's not working well, have a set of common questions and just make your way around everybody that's associated with that wider community. I mean, that's how I'd start. Now, Erica, you're going to be shocked to hear. that I believe you need to go back to your strategy and take a look and see how does this new thing fit in with the existing stuff you have? Is there going to be specific?
challenges or problems as a result of something like this and just figure out how to work together and that your strategy encompasses Both, right? So that it's not just two separate things sort of floating around out there, but you're actually putting these together in some way that's going to make sense, even if they're separate and managed separately. Yeah. Be thoughtful about it. I love that. And I just can, I've seen so many people just go off and
be rogue and just start building and they're completely duplicating work. And then what ends up happening, which we love so much is you end up shipping your org chart because the poor people that suffer. are the people that you're building this for. And you're all of a sudden doing things completely siloed and it shows up. So don't do that. The best is to figure out if there's stuff that you can already plug into. It might make you wildly successful.
¶ Validating Separate Community Needs
to just tap into what's already in progress and then figure out what makes sense to build outside. Just be thoughtful. Yeah. We'd have to hear a little bit more from Gabrielle about... You know, what does she mean when she says secondary or niche? Because one thing I'm always worried about, we've talked about this on many an episode is.
are we bifurcating our audience too much or these truly different use cases that, that, you know, legitimately require a separate community or a separate area of a community or however, however Gabrielle is thinking about it. There's just a lot of considerations that go into something like that, and I always want to make sure we're not...
giving people two places to go when ideally we might be able to give them one place to go. Now, maybe that's already been decided and that's the nature of Gabrielle's question here, but those are the kinds of things I would ask to get some clarity on where we're going with this thing.
And I think even if it's already been decided, there's nothing wrong with doing a little research from your customers to find out if this really does need to be separate, if there's specific content that needs to be separated. You know, this is part of that stakeholder roundup. I think you can uncover.
a lot of this. So I think even if you're being told and stepping into this as community professionals, it's our job to do the research and build that, build that strategy first. So yeah, it's great. You heard it here first from Erica. Go do a shadow discovery and strategy process behind the scenes. And there you go.
There you go. All right. Well, thank you so much, Gabrielle, for your great question. And you can send us your questions at Twitter at IB4TL underscore FM, or you can email us at hello at IB4. tl.fm and we will catch you next time that's a not