Picking the right features for a community – or how to bake a cake.

I have been involved in a number of community creations in the past few years, either as a consultant or just speaking to friends. One thing that always struck me as odd was that many people can list the features they want in the community, but don’t have any idea about what the purpose of their community should be. „I want to build a community, and I really want it to have a wiki, and groups, and subgroups, and sub-subgroups.“

To me, that’s a little bit like saying you’d like to bake a cake, and it should have baking soda and flour and some vanilla in it. The only time you would look at the ingredients this way before baking a cake, is when it’s 10pm on Saturday evening, no stores are open, and you really need a cake right now because your mother in law is coming over on Sunday. Then, you’ll take all the ingredients you have, and try to make something out of it – out of desperation.

When you’re planning out a community, you’re usually not that desperate. So why pick out the ingredients before deciding on a cake? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to decide that you’d like a chocolate cake first, and then take the best chocolate cake recipe you can find, to see what ingredients you’ll need?

That’s how I like to approach community development. First, I map out my goal – what do I want to achieve with this community? What is my purpose or my end goal? Then, I break this down into sub-goals, little things I need to achieve or that the community needs to enable in order to live up to its purpose. I take this list of sub-goals, and match each one up with the features that are needed to achieve it.

For example, with The Moderator Community, one of our goals was to assist community managers with their careers. What would help them with their career? In our view, it was access to jobs, an easy way to connect with peers, and a way to easily find information and knowledge on community management. After establishing this, we thought about the features needed to achieve this. To provide access to jobs, we created a job board, where anyone would be able to post jobs. Later, when we realized our job section was one of the most popular areas of the community, we built on what we already had, and added a job feed from one of the biggest job sites in the world, Monster. For a way to connect with peers, we built user profiles, buddy lists and groups on specific topics. The resource section, which is essentially a link library, serves to provide access to information, and so on.

The key is to choose your features wisely, with the end result in mind. A feature shouldn’t be added just because it’s new and the cool thing to have right now. Rather than trying to maximize the number of features in your community, focus having a few key features that will drive the community’s purpose, and on making those as easy to use as possible. Decide on what the community should achieve, and then choose the ingredients that will get you there. If you absolutely have to have that wiki regardless of your goals, then have it (I put vanilla in every cake I make, regardless of the recipe. I just like its flavor). But always remember your community’s purpose and focus on advancing that. The vanilla isn’t going to make a chocolate cake if you forget the chocolate!