A healthy and vibrant community is a vital aspect of every company, especially an early stage one, and can be a good indicator of whether things are running smoothly for you. Below we will share with you our top 5 tips on how we did this at Purpl, from day 1.
A definition:
First things first, let’s define what Community is. To define it briefly, a company’s community is its diverse group of users or clients who actively use the company’s services, believe in its mission and values, and are interested in actively contributing to its growth and taking part in its initiatives.
Community brings benefit to both the company and its users. That’s why we at Purpl are adamant on building a community of satisfied users who will accompany us on our growth journey.
So without further ado, let us break down the benefits we see for community building:
Building Trust
The economic situation in Lebanon has been tough on all of us. Loss of trust in the traditional banking system and a constant concern on how to transact and handle money is a common issue nowadays for everyone.
At Purpl, we believe that community will help us build the trust that our users need in order to carry on their daily financial transactions care-free. We also believe that building a transparent and reliable money transfer app can help us restore confidence among our users and establish credibility amongst other players in the market.
Resolving a Major Issue
Lebanon faces the issue of exceptionally high fees for sending and receiving money. By building a community around Purpl, we can encourage its use now and in the future when more services are added. By ensuring low fees and increasing access to financial services, we can eventually resolve this long-persistent problem.
Sharing Knowledge
Purpl believes in empowering its users. We want them to know how, where, and when to spend, save, and invest their finances. Financial literacy and inclusion are crucial matters to achieve, and community can help us spread knowledge and information where it is needed.
User feedback and Product Improvement
A strong community provides valuable feedback on the app’s features, usability, and overall experience. We believe this feedback loop would enable Purpl to iterate and enhance its offering, thus ensuring that it meets the specific needs of our Lebanese and non-Lebanese users.
Social Support
We know that a community-focused startup can foster a sense of belonging and support among its users. It can facilitate connections and collaboration between individuals facing similar financial challenges, thus providing a platform for mutual assistance and empowerment. This is another factor that we at Purpl highly value.
How to Build a Strong and Healthy Community
Building a community is not an easy feat. The process often has to start from zero, and there are many factors that affect its success. Here are some ways a company can start building a strong community, that we at Purpl rely on:
Set Clear Goals
It is important to understand what you want out of the community you are building. Making effort here and there aimlessly will most likely not generate any good results. The first step is to set clear goals for what you want out of this community.
Is it to encourage users to support each other and answer each other’s questions? What about collecting feedback and suggestions? Is it to encourage user generated content and new ideas?
Setting goals for your community is the first step towards building it.
Understand Your Users’ Needs and Habits
To build a successful community, you have to understand your audience in many ways.
What platforms are they more likely to be present on, and how does that affect where you build your community? Would they be more interested in online or offline interactions? How does the culture and background of your audience affect the type of community and approach you have to build?
Surely, the steps towards building a community will depend highly on the answers to such questions. Match your goals and your audience’s needs and habits to narrow down what steps you can. Then, this will also help you identify which platform to build on.
Focus On The Offline As Well
Many community builders or community managers do most of their work online, because that’s where everyone is all the time these days, right?
It IS important for a company to build an online community, through engaging in comments, speaking with users, or building a forum.
However, offline community building is essential in its own ways:
- Offline events are valuable because they facilitate personal connections, real-time interactions, education, feedback collection, and social support.
- These events enable face-to-face interactions, strengthening relationships within the community and fostering trust and loyalty.
- They allow for direct feedback collection, which helps understand user needs and preferences, leading to product improvements.
- They create a physical space for social support, collaboration, and emotional assistance among community members.
Invest in Community Like Any Other Department
A community builder or manager needs to receive the same support that other departments receive.
As mentioned previously, community is a vital aspect of every company, and this is becoming clearer with many emerging and older companies.
Therefore, investing in community can never go wrong with clear goals and understanding of the steps to be taken. This investment covers human resources, time, tools, and platforms.
Measure Your Success
To encourage your company’s continuous investment in community, one needs to measure the results. Though it might take some time, and may not be as easy to measure as other initiatives, such as the ones for online marketing, there are many tools and ways in which community results can be measured.
Soon enough, you will find that community makes your life easier in many ways. You will watch your users provide each other support and lower your customer support costs, you will gain user generated content, as well as useful feedback and suggestions you can use and implement in your product that are guaranteed to make it more successful.
Why?
Because it comes from your users themselves!
Conclusion
Our team at Purpl has been placing a lot of effort towards community building through several initiatives. Apart from a focus on taking part in offline events and hosting them ourselves, we are in the process of building an online community. Having started with interaction and engagement on several social media platforms, our efforts are now also directed towards bringing together a group of brand ambassadors, as well as building a community on our Facebook community page.
You can join our Facebook community by clicking here! Also, feel free to reach out to us if you believe in Purpl and are interested in becoming a brand ambassador.
In short, we at Purpl are always excited to be in contact with our users and look forward to building a large community of brand ambassadors who believe in Purpl and feel that they can rely on it for their daily use.
We wholeheartedly believe in the human aspect, and it is always at the heart of what we do.
Written by: Maria Sawaya
