Many a project has gone down in flames because they failed to take the time to really think through a communication plan that educated their stakeholders of the organizational value of their project.  Communication is one of the most important factors to the success of your community. Without communicating your project or program’s benefits and successes, users and stakeholders alike won’t be aware of new offerings, program progress, or the goals and direction of your project.

“The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them.”

–Sam Walton

The first step in any Communication Plan is identifying your stakeholders.  This is a key step that is often overlooked.  Many projects and programs focus only on keeping users informed about community news, however its important to look outside your active community members and find the stakeholders that are most important to your continued success.  This may include management, partners, or even other projects and programs only tangentially related to yours.  Putting together this list comes first and will help you not only identify key players but also will help you discover the correct communication channel to reach them.

Next up, you guessed it, identify all your potential communication channels.  Don’t just rely on email or Twitter to get your message out.  Make sure you talk to others within your organization or your partner’s organizations to understand what options are available to you.  For instance does your organization have building monitors that display company news?  Can you schedule webinars?  Does your partner’s have community newsletters that you can contribute articles to?  There are lots of ways that you can communicate to a larger audience usually you just have to look around and ask lots of questions.

The next step is to think through a communication plan that makes sense. Community communications can broadly be grouped into two types, event driven and regularly scheduled.  Your community planning needs to have plans established for each type.

Event driven communication is, as the name aptly implies, usually driven by some event within your project.  This could be the election of new officers, platform upgrades, scheduled downtime, new releases, etc.

Regularly scheduled communications are necessary in projects to keep the general audience and key stakeholders informed about the progress your project or program is making.  This form of communication is where you have a great opportunity to keep your most important stakeholders up to date on progress you’ve made in achieving organizational goals.

The plan below is a basic skeleton plan that identifies which channel will be used to articulate messaging for each communication channel and provides an estimated frequency for communication. Each plan will be different but this should give you some ideas.

Regularly Scheduled Communications

Event Driven Communication

Of course you’ll want to actually go through the Event plan and fill in your own specific information and dates. You may even want to be very specific and include the Communication Channel owner and prep dates that include coordinating with each channel, but using this model you can plan several months ahead and never be caught “reacting” rather than “communicating”.

I recently stumbled across a great post called Communities Manifesto by Stan Garfield that I highly recommend.  In his post Mr. Garfield lays out 10 principals that define community and also has suggestions for helping them grow and mature.

What communities are not …

Two of his principals in particular caught my attention because I’m wrestling with how to explain the basics of community to a company that draws a distinction between where they are now and where they want to go, so these two really jumped out at me.

1. Communities are not teams
2. Communities are not websites

These two principles nicely articulate what a community is not and sometimes that’s more helpful and descriptive than trying to state exactly what they are.  Communities are NOT some nebulous team to manage or a website to maintain, communities are people.

But let’s think about where many companies are coming from.  Corporations have a clear chain of command, hierarchy and conformity are the norm and everything is organized by function and has an objective to be met.  Teams or websites fit this model of thinking pretty well which leads many managers to try to manage communities as if they were one or the other.  Concepts like “distributed decision making”, “earned leadership”, “reputation management”, and “merit based promotion” are foreign concepts that are not well understood and certainly not something they’d want to embrace in a hierarchical environment…. historically.  However, companies are beginning to appreciate the benefits of less structure and more communal efforts in productivity, worker morale and innovative thinking.

So what are communities …

Communities are not projects to be managed, but are people voluntarily coming together around a common interest or set of problems.

In essence communities are about …

1. People, people, people
2. Articulating a vision that others can embrace and commit to
3. Sharing information and ideas
4. Observing how things are done and helping out
5. Working together to fulfill the vision

So for all you managers out there trying to manage your way to a successful community, STOP.  Learn to manage by letting go and gently nudging here and there when things go astray but mostly just try to facilitate communication and stop trying to managing.

Originally posted by me @ OnCollabNet as Hold On.

The amount of control a community has over process and direction within a project has recently come up in a situation I’ve been involved with and I think it’s a great topic for a post since it strikes at the heart of many company’s trials and tribulations in creating vibrant communities.  The real question in these situations is not one of control but of trust.  Can you just be along for the ride and let someone else influence your project even if you don’t agree with everything they do?

Many organizations and people find it difficult to let go and allow their communities to shape the overall direction and goals of their projects.  They fear that by allowing users to get involved at a deeper level chaos will ensue and they’ll be mired in endless debate over what they perceive as insignificant issues.  However, the opposite of control is not chaos, the opposite of control is trust. Trust that you’re not the only one who has good ideas.  Trust that even if it doesn’t follow your established processes it might be okay.  Trust that you don’t know everything!

