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Excited to start building your community? There are things we recommend you prepare first to make getting started on Beam.gg easier and ensure things are off to a great start! Take a look at our list below.

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Define community goals

Your goals determine your strategy for handling and managing your community. Ask yourself what you hope to accomplish through your community? Some examples are:

• Increase member retention
• Enhance customer service
• Improve customer engagement
• Collect feedback and ideas
• Educate members

Keep in mind you can have more than one goal. It is also advisable to set SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based goals. Once you set your goals, you will be better able to define types of content to post, metrics to check, and strategies to use.

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Decide on your community design

Our builder lets you customize your community website to match your branding. Decide which of your brand assets to use such as a logo, a banner image, and platform color.

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Develop community platform description and tagline

A community platform description and tagline will help members understand what your community is all about and set their expectations.

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Prepare community rules and terms of use

Prepare the community rules and terms of use for members to accept when joining your platform. This lets members know what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t permitted in the community.

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Identify your community stakeholders

Stakeholders are parties or persons with any interest in your community’s outcome and involve:

• Your community members: The people who you will invite to join the community platform whether current customers, fans, or employees
• Who will help manage the community: Those who will help manage and moderate the community such as a community manager or customer support staff
• Who should be informed on community performance: The people you need to report community performance to, perhaps certain community executives
• Other affected departments or groups: Certain groups will have work affected by the creation of the community website. Others will simply need to be informed one now exists. Examples could be the marketing department, operations department, and sales teams

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Determine community roles

Once you identify stakeholders, you will be able to determine who will be assigned roles to help manage and engage the community. If you are migrating an existing company, you can think of appointing trusted members to help with community moderation as well.

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Plan how to onboard community members

Create your strategy for communicating with and onboarding customers into your community. Want to learn more on this? Read our tips for onboarding customers!

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Plan your engagement strategy

How are you going to engage and re-engage members to keep them coming back to your website? First, prepare some initial posts and topics so when customers join your platform there are some conversation starters and things to read. Some examples are inviting them to introduce themselves, asking a question, or a post informing them what they can expect from the community.

Second, prepare content and engagement going past the initial joining. These can be regularly scheduled posts or activities that happen every week and can keep members checking in and participating. Customers are more likely to leave inactive platforms so make sure you are ready with content and ways to re-engage them.

Checking these tasks off will help you easily set up your website and start engaging with your community!

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