KEY POINTS:
How did a bunch of Kiwis manage to get tap into the eco-system and get more Northern Hemisphere bums on bikes? By creating cyber cycling community Challenge for Change.
After just 8 weeks, over 1000 people across 60 organisations are cycling over 50,000 miles (that's twice
around the world), saving some 8,000 litres of petrol. We've just signed up our second UK region and have 10 more regions signing up to be next. It's safe to say we're well on our way.
Ground-level action
A powerful online community drives social change on the ground. Take an existing problem, add an on-the-ground initiative, look at how you can use the online community to make this initiative run more efficiently and grow, and you're onto a winner.
While development partner James Nisbet and I operate from New Zealand, our UK-based lead business partner, Kiwi Tom Stokell leads the charge. After nine months kicking down doors, Tom secured a partnership with the Cycling Touring Club, a UK-based club already spending millions promoting cycling.
CTC funds us to get more people cycling to work, plus a regional representative as we expand, making it both a profitable and sustainable community-building strategy.
They work with us because we're focused on delivering outcomes and our online community provides a more efficient, effective, and lasting way of getting more people cycling than most of their other marketing activities. Being totally transparent and measurable, it enables the community to maintain the momentum beyond any initial promotion.
Knowledge is power
Know the goals of your community and the numbers or metrics that define your community's success. With our cycling community, we're trying to get as many new people cycling to work as possible. This means less pollution, less petrol, better health and less congestion - which financially impact a city or region significantly - we get funded in line with this. These numbers are very visible on the site. Through targeted communication, we help focus our community leaders - the regular cyclists - get their non-cycling friends riding to work on a bike.
Love your contributors
Every action in your community, is an opportunity to promote, add life and currency to your community. Show recent activity everywhere, especially on your home page. Promote community members who are active, give them incentives to stay active, and help them see the results of their community involvement.
Profile personality
People have profiles on multiple sites. What's so special about their profile on your site? You may not be the next Facebook, so your community will have a specific focus, not just be another place to store photos and information.
Understand the profile you're helping your community members build - make it something they're proud of. Help people create their own profile personality. Our cycling community holds a unique user profile, including their organisation's cycling activity and contribution to reducing pollution, energy usage, and traffic congestion. This is unique and real for lovers of cycling or environmentalists.
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