By Kelly Whitfield
Why most organisations think they have a community when what they actually have is a mailing list.
That observation, based on my experience of owning and working closely with multiple businesses, is not a criticism. I get it. You think you’re doing the right thing by collecting the names and email addresses of people who came to an event once, completed a lead gen, or sent you an enquiry. Maybe you send them a monthly newsletter, or invite them to an end of year dinner. I’m certain you’re in touch when you want to sell them something. It’s something, but it could be so much more.
I spent over a decade in specialist recruitment, which means I spent over a decade watching organisations manage audiences, calling it their ‘community’. Yet I believe these are different things. I worked with membership bodies who had hundreds of paying members that had never once even spoken to one another. Others, who had networking, only ran it twice a year, for a few hours, for whoever could make it on the day.
Every single one of those organisations was throwing away value without even knowing they were doing it.
Think of it like this: most organisations are basically acting as landlords: except, they never collect rent. They do the difficult bit, putting in the leg work to build an audience, earn their trust and compile them into one list. But then, at the crucial moment, they send their audience away off to LinkedIn to connect with one another, or to an external job board when they’re hiring, or to a third party ticketing site to register for events, or to a newsletter platform to receive updates.
Every one of those platforms then does their own monetisation using the relationship that the organisation built. They’re the ones getting the data, the activity and the revenue which could and should have been kept in-house.
The fix to this problem is to create one place, owned by the organisation, where members can connect directly, where opportunities are posted and filled within the network, and where events are operated without third parties getting involved. Somewhere every interaction stays inside an environment that the organisation controls and benefits from. My business, KLIK SaaS®, offers an example of what that can look like.
By keeping everything together, the membership body that had been spending money on recruitment agencies to fill its own team’s roles can now post those vacancies inside a platform which they own, to its own members, for nothing. The chamber of commerce that was advertising its events through Eventbrite – for a fee – and losing the attendee data, now manages all the data behind every registration. The trade association whose
members were connecting on LinkedIn, building relationships on a platform that belongs to someone else, now has those conversations happening inside an environment it controls, can see and benefits from directly.
The commercial effect compounds the longer it runs. A member who has posted opportunities, found suppliers and built connections inside the platform has a reason to stay that has nothing to do with whether the newsletter was good that month.
It’s a new way of thinking about managing an audience. That’s why I use the word ‘community’. As well as the commercial benefit, by keeping everything together it means that customers have easier access to one another as well as to the organiser themselves. Inevitably, this boosts retention because you are providing something they can’t get anywhere else.
Most of the organisations I speak to get this immediately. They’re the ones who have communities, not audiences.
About Kelly
Kelly M. Whitfield is a serial entrepreneur with twenty years’ experience building businesses in the North East. She founded and scaled two professional services companies organically, with her own capital and without external investment, before returning to build KLIK SaaS® – a licensed, white-label platform that lets organisations own, manage and monetise their professional communities.
