How to animate your community?

As an organization manager, it is essential to identify facilitators who will be involved in your community life. These facilitators must be comfortable with digital tools and acquire total mastery of the platform so they can animate your community with enthusiasm.

Strategically, your facilitators will have a key role in the tool adoption by your members through the quality of their animation.

TIP: create customized roles in order to identify your members and/or delegate administration rights to them.

1. Communicate efficiently

To captivate your audience and make them active within your network, remember to vary and adapt each of your communications according to the messages you wish to convey.

On Whaller, many message tools will allow you to personalize your publications, in terms of formatting and content.

A. Write messages that make an impact

For a communication to be effective, it is crucial to take care of both the form and the content of your messages.

Make use of the styles for messages


Different styles are applicable (problem, suggestion, important...) and allow you to highlight an issue thanks to a specific color and icon displayed on the avatar of the author. By this way, you can define a communication code with your network.

For instance, the Whaller team uses the "Important" style when the publication is meant to be read and understood by everyone, while the "Problem" style is used when an action is required.

It's up to you to choose how you communicate!




Use the Markdown

Customize the formatting of your post with the Markdown message tool: set title levels, use bold or italics, insert a link or images in the body of the post, add emojis etc.

Your post will be more user-friendly and engaging if its keywords are highlighted.





TIPS: If you want to put text in color, type <font color='red'> your text </font> to color it red, replace "red" with "blue" and "green" as needed.
Use tags to add some context to your posts.

Get your members involved

As much as possible, get your members involved when you publish a message. To do so, there are several tips you can use to encourage call-to-action, such as:


o Mentioning members or groups,

o Ask a question,

o Assign a task

B. Set the pace of your communications

Publish messages at the right time

The timing of your posts is important. Posting at the activity peaks of your network will maximize the number of views and therefore reactions to your posts.

On Whaller, you can easily schedule the sending of messages thanks to the scheduled messages option.

Schedule them for later when your members' activity is at its highest.

To do this, write your message and, via the + button in the message tools, schedule the date and time it will be posted.



Publish regularly and establish "rituals"

For a network to be active, it is by definition necessary to publish content regularly: set up an editorial schedule with the help of your moderators. This way, your members will get into the habit of connecting and developing an interest in this communication channel.

In addition, it is advisable to establish rituals to build community loyalty. These rituals allow you to create a familiar framework, a recurring meeting or even good practices that reinforce the feeling of belonging to the network.

Examples: a post every Monday morning for objectives at the beginning of the week, a post with general news every Wednesday or a summary of upcoming events every month.

Best practice idea: "liking" a message acknowledges its receipt and understanding.


TIPS: As a sphere administrator, you can appoint publishers.

Discover the options "pin" and "move up" for a post. They will then be able to moderate and organize the order of the content.

2. Build and develop commitment

In a digital environment, knowing how to value your members and their actions is crucial to developing a dynamic and involved community. By taking a few minutes a day to create interaction, follow up by answering questions, commenting on posts, you will encourage your members to use the platform.

A. Involve your members with events and surveys

Bring your members together on your digital community and create links by organizing events: make appointments thanks to the videoconferencing tools integrated into the platform and create a collaborative dynamic with your members.

Surveys are also a good way to animate your network: ask questions, collect opinions, create interaction, involve your community in strategic choices... Many topics can be addressed through the surveys, and you can customize the privacy settings.

Surveys are also often "subject to reaction" (likes or comments).

B. Distinguish your members: award badges

Some people are more involved in your organization? What better way than to officially value them!

Thanks to a system of badges that can be customized, distinguish your members for their contributions, their achievements, their skills and encourage others to get involved at the same time!



Examples : congratulate the most active members over a given period, their participation in a specific event, the completion of their projects...
At Whaller, we post a cyber security quiz once a month in our team sphere and people with 70% correct answers earn a "Cyber Expert" badge.

C. Reward your members: points / store

Another fun way to develop engagement, if your organization has goodies, gifts or other products, you can activate a store that will be available on your organization portal.

Simple to set up, it will allow you to reward the actions of your members thanks to a points system that they can then exchange for gifts.

D. Organize a photo contest

A fun and striking idea to animate a sphere consists in setting up a "media contest" on a defined deadline in order to engage the participation of your members around a same project.

Couplez les options de galerie d'images et de widget "Podium de médias" pour transformer votre sphère le temps d'un concours médias avec un classement qui s'effectuera selon le nombre de mentions « j’aime ».

Couple the image gallery and media podium widget options to transform your sphere into a media contest with a ranking based on the number of "likes" per post.

Examples: launch a photo contest across the different sites & departments of your organization or a contest for the best initiative illustrated by a photo...

TIP : Regularly consulting the Analytics allows you to adapt your animation efforts according to the spheres and "periods/days" activities of your network.

Updated on: 09/02/2023