Community is a powerful and emotive word for everyone, especially today, when the need to truly connect with each other is greater than ever. However, when offered by organizations, it can mean different things, based on the intent.

Building community

The ultimate goal for community builders is to create a place where people can come together around a common purpose, share experiences, knowledge, and help each other progress towards their goals. However, how that turns into reality can be quite different.   

Let’s look at two examples at a very high level—a product support community and a peer support community.

Chances are, you’ve encountered a product support community. It aims to help people troubleshoot or learn how something works after making a purchase. Typically, an open, forum-based community with no account required to participate, the sharing of experiences is based on a Q&A format. As a result, it’s primarily functional and transactional, and once the issue is resolved (hopefully!), the need for the community is essentially over. You’ve achieved your goal, and the community has served its purpose. Great!

Taking that as the benchmark, let’s look at online peer communities for collaboration and support.

Different connections for different reasons

Are people also coming to find others just like them who’ve had similar experiences? Yes. Are they also hoping to learn and increase their understanding to progress towards their goals? Yes, again! 

What are some of the other differences worth noting? Privacy and trust are also important aspects. It’s hard to establish trust and feel truly comfortable opening up personally and professionally when what you share is publicly visible to everyone online. That’s why you need to be a member to log in to view content and activity in our online communities. Enabling anonymity through display names is also an important consideration if the focus is on health and wellbeing. We’ve got that covered, and we also build a trusted environment by giving the member control over who they share what with: the whole community, their close circle, or just themselves.

Now, is the goal of both types of community to create meaningful connections? Yes, but not in the same way. For a product support community, the organization hopes to build its brand and reputation with the individual by establishing a brief but successful 2-way connection. However, for an online peer community, it’s about building long-lasting, beneficial connections between members themselves, which can then positively enhance the brand and reputation of the organization responsible for bringing the community to life—i.e. the halo effect.

Privacy, trust, and anonymity

If you don’t have these things in place, there’s a real risk that what happens online stays online. It could be visible to anyone and everyone—the case with social media in general, and a real concern if you’re opening up about your health.

Compare that to the product support community, where the information shared will be less personal, and creating the right environment for openness and a genuine, authentic connection with another person just isn’t a priority—no matter how frustrated you are with your purchase!

What about timeframes?

That’s another difference between these two types of communities. In a product support community, the expectation for those in need is a quick “in and out” with the problem being resolved. For a peer community, the timeframe will certainly be longer, and a member’s needs will likely change over time as they make progress towards their goal.

Without a doubt, “community” is a powerful word and underscores our need for social connection as people. But in practical terms, it can mean different things based on its purpose, its members, and how it’s created. So the next time you think about community, what’s your type? If it’s a peer community for connection, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing, let’s talk!