Creating a beautiful website can be one of the most effective ways a community can engage their residents, connect with their visitors, and support their local businesses. However, there are many nuances and requirements to pulling off a successful community website so that it gains traction and remains sustainable for the long term.
Let people submit their own content
Content that is created by members of your own community tends to be more organic, relatable, and relevant. This helps the website accurately represent your community which is really the ultimate goal. At the same time, it also helps prevent your community members from getting frustrated with information that is not interesting or relevant to them.
If community members know they can submit their own content then they are more likely to be participate with the website and be willing to talk about it, share it, and become an advocate of its usage. Ultimately, this leads to greater engagement and overall awareness of the website creating a snowball effect that helps everyone involved.
Events Calendar
Events are most likely the primary reason why someone would visit your community website. By showing a comprehensive list of fun events that are happening soon makes your community feel active and vibrant. In addition, it also makes residents more likely to attend local events which the hosts will of course appreciate and benefit from (usually monetarily).
By allowing members of your community to create their own events, it opens the door for multiple positive outcomes. Event hosts can be sure to plan their event on a day where they won't compete with other events, build excitement and anticipation around their event, and share event information through their own channels such as newsletters and social media.
The events should be user-friendly and easy to read, look enticing with vibrant imagery, and be very clear on the what-where-when. You can also go deeper and provide cost information, dress code, and contact details for the event host should a potential guest have questions.
Unfortunately, community events are also the hardest to keep up with because they are always changing. Missing certain events, or even worse, still showing events that already happened or that are cancelled will quickly tell your site visitors that your website is not a good resource. Because of that, you will want to have a dedicated community member or staff member that is solely focused on keeping the calendar up to date (CivicLift's Community Hub automates this process, learn more about it here!).
Business Directory
You can never go wrong with highlighting the wonderful local businesses. A comprehensive business directory becomes a valuable resource for both the community and visitors. Whether they are looking for services, products, or restaurants – having an easily accessible list of local businesses will be a well-utlized aspect of your community website.
The most important thing is to make sure business listing guidelines are clear and easy to follow. This ensures that all businesses submitted will have accurate information and photos. It also helps you filter out any business that is not locally owned or has an incorrect physical address listed (it happens more often than you think).
The way the businesses are displayed should be classy and simple. A good community website will have a searchable filterable directory where users can easily find a location by name, type, or services offered.
Maps & Guides
A critical tool for any community website is a comprehensive map of businesses and destinations. It gives visitors the opportunity to explore your community in-depth and make sure they can find all the locations that you want to make sure they find.
It also helps if you offer resources like restaurant recommendation lists or neighborhood walking guides featuring businesses and local attractions. In this way, you can expose your community members to the wide range of businesses in their area and guide them to the best aspects of your neighborhoods.
List Coupons and Specials from Local Businesses
Ever since Groupon took off there has been a flood of daily deal sites trying to capitalize on bringing people into new locations. Why not tap into that interest for your own town? Make sure the coupons offered are relevant and available at multiple locations in the community so people have an incentive to go out of their normal routine.
If you can, partner with the businesses to offer special promotional codes and discounts on products. The more places offering these special deals, the better. In this way, you can reach a wider audience of residents and visitors to stop in at the businesses in your community.
List Volunteering Opportunities & Charities
By listing volunteer opportunities, you help organizations successfully run programs while simultaneously educating your community members of what non-profits exist in town and what it is they do.
For example, why not have a regular day to show off your favorite local non-profit? Have a specific event page where you encourage any community member to get involved. When you submit it you can list the best and most interesting volunteer opportunities that this organization has going on at the time. There are countless ways to educate, promote, and entertain all with
Community Blog
A community website should have a blog to highlight businesses, events, and stories from the area. By highlighting content that is outside of what you would normally see in your local newspaper or on the local news channel you can help promote those places and people who are doing great things in your community.
From new seasonal menus becoming available at a local restaurant, to a new business filling up the empty storefront on Main Street, or an art opening at the local gallery - there are always local stories worth mentioning and that people want to hear about.
Mobile friendly
Your community website should be responsive and mobile friendly. It doesn't matter how fancy it looks or the amount of information you have if people are unable to access your site when they are out enjoying your community.
