How to mobilise your community during a pandemic

Andreia shares how the OutSystems team worked with their developer community to create apps that would help in the response to COVID-19.

Summary:

How to mobilize the community?
- Communicate the value, internally and externally
- Offer the right incentives
- Continuously engage with your community.
- Promote, promote, and promote a little more.
Over-communicate.
- Showing the real value of what you’re offering.
- Making sure that people understand why they’re associating themselves.
Set hard criteria on how you can help and what you’re expecting to get back.
- There's “so much” volunteers can do and “so much” that a company can do.
- Set realistic goals and expectations.
- Consistent, transparent, and be as crystal clear as you can.
Be really present.
- So many teams-- all remote, never forget to check in.
One size does not fit all.
- Some things just don’t work if you scale.
Don’t be afraid to fail.
- Quickly get up and make sure that you rally back up again.

Communicate the value, internally and externally
- Make sure that the value proposition of what we are communicating to the community is very clear and people see the impact and what it means to be a part of that initiative.
- Important to communicate this externally to the community.
- Also essential that internally you get that alignment and communication with all the different teams that are being part of that project.
Need to offer the right incentives.
- To build a bilateral relationship, you need to give in order to receive.
- People are doing the best they can with what they have.
- Offering the right incentives to reward them and recognize them for all their hard work is essential.
Continuously engage with your community.
- They know that you’re there for them and supporting them when they really need them.
Promote, promote, and promote a little more.
- Word of mouth is real. A powerful tool.
- So, the more you promote, the more people you’re going to be able to inspire.
- More people you’re going to be able to mobilize to be part of the global movement.

Make sure that you’re aligning with all the different teams in terms of communication.
There’s nothing you can do on your own that will create a huge impact.
Working together to make sure to communicate this
- Create a major impact because everyone was being communicated and reached by the right channels, by the right people, in the right way.
Give that extra motivation of, “We can do this as a team and that we can leverage our technology for better.”
Have a dedicated communication channel, so, in our case, it was a Slack channel, where we posted multiple daily updates on what we were doing, what the community was doing, and how our internal teams could help participate and collaborate on top of what we were doing.

Probably the most important -- where you actually get the community’s attention.
Leverage the community.
Directors and VPs sending out emails to customers and partners to make sure that they were volunteering and they knew exactly what they could do.
Doing daily posts to the community.
Communicate all the different projects that we were selecting
- All the different statuses that the projects were going through.
Official landing page.
- Place that had all the information regarding the program.
- Be as clear, as consistent, and as transparent as possible.

In a bilateral relationship, you need to give in order to receive.
Support from our developer advocates.
- Expert people that we have in the company.
- Not only do they know I think anything and everything about the platform and the product but they know everyone internally.
- Bridges between the projects and the internal experts.
Visibility in the ecosystem.
- Developers from partners and customers participating.
Business synergies.
- Look at all the different networks to bridge between the projects that were happening, to scale the projects even more.
External collaboration.
- Multiple technology partners wanting to be a part of your project.
- Adds extra value to the project.
- Opens the door to strategic opportunities.

Always in constant communication with these community members.
Dedicated communication channel where they could talk, not only to members of the organisation but amongst themselves.
Daily syncs, calls with the teams.
Weekly updates on the channels.
Monthly councils
- Get together community members from all the different regions.
- Talk about the different projects that they were working on.
- Figuring out how we could help each other and, basically, getting to know each other.

Last updated 3 years ago