Why You Should Start Building Community Using "Campaigns"

I think it would be useful for us to think of our community work in the structure of "campaigns".One of the challenges we face in the community industry is that community isn't something that has a beginning and end. It starts when the company launches, and it ends when it either dies or evolves into a new community. This makes it hard in a business that's built on experiments, data and proof of ROI. You can't efficiently explain, focus on, and measure something that has no beginning and no end. How do you know when your job is done? What is success?But other industries have the same challenge. Take marketing for example. Your company "brand" never really starts or ends, it's an ongoing concept that lives with your company, and can be improved or diminished over time. So to make their work more specific, marketing doesn't just focus on building "brand", they launch marketing campaigns that focus on accomplishing specific goals. Sometimes it's about enhancing the brand overall. Sometimes it's about driving a specific result, like sales. If a campaign goes well, they continue it. If it doesn't, it's okay it was just a campaign, and they try a new one. It doesn't mean their brand failed, just that the campaign failed.Politics also has ongoing political parties, but launch campaigns specifically to get someone elected, pass new bills, etc. The party is this ongoing thing, but the campaigns are time-based and measurable.Think about the things you're doing in your community now. Maybe you're running an online forum, hosting events, engaging across channels. These things aren't your community, they're tactics, or programs, that you're running for and with your community. Can you reframe those things to be part of a "community campaign"?All community campaigns would do one of the following two things, or both of them:1. Enhance the sense of community amongst members (measured by community health)2. Motivate members to take a specific action that's tied to a business objective (measured by the amount of actions taken, ie. support, product feedback, new customers, content contributed, etc).It helps to delineate it this way because if you're launching a campaign focused on #1, you don't have to prove the ROI. You're doing it because you just know it will enhance the culture of your community and that's going to set up #2 to be more successful. This is why companies throw holiday parties, host retreats and offer benefits. There isn't a direct ROI (loosely, you can tie it to retention), but they know that by doing these things, they will enhance the overall culture of the business, the satisfaction of employees, and this will rise all tides.Then they launch specific campaigns, could be shipping new code, launching new products, marketing campaigns, PR campaigns, that are focused on #2. They motivate team members to work together to accomplish a specific goal that is tied to a specific business objective and often, ROI.Community can do this same thing. Launch campaigns that are either focused on making our communities happier/healthier, or focused on activating members to take specific actions. You can refer to the SPACE model (https://pro.cmxhub.com/posts/1281270) for the different objectives a community can be activated to achieve. You could imagine SPACE being reframed as "The 5 Community Campaigns". So you could launch a "support campaign" focused on bringing members together in a space to solve problems for each other. Or a "product campaign" to bring members into the product development process and share ideas and feedback. Or an "engagement campaign" focused purely on developing stronger, more meaningful engagement within your community.By breaking down the overall work of building community into campaigns, you can take this big, nebulous concept that businesses struggle to wrap their heads around, and make it more specific, time-based and measurable.