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Public participation has been at the core of everything as far as anyone can remember. A lot of research has been conducted to analyze the impact of community engagement.
Community engagement helps the community members in multiple ways and also enables you to create a long-lasting bond with your community.
In this article, we will discuss the following benefits of community engagement:
- Audience Reach
- Community Relationship
- Decision Making
- Community Organization Skills
- Resource Management
Let’s get into it.
Audience Reach
As time goes on, the human population will grow exponentially. Recent research has shown that a total of 4.66 Billion have an active internet connection.
It means that businesses can provide services/programs to newer audiences if they select the right target market.
Community engagement matters because it enables you to learn what type of people are a part of your community and what sort of potential users you can target.
You can use this information to make a positive impact on your brand image.
How do you do that?
For example, your online programs provide effective solutions for coding. You can analyze your community and assess its demographics.
In other words, you can check if your community is filled with people in their early twenties and you need to use your resources to target people in their early thirties.
Besides that, you can compare with other communities to check if they have an overlapping interest which you can target.
Community Relationship
As it stands, a strong community is built upon the strong interpersonal relationship of its members.
It enables your members to streamline communication and build trust among them. Furthermore, it ensures the participation of every single community member.
Why is community engagement important?
On a basic level, it helps the participants to explore their common interests and raise awareness of any underlying problems.
On the other hand, when different minds engage in discussions, they tend to get more creative with their decision-making and problem-solving ideas.
Once your community builds a trusty relationship, they will exchange ideas, personal information, and act like friends rather than acquaintances.
How does it benefit you?
It will benefit you as an individual instructor but will also go a long way to benefit your business.
A community with strong interpersonal communication will also help newcomers adjust and participate in the community easily.
Another important aspect of a strong community relationship is feedback. As the community gets more involved, they will provide you with honest and detailed feedback.
This will help you in better understanding your shortcomings and how to tackle them in the long run.
80% of the people with active engagement in a community transition easily into a leadership role for different projects.
Decision Making
Decision-making is an important part of any community. It is a two-sided process that affects both the instructors and the learners.
An extensive community engagement helps your members to focus on a solution plan for any problem. It provides them access to new and better ideas.
The other side of it benefits you in resource management. But how does that happen?
Why is it important to have a linear decision-making process?
Time is an essential resource in any given circumstance. The more time you save, the better it is for you.
Decision-making processes help you to save time while creating a plan for your community.
For example, you want to devise a new teaching plan for your members. You can easily allocate the time to different aspects without giving it much thought.
This is highly affected by the aforementioned benefit ‘Community Relationship’, it feeds off the feedback given to you by your community.
We should mention that this benefit of the community is rather passive compared to other benefits.
Your decision-making process works subconsciously and helps you to manage your project outcomes in a better way.
Community Organization Skills
As you develop a healthy community, you will learn many organizational skills along the way. You can implement these skills to further enhance your community engagement strategy.
You might be thinking, what are these skills? Some of these skills are stated below:
- Resource management
- Project management
- Community participation
- Interpersonal skills
- Relationship building
These skills will help you reach out to newer audiences and engage your current members to make a better community.
How can it help you?
We must emphasize that the ability to better manage your resources can help you in many ways. You can divert your time to other projects, overlooked problems, or just in steady growth overall.
The interpersonal skills help in community engagement and a better understanding of the shortcomings in your teaching style/pattern.
If you are interested in starting your own online course business, take a look at our complete guide to help you through each step.
Resource Management
As we have mentioned in the previous sections, resource management is a very vital part of every task.
How you use your resources holds great importance and can impact the project outcomes in the majority of the cases.
The types of resources related to projects are always different.
The three main types are:
- Labor
- Capital
- Time
What do they represent?
The labor denotes the amount of manpower you have to complete a project within the given deadline.
The capital represents the finances you need to use to get the project done.
Lastly, the time represents the deadlines you are given for a project.
You must develop a balance between them. A family-like community can help you with it.
The feedback you get can help you to determine what areas need a specific resource.
Find out the essentials to build community engagement by clicking HERE.
Importance of Community Engagement
We have discussed the benefits of Community Engagement, let’s see why it is important.
Following are some of the reasons we think it important to get your community involved in different things:
- Community engagement develops community leaders. Your members are better equipped to deal with problems.
- Community engagement facilitates the empowerment of the members on a personal level.
- Community engagement always leads to better results.
- Streamlined problem-solving skills. Your community members can handle and complete a task in a shorter time.
Conclusion
Community engagement can help you create a healthy environment for your old and new members alike.
It prevents disconnection between community members and avoids any negative impact on your brand’s image.
This brings us to the end of our article on the Benefits of Community Engagement. We hope this article proves to be informative for you.
Do let us know what you think are the benefits of community engagement.
CLICK HERE to learn more about how you can effectively manage your online course.