Closing the loop: The power of thank you

Closing the loop on online community engagement projects is often ignored as teams move on to the next exciting or urgent project. Worse still, projects are sometimes “disappeared”. The lack of a closed feedback loop to the community has a major impact on community-to-government relations, trust in the process, and trust in the future processes. power of thank you

I subscribe to a great online marketing blog, Social Triggers, and once again Derek Halpern has delivered BIG in thought provoking content.

His blog focuses on how psychology helps boost online traffic and sales. While it is marketing and sales focused, I strongly believe that some of the techniques and strategies from this space are vital in getting, and keeping, communities engaged online.

When we look at this in an online community engagement context, one of the toughest challenges for many organisations is motivating action within a community.

In his latest post about the Power of Thank You, Derek looks at the “Gratitude Effect” and how a simple thank you changes behaviour and drives action.

In marketing, it’s making a sale or generating buzz. In community engagement, it’s the same, but the sale = engagement or participation.

So when it comes to saying thank you in your online community engagement space, what are some of the things you could be doing? Here are three simple ways you can show gratitude to your online community.

  1. Personally thank people for their contributions. This is an easy one and could be a simple comment in the forum thanking them for their participation.
  2. Think about how you could reward their participation. Could you send them something in an email – tickets to a show, iTunes credit or a voucher to a local shop.
  3. A simple and oft forgotten process. Thank your community and tell them how their participation contributed to the outcomes of your project.

They’ve shown your consultation some love by taking the time to have a say. Show them some in return by saying THANKS!

I’d love to know in the comments below how you’ve thanked your community for their time and effort.

The more ideas, the more we can spread the Attitude of Gratitude!

So to practice what I (and Derek) are preaching, I’d like to thank Derek for this making another great video and YOU for stopping by and giving some of your valuable time to reading this post.

Over to Derek.

 

Image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks

Published Date: 9 August 2013 Last modified on October 9, 2018

Let's activate your community. Request a demo
https://www.bangthetable.com/blog/the-power-of-thank-you/
www.bangthetable.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-47
62989
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UEXEJW4LFMLCVZXYT7W2PWNQVFVIJ5BO
<urn:uuid:c6b9853f-86ff-4595-88c2-ac29542f79db>
2019-11-15T13:28:11Z
208.113.148.248
text/html
sha1:OOMVOTBQSBQ7N76EWWPX27QB46YFATJK
<urn:uuid:ef92695f-ad7a-4137-91c3-3cf4351e14a5>
https://www.bangthetable.com/blog/the-power-of-thank-you/
response
<urn:uuid:319e6567-d044-430a-bf72-a97d288a4868>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-47
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-37.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/