by Jayne Cravens
  via coyotecommunications.com & coyoteboard.com (same web site)

How To Successfully Move an Online Discussion Group

How To Successfully Move an Online Discussion Group Thinking of moving your online discussion group / online community from one platform to another?

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:

The day the group goes live at its new home, you should either have everything re-posted from the former community or, at least, the content from the last one-two weeks at its previous home (or maybe more, depending on how active your community is). 

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!

Have a plan for the first day of the group's new home, the first week, and the first three months, in terms of what content you will post and what help you will provide users. Your first month in particular will require a lot of tech support for community members - you may want to focus on content related to providing that help to share to the community, as much as, if not more, than posts that relate to your community's primary mission. You will also want plenty of interesting content and discussions to inspire people to participate in the group in its new home.

If, after four - eight weeks, participant numbers are significantly down (not just overall members), you have a problem! You will need to contact former participants directly, by email and phone, and ask them what's up. You may need talk people through the process over the phone of subscribing to the new home of the group. You may need to develop a short webinar to help people understand how to join the group's new home.

After eight weeks, it's time to redo some of the things you attempted before the community moved:

Remember: the previous community members won't use the community in the new home if YOU aren't using it and if you aren't providing highly relevant, essential information.

Also, you may find that you lose some community members permanently. There may be nothing you can do to convince these former members to join you at this new location. Some people realize, with the move of a community, that they have lost interest weeks or months before, and this is their opportunity to disengage. Some people just cannot accept the change in a system. It's up to you to decide what your level of "drop outs" is acceptable. But if this is a community that is mandatory for a certain group to join - your organization's employees, your organization's volunteers, students in a certain class, etc. - you then you will have to do a lot of one-on-one and support to help these reluctant members in making the transition.
   

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