Last week, I facilitated a session at the Lagos Digital PR Summit where I shared strategies we used to build The Comms Avenue Community.
Preparing for this session was quite interesting for me. It took me down memory lane to February 2020 where I nursed the idea to bring communications professionals together. I wanted them to talk about challenges they face in their work and share ideas with other professionals. Setting up The Comms Avenue community came as a result of the pandemic which halted our plans for a physical event.
I’ve pretty much been learning on the way. Did I envisage that we would have over 600 members from 14 African countries in 18 months? I wish I could say yes. The truth is that the desire to make an impact has continued to drive everything we do at The Comms Avenue. We are constantly thinking of how we can make lives better for communications professionals. This informs how we respond to the needs of our members, the programs we create, the senior professionals we invite and so on.
I’m also glad that we documented everything we did right from the start. That has allowed us to track our progress and see what’s not working. It also made it easy to prepare the content for the session at the Lagos Digital PR Summit. If you don’t document, you cannot measure and evaluate. You’ll also find it difficult to replicate and scale if you do not document.
Maybe I’ll share lessons on the importance of documentation in another post. For now, please feel free to download the slides from the session – Lagos Digital PR Summit Presentation by Adedoyin Jaiyesimi.
I believe the lessons shared can be replicated by anyone, especially organizations that want to leverage community building as a strategic tool for customer engagement and retention. Since the pandemic, the trends have shown that virtual communities will continue to be a valuable tool that organizations can leverage to gain first hand consumer insights. They can also leverage it to nurture a community of strong advocates for their brand. Think about the money that will be saved on customer acquisition campaigns if you already have a vibrant community that attracts your target audience!
Do you share your feedback or questions when you go through the slides. I’m happy to answer them!
