Congratulations on starting to build your online community! Finding ways to make your community engaged and active can be difficult. This page includes tips and tricks to get to know the platform, it’s structure and concepts, how to populate your Space, and how the functionalities on Alkemio can keep your community active. But first, you are not alone! So join our Communities for Change Space, where you can share insights and experiences from other leads as well as tips and tricks from the Alkemio team.
While you may be managing your projects using Excel spreadsheets, Trello to manage your tasks, Miro to capture your brainstorm sessions, or LinkedIn to find relevant people to connect with, the Alkemio platform combines it all. All centered around the urgent societal and environmental challenges of today.
As with any tooling, understanding the platform will help you get the most out of it. A good place to start is reading about the platform structure and its key concepts on this support page. Are you interested in reading more about the mission and vision of the foundation behind the platform? Have a look at our Manifesto.
After the Alkemio team has set up the first Demo Space for you, there are some general decisions for you to make about the set-up of your Space. If you navigate to the settings of the Space, you will find them under the sub-section Settings.
Here you can decide on the visibility of your Space (public or private), who can join your Space (any user, only invited users, or users associated with certain organizations), and what the members of your Space can do. You may also want to select a few questions for the application form.
Now let’s have a look at the other sub-sections: profile, context, community, updates, Subspaces, templates, and storage.
To make your Space visually attractive for new members, it is important to choose an engaging tagline as well as visuals. They will be visible on the home page for all visitors of the platform as well as the dashboard page of your Space.
Also, you can add additional tags to summarize the content and make the Space easier to find. Finally, you can add references (links as well as documents) for your community, such as your website of the facilitating organization, an article or report related to this Space, an introduction video, etc.
For yourself, and for the members of your community, it is essential to understand the context of the Space. We have divided this into four key sections (*vision, background, impact, and who should be involved). The provided questions will guide you through filling in all these sections. Note that you can also use text styles such as bold/headings etc. or add images to make it more visually attractive/understandable. Start with a first pass, it is always adjustable later.
Here you can manage the pending applications and invitations, as well as the community roles of the member and leading users and organizations.
There are four different types of community roles for users and organizations:
These sections are more straightforward as they allow you to post updates, to manage the set of Subspaces, and to see the documents uploaded in your Space.
If you already have a few ideas in mind regarding Subspaces for this community, you can directly add them under the Subspaces tab. Our context questions will guide you through the process of framing your Subspace. Note that for Subspaces, you can follow similar steps as the ones for the Space to further populate it.
This sections allows you to decide what templates you want to make available for the community. These templates can be used by members when they are working with the collaboration tools, but also when they start a new Subspace. You can find more information on how to use, create, and import templates on this support page.
Besides some descriptive information, it is key to engage and guide your community when they land on the platform. Three key functionalities that can help you with this are the following:
Bringing your community together in on- or offline events or meet-ups is key to activate them. Here you can add the upcoming events with a description, time and location, or a link to a meeting or sign up page.
When you start working in your Space, there is a default section for Recommendations by the Host. This section can be used to guide your community to the most relevant content of the Space. Especially when they enter the Space for the first time, they want to know where to go. This collection of links can for example include a ‘getting started in this Space’ document or an explainer video, questions that most urgently need their action, or a sign up link for the next community event. Ofcourse it is always possible to delete the section if you don’t want to use it.
Instead of only bringing the community together and start discussions, the platform allows you to really start collaborating together. The platform offers you a set of collaboration tools to work with, including discussions, whiteboards, collections of links or knowledge. Ask for example your community to put articles up with relevant knowledge, to create their stakeholder map on a whiteboard, or to share relevant experiences.
You are able to use as you see most fit for the Space that you are working on. Have a look at this support page to discover how you can use these Collaboration Tools.
Updates are a powerful way to keep your Community informed and engaged. They allow you to broadcast messages to the community, and then each member (with notifications enabled!) will receive an email with your update. As explained earlier, you can send updates via the settings Updates tab.
When you have populated the Space, you can start sharing it in your network. Pretty much all content on Alkemio is shareable via direct links. You can then share the link directly via email, on LinkedIn, or direct message in platforms such as WhatsApp.
Hopefully these few steps will get you up and running on the platform! There is a lot more to discover with regards to functionalities or best practices. Have a look at our blog posts to find more content on various topics.
Also, you can always find further guidance on our support page or contact us directly.