How to Start a Community Forum for Your Members

How to start a community forum for your members, whether it is a club, a school or a local community forum for a neighbourhood. This video explains what a community forum is, why a group chat falls short, and the four steps to start one on WordPress.

Transcript

What is a community forum, and how do you start one? It is a place on your own website where your members talk, ask questions and decide things together. It is open to your people, organised by subject, and still there next year. It works for any group with something in common. A neighbourhood. A sports club. A school and its parents. A charity. A residents group. Or a circle of people in the same profession. Today, most of these groups run on a group chat that nobody can search. Or on a social page that the group does not control. So notices are missed, and every new member asks what the last one asked. Starting your own takes four steps. Install a forum plugin on your WordPress site. A short setup wizard asks where the forum should live. It can be a page called community, or forum, or any word you like. Create a space for each subject your members care about. Then invite your members with a link. Here is the owner view on a real WordPress site. Each space has a type, and a rule for who can join. Open to all, by request, or by invitation. And this is what members see. A forum home, with every space listed by subject. An announcements space carries the news. You can set it so only organisers start topics, so the news is never buried under chat. A club space is where members help each other. One question, with the replies kept under it. A community forum has to stay friendly. Any member can report a post that breaks your rules. The reports go to one queue for your moderators. And new members start with limits, then earn more trust as they take part. That queue sits on your dashboard. You, or a moderator you trust, decide what happens to each report. A forum also sits well beside the rest of a community site. The member who reads the notice can sign up for the clean-up day, and join a group for their street or their sport. Those come from separate plugins on the same site. Side by side. In a group chat, notices scroll away. In a forum, they are pinned at the top. In a chat, new members see nothing that came before. In a forum, they can read back. A chat is one stream on someone else's app. A forum has a space for each subject, on your own website. Every season you wait, more of what your community knows stays locked in a chat that new members will never read. Jetonomy is the free forum plugin for WordPress. Start your community forum this week, with one space and the members you already have. Get Jetonomy. The link is below.