Engagement Strategies to Make Your Planning Website a Success

It’s one thing to create project websites or social media accounts for your planning project - but it’s a completely different story to actually get people to visit them and become engaged. We often see planning projects that are offering an impressive list of social media features and participatory elements, just to see a handful of submissions, comments or other activities that could be considered participation. To avoid non-participation, Social Signal recommends creating an Engagement Plan, a document that outlines your strategy for getting your audience to participate well before your website and social media accounts are launched. The elements of your Engagement Plan should include:

• First principles: Audiences, target outcomes, offering, messages and benchmarks to let you know if you’re meeting your goals.
   
•  Channels: Which complementary on- and offline channels (print, TV, social networks, ads, etc) are you going to use to let people know about or contribute to your project? How will you use them?
   
• Activities: What are you going to ask people to do on your site and elsewhere? (e.g. blogging carnivals, photo contests)
   
• Incentives: The prizes, points, rebates and other benefits that people will get from visiting or contributing.
   
• Roles and responsibilities: Who is responsible for content creation, animation, promotion, outreach, tech support and other functions.
   
• Texts: Drafts of all the on-site and e-mail messages you’re likely to need in your initial months, from your invitation to beta users all the way through to the message you post in response to a critical comment
   
• Timeline: What needs to happen when (including dependencies and periodic evaluation of success metrics)?
   
• Do’s and don’ts: A summary of the principles your whole team should keep in mind in order to define a consistent voice and approach for your project.

To see  an impressive list of online venues designed to help you spread the word about your project, and engagement planning tools that can bring your social media project to life read the full article inspired by Social Signal.