We are excited to be launching six new community platforms this spring, and delighted to be welcoming new clients and platform admins to the Made Open community development network.
Some of our new clients and team members have been asking for guidance about promoting the launch of their platform.
We recognise that all communities are different and people respond to different methods of communication - there is no 'one size fits all' approach to promotion. However, we are keen to encourage knowledge sharing within our network and invite you to share your thoughts, ideas and feedback about what worked well for your platform.
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What worked well?
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What didn't work so well?
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What actually happened?
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What would you recommend?
Our official launch plans were derailed by Covid. We'd planned a face to face conference in London to launch the platform in March last year, which was cancelled at the last minute. We still went ahead with a more subdued launch - the PR was already in place so press releases still went out etc but most of social media activity was understandably lost in the Covid noise.
Once things had calmed down a little, we redesigned our conference to a 2 day virtual event which ran in October last year. It was very successful. It enabled us to really introduce what it can do. We used the project teams to share the agenda and speaker presentations etc. and encouraged people to sign up throughout the event. We tried to link back to the platform throughout the 2 days where we could and also asked for feedback - what did people like about the website, what could we do differently etc.
Following the conference we've started running monthly virtual tours. These are roughly an hour long but we basically walk small groups of people through the main functions of the website. It gives us the opportunity to make that personal connection with our community and build quality relationships.
I really like the idea of monthly virtual tours Nicole. Are they drop in style or by invitation? How do you promote them to potential new members?
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