Small and Smart

There are a variety of ways to encourage your members to be a part of your online microcommunity. Last year, the Cornerstone League identified a simple one: Don’t ask members to pay for the privilege.

Cornerstone League is a trade association representing credit unions in Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma. It had gone through a series of restructurings and mergers that were completed in 2023, which included online communities for its various council groups dedicated to different parts of credit union operations. Previously, Cornerstone had members pay an annual $25 fee for group access. After the merger, it changed tactics and decided to treat it as a member benefit.

“We thought, ‘Let’s rip that barrier off,’” says Cornerstone League VP of Operations and Engagement Sarah Bowman. “The Kansas and Missouri credit unions [whose group had merged with Cornerstone] are not used to paying that. It’s not like we were dependent on that income.”

With the groups established and the additional price tag removed, the association could focus more on supporting the individual parts of the association’s communities and launched new ones for young professionals and CEOs. To stoke engagement, Bowman says, the association asks each community to produce a number of “virtual engagement opportunities” such as webinars, alongside topical discussions. “We’re connectors, we’re the place that facilitates cooperation among the cooperatives, so this gives us another means to connect,” Bowman says.

Post-COVID Growth

Online communities, like those run by the Cornerstone League, have played an increasingly substantial role in an association’s operations since the COVID-19 pandemic prompted members to move their connections online.

“Before COVID, there wasn’t really too much engagement in that area of the application,” says Davendra Raghubir, project manager for AMO, an AMS platform. “A lot of stuff for associations were always in person. Once COVID happened, all of a sudden, I was getting requests every single week, people asking us about our group system.”

Carrie Hartin, president of MCI USA, an association consultancy, says that for many associations those communities have become places where members can discuss issues with more immediacy and flexibility.

“In places where it’s been harder for members to discuss more timely issues, those microcommunities have had a lot of purpose,” Hartin says.

Management of those communities can be tricky, Hartin adds. Though associations want to encourage smaller communities—younger professionals, executives, affinity groups—the opportunities to organically form and interact, they do require some level of moderation and support. One question engagement managers should ask, she says, is if the community is coalescing around a long-term or short-term issue.

“Is it a core part of our overall organization that’s going to need longer-term nurturing?” she says. “Advocacy might be an area that you don’t have a committee for, but it’s key to a portion of members, and there really is a need for a community. There are other times when there’s something more pressing that requires a group to come together and collaborate but have an anticipated and planned end time.”

Managing by Not Managing

It also helps, she says, to encourage (if not directly assign) a number of champions within the group who can be trusted to stoke discussion and model self-moderation.

“When we think about those microcommunities, being able to have one or two members who are well-known and perceived as leaders, having them be a champion of those microcommunities when they are getting started is really important,” she says. “If those leaders can do a good job inviting and seeding the conversation, there’s room for the organic growth that comes after that. But when I look at successful microcommunities, they have more than one champion. It’s usually two.”

Bowman says that the Cornerstone League uses a mix of online and in-person promotion to inform members about the council groups and their values. “We push it a lot through our communication process, and then we do a lot of word of mouth when we’re talking to credit unions,” she says. “I did a workshop with small credit unions in Arkansas and had a dedicated time to talk about the council program. Credit unions are cooperative, so we work on cooperative principles, and one of them is cooperation among cooperatives.”

Looking ahead, Hartin says, associations can look for ways to develop smaller peer groups, such as members studying for a credential, and find ways to support them. “The ability to have that kind of group within an association—maybe they’re all 10 years into their profession and looking to advance to the next level. Or they’re working through a specific credential in some way and they really want that peer-to-peer support. They want to know the 10 people in that group, they want to build a relationship with them, they want to find them when they go to a conference.”