Types of online communities you need to know about before you start designing one
What are the types of online community that you need to be aware of if you’re thinking about starting one yourself?
Online communities have been around since the early days of the internet in the form of message boards and email discussion lists. Most of the earliest communities sprang up around the desire to discuss a special interest or hobby with like-minded enthusiasts.
However, business and government only began to embrace them with any enthusiasm within the past ten years. That may seem like a long time, but it really isn’t considering how slowly that adoption curve has moved.
Communities Today
Fast forward. The pandemic of 2020 forced many organizations that never had to support remote work, connection, and collaboration to look more carefully at platforms where the communication is not unidirectional and top down but omnidirectional and many-to-many. In short, they’ve grown far more serious about communities online and the collaboration they make possible.
Between communities based on personal interest and those based upon a business purpose—and everything between—it’s tough to know where to start today if you’re thinking about building a community.
The idea of an online community can seem pretty nebulous if you’re just getting started, so I’ve put together the following community typology guide to help clear away some of that vagueness.
The categories below are entirely my interpretation but I think I’ve managed to include a few that the other articles I’m aware of generally don’t. I also decided that some types of community that I’ve seen elsewhere as their own category (branded communities) as a subset of communities of interest, something that purists may take issue with, although I stand by my reasoning for the grouping.
What are the different types of communities?
Most community concepts can be categorized as at least one or some combination of these seven types:
Communities of Geography (or Place)
Communities of Interest
Communities of Belief
Communities of Change (or Action)
Communities of Practice
Communities of Situation (or Circumstance)
Workplace Communities
Communities of Place (Geography)
Community concepts based on geography hearken back to the earliest human settlements. Individual family units would band together in neolithic times and form communities for the purpose of survival. Not banding together could mean the end of the family unit due to starvation, disease or violence.
These days geographically based communities online tend to exist for less urgent reasons. They are most often an extension of a physically situated community of people who care about current events, activities, resources, and entertainment in a neighborhood, a town, a county, or some other distinct, bounded location.
However, the members of these communities aren’t always people who live there. They may, and often do, include people who used to live there, who might live there in the future, and who are affected by or interested in what’s happening in this location even if they do not and will never live there.
A noteworthy example of a community based on geographical locations is NextDoor. According to their website, nearly 1 in 3 people living in the United States belongs to a NextDoor online neighborhood.
Community of Place Example
Next Door is an example of a community of place.
Communities of Interest
Community concepts based on interest can range from cosplay fandoms and Twitch channels to casual groups about parenting or branded communities designed to support a product, service or lifestyle—really anything at all.
With communities of interest, you’ll find wide variations in growth and sustainability. A Game of Thrones forum could grow wildly popular and include nerdy flame wars about the latest plot theories during the show’s broadcast, but it’s now likely to be much more of a slow burn community with fewer, less intense posts.
Communities of interest may struggle to gain or keep a foothold because interests change over time and they do not tend to be central to the identity and core beliefs of a large group of people. Branded communities run by large enterprises hoping to grow their products or services support communities into a lifestyle brand community run into this problem frequently.
Pretty often, your customers just aren’t that into your service, at least not enough to make it a place where they want to return regularly. Most communities of interest run by brands are now and will probably always be support communities.
Unless they are very thoughtful or very lucky, branded communities of interest seldom grow quickly enough to satisfy the executive leaders who originally funded the effort.
Examples of a community based on brand interest that have succeeded include Lego Ideas community, the Harley Owners Group community, and the Apple Support Community.
Community of Interest Example
The Lego Ideas Community is just one of many examples of a community based on an interest or a hobby.
Communities of Belief
Finding people where you live who share your beliefs can be challenging, so it’s no surprise the people seek out others of the same faith, philosophy, or mindset online. Different types of community based on belief can appear online around religious (or its absence) affiliation such as Buddhism, Catholicism or atheism, but communities of belief may be political or entirely secular.
Because these communities tend to be so closely tied to self identity, they tend to be active, passionate, and long-lasting.
People join communities of belief because they are far more likely to find “people like me” than they will on open social media platforms. In addition, they will be more likely to share personal stories and form friendships in these communities in private online communities, especially those whose discussions that are not indexed by major search engines.
Community of Belief Example
Dharma Wheel is a discussion forum style example of a community of belief. Though it isn’t as visual and modern looking as the other examples, it still serves those drawn together by their shared Mahayana or Vajrayana Buddhist belief system.
