How To Successfully Move an Online Discussion
Group
How To Successfully Move an Online Discussion Group
Thinking of moving your online discussion group / online community
from one platform to another?
Maybe the platform you have used for years has become too expensive.
Or maybe that platform is going away altogether because the company has
decided to discontinue it (like what happened to YahooGroups).
Maybe the upgrade to the platform you have been using is not at all to
your liking. Or maybe you have decided there is a better platform that
will provide you and your community with the features it needs.
The big downside of moving an online community is that you are going to
lose a LOT of members. But maybe that's okay - maybe you have a lot of
inactive users and it's time to "clean house."
A bigger downside, in my opinion, is that you could potentially lose
valuable content and any links you have to that community, or that other
web sites have to that community, won't work if your original community
goes away entirely.
I learned just how dire moving a community can be when a very popular,
lively group I was on moved four times in two years. Well more than half
of its members never signed up for its final resting place and most of
the frequent contributors - the lifeblood of the group - gave up and did
not join the final version of the group. The community never recovered.
If you need to move your online community, or you are thinking about
it, here are some things to consider:
- First off: think very, very carefully about whether or not moving
the group is, truly, a good idea. This is a monumental task. Are the
reasons you are moving your platform urgent? Does your nonprofit, NGO,
charity or other mission-based organization have the resources you
need to shepherd the process? Are you ready to make the investment of
time and strategy over months to make this work? No matter how hard
you work at it, it is likely you will see a significant drop in the
number of subscribers and participants immediately after making a
transition to a new home, and it will take much work to recover from
that. For this move to be successful, you will need to have the
capacity to take action to counter the drop in membership numbers -
are you ready to do that? Do you have volunteers ready to help and
make the necessary time commitment?
- If you have the time - if this isn't a change you need to make in
days or weeks - take plenty of time with trying out different
platforms, or the one that your company has told you that you must
switch to. Make sure what you choose is going to at least be the same
and, even better, an improvement. Crucially, your new platform
needs to be something you are going to stay with for a long period of
time - many years.
- Find every place online where you provide information on how to
join your community or how to access the group's messages. Volunteers
can help identify all these. You will have to change all of these
directions immediately upon
the launch of your new group home. It not only has to change every
place on your web site, but also, on the web sites of other's that
link to your community - and so you need a strategy of when you are
going to ask those other web sites to make those changes.
- Create a strategy for what should happen - what a user should see -
when a user clicks on the old URL for the community, on the old ULR
for the FAQ of the community, on the old URL for the top five threads
that people may still reference, and any other key pages. Is your IT
staff prepared to make that happen?
- Give the group information about why the change is happening and
updates about the change to the new community home FREQUENTLY. Provide
the information at least one month before the change date, two weeks
before the change date, one week before the change date and one day
before the change date. Provide the information on your current online
community, on your web site (as appropriate), on your intranet, in
direct email messages and, if you have the budget, in a printed,
mailed form. Note exactly what day the last posts to the old group
address will be accepted and what day the new system goes into affect.
- Spell out exactly what favorite features will be available on the
new platform and which ones are going away.
- Detail exactly how people with specialized settings (they have been
getting the digest version of the group via email, or they have been
accessing the group via the web rather than e-mail) can maintain these
settings.
- Remind people that they can filter messages from the group that are
sent via email into one folder on Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird or
whatever email reader they use (rather than having it mixed in with
all their other email).
- Detail what will happen to the archives of discussions for the old
system. Will they be available on the Internet
Wayback Machine?
- Have a small group of current participants practice on the new
group for at least once month before the move, so they can identify
and work out any problems. Test, test, test, test and, also test.
- You want the time between the original community is unavailable and
the time the new community is launched to be as tiny as possible. If
you are going to have a planned outage of a day, announce it for two
days. If you believe your community will need to be offline for two
days, announce it as four days. Things WILL go wrong!
- The day the new group goes live, you should either have everything
re-posted from the former community or, at least, in the last one-two
weeks.
- Create a message that someone would receive via email upon trying
to subscribe to or post to the old community to direct the person to
the new group (if possible).
The day the group goes live at its new home, you
should either have everything re-posted from the former community or, at
least, the content from the last one-two weeks at its previous home (or
maybe more, depending on how active your community is).
You want the time between the original community is
unavailable and the time the new community is launched to be as tiny as
possible. If you are going to have a planned outage of a day, announce it
for two days. If you believe your community will need to be offline for
two days, announce it as four days. Things WILL go wrong!
Have a plan for the first day of the group's new
home, the first week, and the first three months, in terms of what content
you will post and what help you will provide users. Your first month in
particular will require a lot of tech support for community members - you
may want to focus on content related to providing that help to share to
the community, as much as, if not more, than posts that relate to your
community's primary mission. You will also want plenty of interesting
content and discussions to inspire people to participate in the group in
its new home.
If, after four - eight weeks, participant numbers are significantly
down (not just overall members), you have a problem! You will need to
contact former participants directly, by email and phone, and ask them
what's up. You may need talk people through the process over the phone of
subscribing to the new home of the group. You may need to develop a short
webinar to help people understand how to join the group's new home.
After eight weeks, it's time to redo some of the
things you attempted before the community moved:
- Find every place online where you might have the wrong information
on how to join your community or how to access the group's messages.
You also need to make a list of every web site at other organization's
that still links to the wrong address and ask them to change the
information. You can find these relatively easy with any Google, Bing
or Duck Duck Go search.
- Remind everyone both on the community and via email how to access
their favorite features from the previous platform.
- Remind people with specialized settings (they have been getting the
digest version of the group via email, or they have been accessing the
group via the web rather than e-mail) on how to have those settings
with the new system, and remind them on how they can filter messages
from the group that are sent via email into one folder on Microsoft
Outlook and Thunderbird or whatever email reader they use (rather than
having it mixed in with all their other email).
- Remind people where they can find archives of discussions for the
old community.
- Respond to complaints and comments about the move from community
members QUICKLY.
Remember: the previous community members won't use
the community in the new home if YOU aren't using it and if you aren't
providing highly relevant, essential information.
Also, you may find that you lose some community
members permanently. There may be nothing you can do to convince these
former members to join you at this new location. Some people realize, with
the move of a community, that they have lost interest weeks or months
before, and this is their opportunity to disengage. Some people just
cannot accept the change in a system. It's up to you to decide what your
level of "drop outs" is acceptable. But if this is a community that is
mandatory for a certain group to join - your organization's employees,
your organization's volunteers, students in a certain class, etc. - you
then you will have to do a lot of one-on-one and support to help these
reluctant members in making the transition.
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