Is Your Online Community Trustworthy? Use This Checklist to Find Out
Creating a trustworthy and safe space is essential to building and maintaining an engaged and active online community. Without trust, members may feel hesitant to share their thoughts, engage in discussions, or even participate in the community at all.
As a result, assessing and maintaining the trustworthiness of your online community should be a top priority.
In this blog, we will provide a checklist of questions to help you assess your community's trustworthiness and suggest a scoring system and scale to evaluate your community's overall trustworthiness.
Scoring System and Scale
To score your community's trustworthiness, assign a score between 0 and 2 based on how well your community meets the criteria for each question.
0: No, work is needed!
1: Yes, we do this reasonably well.
2: We consider our work in this area to be world class
The Community Trust Checklist
Level 1: Does your technology platform inspire trust?
How secure is your community platform? (e.g., do you have a valid site certificate, how strong is password security, do you have disaster recovery plans, do spammers get into your community easily? Does your platform provider offer uptime guarantees?)
How easy is it to sign up?
How consistent is the user experience?
Are subgroups used sparingly?
Does your gamification match the community tone?
Does the platform cache member post data?
Level 2: Does your organization inspire trust?
How clearly your organization clearly disclose the purpose of the community?
How often the community regularly remind members about this purpose?
Does the community clearly explain how and when member content may be used?
Is the community visibly and responsively defended from spammers and other bad actors?
Does the community have a visible, responsive, and empathetic community manager?
Does the community manager regularly participate in the community?
Does the community manager encourage sharing diverse and inclusive opinions and ideas?
Does the community manager regularly recognize great contributions?
Does the community manager model kindness and reciprocity?
Level 3: Do your members trust each other?
Do members show that they are empathetic and reciprocate kindness to one another?
Are your members tolerant of new ideas and diverse opinions?
Do members use inclusive language so that newcomers feel welcome?
Does the community have established etiquette for posting (not rules but unspoken or spoken guidelines for getting good responses)?
Do community members regularly welcome newcomers?
Do community members share their profiles?
Do community members regularly mention or tag each other to encourage conversation?
Now, use the following scale to evaluate your community's overall trustworthiness:
29-40: Highly trustworthy! Your organization is doing some world class work to create trust.
17-28: Your community is trustworthy but you still have ways to improve.
0-16: Low trustworthiness is an issue for your community. Get started addressing some of the items called out in this list.
Conclusion
Assessing the trustworthiness of your online community is crucial to creating a safe and engaging space for your members. Using the checklist provided can help you to assess your community's trustworthiness and identify areas for improvement. Regularly evaluating and maintaining the trustworthiness of your online community can lead to increased member engagement and overall success.