This lack of trust is one of the biggest reasons your community is not growing and it’s not a lack of trust in your project (well maybe it is , it’s that you don’t trust your community!  This is especially common in enterprises that have well established processes or in any company that has a title of Senior Vice President . In larger organizations that have worked to develop processes for product development, marketing, and sales, it’s hard to find someone in command willing to allow control to slip through their fingertips and into the community and shape their baby in some way they don’t agree with or that their processes can’t handle. But that’s what it takes to grow your brand and community, hopping on and letting your community take you where it wants to go.

One of the best books I read in all of 2009 was Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfurth.  In it he details the making of many brands that allowed themselves to be hijacked by their communities to become successes: Dr Marten, PBS (Pabst Blue Ribbon not the broadcasting service:), Red Bull, and others.  All of these brands did something unique, instead of trying to define themselves in a traditional marketing sense, they let their fans influence and define the brand, and that’s what you need to do in order to grow your fan base… let go.

Don’t confuse letting go with abandoning all your processes, my point is not to let your community suddenly start running everything without any leadership from you.  The point I’m trying to make is you need to stop trying to control EVERYTHING.  Pick your battles and arm yourself with good arguments.  Don’t use coercion due to your position or ignore your communities input, use your communication channels to guide your community during those times when you see it straying from the path.  Having this blend of give and take will allow your community to feel a sense of ownership and grow your community and brand.

I just read Joel Spolsky’s blog entitled “A Little Less Conversation” which discusses something I’ve blogged about in the past here and here, communication overload.

After reading that post I began to consider my own personal experience in meetings over the last dozen or so years and decided to add an addendum to the communication node problem that was so eloquently detailed in the Mythical Man Month by Brooks.

The problem with Brooks’ theory of intercommunication is that it doesn’t take into account the “Number of Managers” in any given meeting.  He assumes in his calculation that all nodes in a communication network are equal.  This is a mistake.  All nodes are not equal, as anyone who has sat through a meeting with more than one manager participating can attest to.

Managers have keen insight into every major (and minor) issue at hand and willingly share that information with the team in a seemingly endless discourse that greatly adds to the meeting’s productivity and value.  In fact I’ve been in meetings with multiple managers that have lasted two, maybe three, times longer than the scheduled meeting length due to the significant wisdom that each of the managers was imparting to their counterparts and the team.

This imbalance in communication node weighting should be reflected in a revised formula for group intercommunication (especially meetings).  Brooks’ original formula can be stated as n(n-1)/2=communication pathways. The revised formula adds the significance of management communication to the pathways problem by accurately describing the impact of management on the original formula.  This new formula can be expressed as (n(n-1/2)) ^x (^x indicates raised to the power of x) where x is the number of managers.

As an example I will restate the original example given by Brooks and then show the difference when true communication weighting has been added…

Example: 50 developers give 50 · (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.

However, given our new formula and assuming the presence of 3 managers (or significant stakeholders) into our team we now see the impact of the additional management on our communication overhead.

Example: 50 developers + 3 Managers give (50 · (50 – 1) / 2)^3  = 1838265625 channels of communication.

There, that’s better.  This new formula clearly shows the benefit of adding additional management resources to any project.

You can thank me later Fred .

Related Reading

• The Mythical 40 Hour Workweek
• Productivity and Multitasking
• What Do Potential Energy and Collaboration Tools Have in Common?
• Lost Productivity

“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.”

–Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln may have understood trust and community better than anyone in the history of the United States.   He knew that maintaining trust meant having the people’s confidence… and with confidence you can lead.   I can’t imagine having to make the kind of  decisions that he did, but I can imagine how important maintaining the people’s trust must have been to him through that period in history.  Every leader must have his community’s trust to be effective.

Building and maintaining trust stems from two elements, transparency and action, one without the other will not work, but together they have proven to be a winning combination for instilling the necessary confidence to effectively lead.

Transparency

“Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe”

–Abraham Lincoln

Leadership means making decisions that aren’t always popular, and sometimes making mistakes, but always being honest about the facts.  All great leaders seem to understand this and go out of their way to provide as much information to their communities as possible.

Decision-making cannot happen in a bubble.  Leaders have to have the vision and confidence to share information,  both good and bad, and present it in a way that followers appreciate.  Making changes and enacting policy just because you can often leaves you leading a lifeless community and looking for a new job.

“I determined to be so clear that no honest man could misunderstand me and no dishonest one could successfully misrepresent me.”

–Abraham Lincoln

Delivering on Promises

Spend time letting your followers learn that you are firm, resolute, and committed in the daily performance of your duty. Doing so will gain their respect and trust.

–Abraham Lincoln

The other component necessary in building trust is delivering on what you say you’re going to.  We all have a tendency to talk about a better tomorrow and some even have compelling ideas that excite others, however to build trust and respect within a community requires ACTION.  Over time simple progress towards a goal creates trust and respect from your community.  Saying you’re going to do something and never quite following through eventually leads to a loss of momentum in your community and your project.  By making steady progress towards a goal and communicating your intentions, you invite constant feedback and analysis of your plan.  In a world that changes as fast as this one steady action combined with community input leads to great things.