Past couple of years I’ve informally researched different edge communities and platforms at conferences and in workshops, listening to and asking people about their community sites. What I have learned so far is that the number of registered users is number one metric. The second interesting finding is that most organization-owned platforms I heard of hover between a few hundred to thirty thousand or so registrations (both active and inactive). Yet nothing ever comes close to millions that popular social networking sites claim.
This is certainly the case even beyond the international development world - while researching this post, found a post about Bank of America reaching some 15.000 users on their online communities.
Yet, there is strength in numbers: only a small percentage of the registered users is contributing actively, and user attrition rates are significant - in my experience can easily be 15-20% per year (those registrations are kept and counted, but users never log in and their email address bounces). We all want to build communities with large numbers of users; lacking any other “serious” quantitative measure, all success is based on that sacred number and donors want to hear about it (in addition to “number of countries engaged”).
The question is will we ever be able to increase the number of users to reach the Web 2.0 levels of millions? The way we approach building community platforms now, I think not.
And here’s why: all community sites operated by organizations imply certain organizational motivation to get people together; it’s all about noble things like working practices, learning, progress… Nothing about our egoistic needs as individuals; what’s in it for us, after all? All those big social sites with millions of users are about the individual’s egoistic need and escapism. It’s about us, not about the organization; dating sites are huge; social networks are huge; nothing else ever comes close. Many other reasons contribute to this disparity, yet this is the biggest one in my view.
Membership potential
The diagram above shows the potential of virtual collaboration applications to attract users. Obviously, the internal organizational communities are limited by the number of staff; the edge is organizationally owned and funded and potentially reaches everyone an organization is associated with - this is where we all are with our tens of thousands of users; finally, only platforms serving individuals’ needs can really attract huge numbers of users.
If you have ever heard of a community platform in international development with a significant number of users, please leave a comment; I’d love to learn about it and why it is successful.
