Celebrating 1 Year of Our Community

kbateman

Hi everyone! This September will mark 1 year of going live with our customer community. We want to celebrate this milestone with our members and also with our internal employees.

Would love to hear what others have done to celebrate the 1 year mark of their community with members and fellow employees. We want to make a splash!

Alex Dunne

Good question! Unfortunately, we missed our 1 year mark (oops - lots of stuff was going on at the time though so I'm giving us a pass 😁) However, one idea we've floated around (and may do as part of a "Summer's End" promo) is a Community scavenger hunt - get users to interact with old posts and/or complete some actions to win prizes. We're also exploring the possibility of more Community-specific events like webinars and roundtables.

Mackenzie

We hosted a big virtual event for our 1-year, and it was a huge success! We also hosted giveaways with each of the sessions, and for participating in a dedicated thread (in this case, our newly launched introduce yourself thread).

We are a B2C business/community, so it might be a bit different if you are B2B. But I'd recommend thinking about what brings your members to your community (in our case, virtual expert events) - and create a celebration that provides that in a big way. This can also incentivize new members to join during this time period and help you hit your goals.

kbateman

Thanks, @Alex Dunne and @mackenzie for sharing! Congrats to you both on your 1 year community anniversary.

Would love to hear from anyone who has done a scavenger hunt in their community and how they made that a success!

Alex, keep me posted on how your roundtables go! We've been hosting some and I'd love to exchange ideas. 😊

PiperWilson

@kbateman - I totally missed this the first time. Congratulations on your anniversary!!

YAY!

Pratheek G

Hi There!

The scavenger hunt idea is a great one, Alex. We did a similar scavenger hunt for our members and they seemed to have loved it (we’ve seen more engagement).

@kbateman, here’s what we did:

• We edited some old posts and added ‘hidden treasures’ such as emoticons/small images in those discussions.
• We told our community members to find these treasures and comment under the posts (this made them open old discussions - engagement again!). We told everyone who (or maybe the first 10 people - can’t recollect) discover these treasures by dropping comments under those old posts will win cool swag.
• We tracked the activity manually and sent out the swag to the commentors/contributors.
  
  It's a simple engagement plan that didn't involve heavy work for us., but I'm sure it needs creative ideas (on what you hide in those discussions - aligning it with your theme) and a good promotional plan.
  
  Good luck with your campaign :)