Your mobile friendly community website should have all the same features that your desktop version has, just in a condensed form that is more easily read while on the go.
Curation process to vet the submitted content
After the content is submitted (by anyone in your community), there should be a moderation queue where content submissions are reviewed by moderators before being published to ensure all submissions adhere to your standards for quality.
Allow submitters to maintain their own listings
People who submit content should be able to maintain their own presence without any help from moderators. If an event is cancelled or a phone number is changed, the last thing you want is an email asking you to make the changes for them. This will be less frustrating for them and keep things easier to manage for you.
Encourage participation from all of the stakeholders
In order to build a thriving community website, you need buy in from the businesses, community leaders, and event organizers. You can't do this if you don't get them involved. Make sure when they submit their events or businesses, that there is an easy way for them to provide updates without requiring extra steps/clicks - as well as more ways they can use the site to highlight what they do.
Make Tutorial Videos for Common Features
People are more likely to use something if they have a basic understanding of how it works. By making a set of short tutorial videos, you can ensure that people are confident in how to use the most common features on your site (e.g. adding listing/blog posts, uploading photos, etc.).
Making tutorial videos can be time consuming, but the payoff is worth it. Instead of having to handle support by sending help emails back and forth, you can just refer people with questions directly to a video that answers their question or concerns.
Create companion social media accounts
Think of the main social media platforms as the busy sidewalk outside your store and making posts to those platforms as putting a sign out that grabs their attention and invites them to come in.
Creating a profile on the various social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, etc.) for your community site allows you to send out updates to your followers about interesting content they can find on your website. Of course, you'll want to be sure to include a link in any social media updates that drives people from these platforms directly to said content on website.
Social media content calendar
Instead of scrambling to come up with new ideas for content all the time, use a content calendar to schedule what you'll be posting when. This gives you more time and space to focus on putting together quality posts full of information that is helpful and relevant to your community.
Sure, you can get by with a spreadsheet and discipline, or you can use any of the great tools out there such as Loom.ly.
Start a Newsletter
Again, it's all about meeting people where they are and someone's email inbox is somewhere where you know they will be!
By starting a monthly or weekly newsletter, you can remain on top of people's minds and invite them to come back to your website regularly.
Writing a newsletter is no small feat and will probably require someone on your team who has experience writing them. It should be fluff-free (no promotional messages!) and help people feel like they got value for reading it. One easy way to accomplish this is by including a roundup of interesting items that were shared on the website in the
Backup plan for unpredictable budget cycles
It's always good to come up with a backup plan for how you'll deal with the unpredictability of your community website's budget. Here at CivicLift, our mantra is "remove the dependencies". While that typically applies to our software development process and community content aggregation methods, it certainly applies to budgets as well. Here are a few ideas for other ways to secure a budget for long term sustainability.
Sponsors
Especially if your site gets a lot of traffic, finding sponsors might be a great option. Think local businesses such as community banks, real estate agencies, and other businesses that benefit from having a thriving community. You can offer them placement in your website header, their logo in the newsletters, and regular mentions on social media.
Premium Paid Features
Perhaps there are some businesses that want to have their events highlighted on the calendar or get special mention on your social media channels. You can charge for this, and with a few key businesses upgrading to a premium presence on your site, you could keep the project funded.
Ads
If you're not going to have a paid subscription, then ads might be another way to get things funded. Of course, this requires a dedicated sales person who can cultivate advertisers and negotiate rates with them.
Whatever you choose, it's important to ensure that the site remains free for community members to use and promote through. Asking for even $1 will prove to be a dealbreaker for some users.
Track Website Activity
To develop a true ongoing growth strategy for your website, you must track your website activity. This will allow you to see which content is being engaged with the most, how often people return to your site, what they're spending time on and even more advanced tracking. Each of these insights can provide you with valuable information for developing new features and content that your community wants.
Having website traffic metrics on hand also make it much easier to prove value to those considering sponsorship, ads, or simply just spending their time uploading content to your site.
In conclusion
The best way to get residents and businesses connected is by providing a place for them to connect. A good community website that is kept up-to-date will be worth the investment and enhance the social and economic health of your community. Click here if you're interested in building a new community website with us!
