How To Successfully Move an Online Discussion Group
Maybe the platform you have used for years has become too expensive. Or maybe that platform is going away altogether because the company has decided to discontinue it (like what happened to YahooGroups).
Maybe the upgrade to the platform you have been using is not at all to your liking. Or maybe you have decided there is a better platform that will provide you and your community with the features it needs.
The big downside of moving an online community is that you are going to lose a LOT of members. But maybe that's okay - maybe you have a lot of inactive users and it's time to "clean house."
A bigger downside, in my opinion, is that you could potentially lose valuable content and any links you have to that community, or that other web sites have to that community, won't work if your original community goes away entirely.
I learned just how dire moving a community can be when a very popular, lively group I was on moved four times in two years. Well more than half of its members never signed up for its final resting place and most of the frequent contributors - the lifeblood of the group - gave up and did not join the final version of the group. The community never recovered.
If you need to move your online community, or you are thinking about it, here are some things to consider:
- First off: think very, very carefully about whether or not moving
the group is, truly, a good idea. This is a monumental task. Are the
reasons you are moving your platform urgent? Does your nonprofit, NGO,
charity or other mission-based organization have the resources you
need to shepherd the process? Are you ready to make the investment of
time and strategy over months to make this work? No matter how hard
you work at it, it is likely you will see a significant drop in the
number of subscribers and participants immediately after making a
transition to a new home, and it will take much work to recover from
that. For this move to be successful, you will need to have the
capacity to take action to counter the drop in membership numbers -
are you ready to do that? Do you have volunteers ready to help and
make the necessary time commitment?
- If you have the time - if this isn't a change you need to make in
days or weeks - take plenty of time with trying out different
platforms, or the one that your company has told you that you must
switch to. Make sure what you choose is going to at least be the same
and, even better, an improvement. Crucially, your new platform
needs to be something you are going to stay with for a long period of
time - many years.
- Find every place online where you provide information on how to
join your community or how to access the group's messages. Volunteers
can help identify all these. You will have to change all of these
directions immediately upon
the launch of your new group home. It not only has to change every
place on your web site, but also, on the web sites of other's that
link to your community - and so you need a strategy of when you are
going to ask those other web sites to make those changes.
- Create a strategy for what should happen - what a user should see -
when a user clicks on the old URL for the community, on the old ULR
for the FAQ of the community, on the old URL for the top five threads
that people may still reference, and any other key pages. Is your IT
staff prepared to make that happen?
- Give the group information about why the change is happening and
updates about the change to the new community home FREQUENTLY. Provide
the information at least one month before the change date, two weeks
before the change date, one week before the change date and one day
before the change date. Provide the information on your current online
community, on your web site (as appropriate), on your intranet, in
direct email messages and, if you have the budget, in a printed,
mailed form. Note exactly what day the last posts to the old group
address will be accepted and what day the new system goes into affect.
- Spell out exactly what favorite features will be available on the
new platform and which ones are going away.
- Detail exactly how people with specialized settings (they have been
getting the digest version of the group via email, or they have been
accessing the group via the web rather than e-mail) can maintain these
settings.
- Remind people that they can filter messages from the group that are
sent via email into one folder on Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird or
whatever email reader they use (rather than having it mixed in with
all their other email).
- Detail what will happen to the archives of discussions for the old
system. Will they be available on the Internet
Wayback Machine?
- Have a small group of current participants practice on the new
group for at least once month before the move, so they can identify
and work out any problems. Test, test, test, test and, also test.
- You want the time between the original community is unavailable and
the time the new community is launched to be as tiny as possible. If
you are going to have a planned outage of a day, announce it for two
days. If you believe your community will need to be offline for two
days, announce it as four days. Things WILL go wrong!
- The day the new group goes live, you should either have everything
re-posted from the former community or, at least, in the last one-two
weeks.
- Create a message that someone would receive via email upon trying
to subscribe to or post to the old community to direct the person to
the new group (if possible).
