Choosing a Platform For Your Community

Request for Proposal - Your Guide to Selecting The Right Platform For Your Community A COMMUNITY BUILDING TOOL BY CLI

TOOLS/RFP

Note: Qs marked * will immediately help narrow your options. So if you have a long-list, look at these questions first, and narrow down your selection before asking vendors the other questions.

Functionality and Features

Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

Use case*

Who are the primary users/clients of this platform, and are they like you?

There are hundreds of vendors available - some specialise in Associations, others in virtual events. Some are Learning Management Systems that have added a forum, others may be built specifically as Community Management platforms - but for specific types of community, eg Tech Support or Product Advocacy. The development and focus of these platforms will depend on who their key clients are - are they like you?

Testimonials (but Once you know who's using the the real ones)

platform, speak to them

Integrations*

What integrations do you need

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The vendor will have a dozen shining testimonials, but skip those and speak directly to the Community Manager of a few of the organizations you've identified as clients, to get the full picture

Examples: Your CRM (like hubspot or salesforce), Learnng Management System - if separate, Email marketing (like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign), Finance & payment systems (like Xero and Stripe) Social Media (like facebook or twitter). Also think about other apps like messsenging apps - what'sapp or wechat, your email system etc

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TOOLS/RFP

Functionality and Features

Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

Sign-on Capabilities*

How sophisticated do you need to be

For example, do you want people to be able to sign-up/in using their social channels? Does sign-in to the community have to be part of their sign-in to your other systems/offers?

Customisation of layout and functionality

How important is bespoke customisation?

Is customisation important to you- do you need it to work in exactly the way you envisage, or are you happy to fit your requirements into the an existing solution?

Branding and Design

How important is customisation of design?

Similarly, how customisable does the look and feel need to be? Do you mind if there's visibility of platform brand or do you need full white-label?

Mobile Capabilities

How responsive is the system?

Most systems offer a fully responsive system that is as clean and elegant on mobile as desktop - so often the differentiator is whether you need the mobile capability as an App, or whether web-based is preferred/suitable

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Functionality and Features

TOOLS/RFP

Profile capabilities

Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

How customisable should profiles be

Most systems have customisable profiles, enabling you to add or remove fields. More sophisticated systems have the ability to pre-populate member profiles from your CRM. Also question what members can access and control in their profile

Peer to peer communication

P2P Comms is at the heart of most communities, so the level of functionality here is important

Question whether abilitys can send each other private messages, whether adminsitrators can message members or send announcements, whether and how admin messages get displayed. Consider how group discussions look and feel, and how visible they are/where they sit within the platform and whether members can get notified of new conversations/messages etc to pull them in to the community - how flexible is the set-up of this, can members control what they see?

Moderation and Engagement

How much control and visibility do admins and users get?

What level of control do admins get over posts?

What level of segmentation is possible - can users create sub-groups, or conversations by topic? Can private groups be created? Does the platform have the means for members to host their own video calls through the system? Can access to members be restricted to specific groups? Can specific groups have specific moderators?

User admin priviledges

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What level of control For example, is it possible to set up communiis availble over difty wide admins, but also to set up admins who ferent user types manage certain sub-groups? Is there flexibility to control access and control priviledges for different levels of admin (this is particularly important if you intend to empower community members to become admins)

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Functionality and Features

Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

Post Visibility

How does the forum part of the community look and feel?

Can members amend their view to reflect their preferences or do they all see the same thing?

Can members vote or like for posts to boost them?

Can members create polls or add other multimedia content? Do older posts get auto-archived?

Tools/Resources/ How much flexibility Library/Articles is there for adding

Can users add content, or only admins? Can subgroup libraries be set up and/or can content be shuffled based on most consumed? What file types are supported? Can video be embedded?

Can content be categorised or tagged? How effective is the content search bar?

TOOLS/RFP

content - and are there storage limits?

Directory

What are the capabilities of the Directory

How flexible and adaptable are fields, for directory entry? Can vendors add themselves, or is it restricted to admin-only? Do directories contain tags or categories or effective ways for users to search for their needs?

Multimedia capabilities

What are the "extras?"

Can the system create and handle quizzes and polls?

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Functionality and Features

Think About

TOOLS/RFP

Onboarding

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

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Some of this will depend on the level of integrations possible - but what are the system features to allow for onboarding, for example are email nurture sequences generated once a member joins?

Can users be shown specific new member content? Is there capability to add a "demo" or showround of the platform?

Sponsorship

Is there sponsorship capabilities?

Can ads be added both site-wide and against specific sub-sets of content?

Reporting, tracking, governance & exports

What analytics are available? Can data be exported?

Can you pull reports on engagement, member discussion, topic trends, resources consumed by members etc? What does the system track? Is this extractable as csv data not just pretty reports? Is full member data exportable?

What capabilities does the system have for events

Do you need to host virtual events on the platform - if so, can you? Can you host webinars and live training? Can the look, feel and design of the virtual event be created separately to the broader community? Does the system have event management efficiency tools such as auto-generation of social media tiles for speakers? Or the ability for speakers to be able to update their own profiles and biographies? Can it handle registration for the event?

Virtual and Live events*

Vendor 1

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TOOLS/RFP

Functionality and Features

Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

Gamification

Are there any builtin gamification features?

For example, competitions and leaderboards for most engaged attendees etc or user "levels" and built-in rewards for contributors

Affiliate marketing

Is there any in-built affiliation capabilities

Can the system generate unique codes which track where users "arrive" from?

Payment Systems How are payments

Which 3rd party integrations are available for payment? Can the system handle payment plans? And automatically process recurring payments? How does the system handle local tax, across multiple regions?

processed?

Pricing*

What's the pricing model?

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If it's per user, with different tiers based on your numbers - be cautious about committing too high too soon. Pricing varies considerably, so if you have an approx budget in mind, this will help you shortlist - however, in doing so it's worth keeping one or two outliers, over your price bracket, incase you determine the extra capabilities and functionality they can deliver might warrant the over-spend

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Think About

Questions to ask yourself and then put to your vendor

Resources

How technical is the platform? How complex? How long will it take you to be a confident user?

The more complex your requirements, the more complex the system you'll be using. Be cautious about over-thinking your needs, then choosing a complex product to serve those needs, only to discover you don't have the resources to manage it all

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TOOLS/RFP

Functionality and Features

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