The key components of your community’s foundation are its vision and mission. Those sound simple enough, right? You’ve likely seen vision and mission statements plastered to the walls of offices, in libraries and museums, and even on the entrances to shopping malls.

Great communities exist because of the amazing people involved. I don’t think anyone would dispute that. Nonetheless, as departments and companies plan communities or they make decisions related to their online spaces, they tend to forget it's about people. I think part of the problem is we replace the word people when we talk about community, and use terms like members, users, or even super users. By using this terminology, it can be easy to forget the people factor. It’s very similar how in some corners project managers talk about “a resource”, when they really mean a person.

When a community fails, more often than not, it’s because there’s no perceived value to the company. Your boss may one day ask you “what’s the value that this community brings to the organization—why do we even have a community?” Unfortunately, if you aren’t prepared and don’t have quantifiable results that clearly reflect the value of your community, you may soon end up forced to close the community or worse, without a job.

There’s a secret sauce behind creating the perfect knowledge base content. It’s called research. 

Knowing what you need to write about isn’t a simple walk in the park—it takes time to know what types of questions you need to tackle, and even more so, how to respond to them. 

While these terms are often used interchangeably, there’s a difference between simply having an audience and having a community. There was perhaps a time before when these two terms were blurred, but over the past couple of years people have been throwing out the term “community,” at just about anything it’ll stick to—and it’s clearly wrong. In other words, people have been using the term community incorrectly by identifying a simple audience or following and deeming it to be a community, when really, it’s not.