Companies Use Online Communities to Grow
Even before the redesign, the ACS chat rooms and message boards were immensely popular, accounting for 27 percent of the traffic to the site, according to Miller. Eighteen percent of the user population was active in discussions on an ongoing basis, he says. (As CIO went to print, Miller was still configuring the site’s reporting software and didn’t have usage numbers for the community forums on the new site.)
ACS’s community-building also has a bottom-line component. Miller says creating a sense of community among ACS’s constituents helps the organization grow its relationships with them. "If someone comes to us and is interested in volunteering, we want to convert them into someone who also donates. If someone comes to us looking for general health information, we want to convert them to somebody who volunteers for us," he says.
Offering a sense of community also ties people to ACS and its mission. Miller says ACS’s constituents have a sense of loyalty to the organization because they’re a part of the website’s community. "For a nonprofit, that means you’re always going to be at the top of a person’s mind when they start thinking about donations," he says.
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