Public vs. Private Community

Public Community

Setting your community up as a public community is a great choice if you plan on running a long term community (multiple years) and are looking for social growth and organic membership refreshes. 

You are creating a potentially large community with few privacy restrictions in terms of what members can join and what content is shared. You will be able to get TONS of feedback from your community.

Benefits:

• URL is public, unrestricted: This is helpful for organic and inexpensive community growth. 
• Ease of recruiting methods: People simply create an account, have immediate access to the community and can start engaging right away. New members can be recruited by you and your members by sharing the URL through your website, social media, emails and other communication. Members can tell their friends, thus growing the community organically.

Potential Cons:

• Privacy: If your community will discuss sensitive company information, a public community will not be a good solution.
• Member requirements: If you are looking for a very specific target audience and do not want to allow people in unless you have vetted and reviewed them, a public community won't allow you enough frontend control over member sign ups.

Private Community

A private community has a lot of protections to ensure that only the people you want to include in your research can sign up and access the community. The whole community is behind a firewall, ensuring no one gets in that you don’t intentionally allow.

Private communities are great for Community Advisory Boards (CABs), Market Research Online Communities (MROCs), and short term intensive research projects (two to six months).

Benefits:

• Targeted recruiting: Private communities give you more control over who joins and ensures you are getting the right mix of members.
• Privacy: Members can only join if you invite them directly and/or if you manually approve them. Sharing of join links among friends is NOT possible.

Potential Cons:

• Delays in member approval: Member review and approval can be lengthy. A clear and quick turn process needs to be implemented to ensure new members are able to join quickly, otherwise, conversion rates (qualified to joins) can be low.
• More costly recruiting: With private communities, website and social media recruiting is not available. This reduces some of the low cost recruiting options. 

 

Continue Reading:

Branded vs. Unbranded Community

 

 

For more details see:

When to use a Community

Frequency of Member Engagement

Community Engagement Tips