Support Communities (Situation)
Another type of community concept that tends to grow quickly and thrive over time is based upon individual situations or circumstances. Physical or mental health online communities are a prime example, such as The Truth Initiative’s BecomeAnEx community devoted to helping people to stop using tobacco products.
Communities related to addiction and recovery, chronic physical conditions, or mental health can be a haven for those who may not know someone in their lives facing the same situation but can now connect with someone who has faced (or continues to face) their exact situation.
Individuals who have gone through addiction and are in recovery, individuals who have been terminally ill but are in remission—even these individuals tend to remain a part of situation-based communities so that they can give back and support others in need.
Situational communities need not be health-based, of course. They may be based upon someone’s socio-economic situation, upon their stage of life, or upon an ethnic, cultural, or gender-based orientation.
Support Community Example
The BecomeAnEx community by the Truth Initiative is an example of a healthcare support community. The community is for people looking for support from others who understand the process and struggle involved in quitting smoking and other tobacco products.
Communities of Practice
Communities concepts based upon the practice and improvement of a skill or profession can serve an array of purposes. A community of practice could be based upon inquiry into how to solve a problem facing a profession such as the Hearing First professional learning community whose original purpose was to connect geographically-dispersed hearing professionals across the United States and to expand those in the profession to prepare for an increase in early childhood hearing loss.
Communities of practice can be about innovation, finding ways for a given profession to do its job better, improve working situations, or to reinvent the practice entirely. They may be built around an event or series of events designed to enhance professional development—and events are increasingly paired with online community platforms such as those provided by Hyvve, a strategic partner of Clocktower Advisors.
Many communities of practice are built by trade organizations and associations because they connect a membership more continuously than a few meetings a year or a convention could ever attempt to duplicate.
But nearly always, communities of practice are about learning and sharing knowledge. They exist to help newcomers share tacit knowledge and advice about a profession that new practitioners didn’t encounter in school. They help people who join these communities to solve wicked problems that only others in their profession can recognize and appreciate. For more information about communities of practice, I would wholeheartedly point you to the website of Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner whose trailblazing thought leadership in communities of practice is well worth the read.
Community of Practice Example
The Hearing First organization supports both and families whose children are affected by hearing loss and professionals who help them. The Hearing First Professional Learning Community is an example of a community of practice that promotes both internal discussions about the profession and serves the adjacent support community for families.
Activist Communities (Change)
Online communities seeking to change the world in some aspirational way can be a powerful way of concentrating effort, activism, and commitment. Communities based on a cause and aimed at change are often represented by nonprofits.
An example of a community seeking to champion change is the Pachamama Alliance Global Commons whose purpose is to ensure a high capacity of dedicated volunteers at all times who can be informed about protests and opportunities to advocate change at the local level.
Change communities are frequently ad hoc groups formed swiftly to effect some action around social or economic justice, such as the Black Lives Matter Community on Facebook or the wallstreetbets reddit that coalesced to oppose Wall Street and drive up the price of GameStop stocks.
Communities of change online help to collectivize those who are interested in the cause, bringing them to a place where they can share ideas, build consensus, organize activity, and track progress against goals.
Activist Community Example
The popular Black Lives Matter community on Facebook with over 790,000 followers is a great example of an activist community, swiftly formed to take action on social justice topics of global importance.
Digital Workplace Communities
The other community concepts I’ve discussed tend to be externally facing and homogenous. Workplace communities are sometimes referred to as enterprise social networks, social intranets, or collaboration platforms for the enterprise. These digital workplaces are not typically open to public view and only employees of that organization can see the content.
But these are a type of community as well, whose purpose is in itself strongly defined around helping an organization to thrive and meet its business goals. The members of the workplace community are extrinsically motivated by money and professional advancement to belong to the online workspace and their activity can augment and improve how different groups across an organization work with one another.
I seldom see digital workplace communities mentioned in the same breath as other types of communities but the only real difference, its visibility to the outside world, is not so very different than many communities of practice, belief, or situation, which are themselves often walled off from the internet’s search engines and hidden behind a registration and approval process.
Workplace communities require the same thinking about what motivates members as the other types.
How do I know which type of online community best fits my needs?
If you’ve read this far, you may be thinking “But my community doesn’t neatly fit into any single category here!” And you’d be in good company.
There isn’t such a thing as a purely geographical community concept, for example. The community may be geographical but also based upon a particular situation or special interest. That’s okay and, even better than that, it’s expected.
Drawing upon the characteristics of multiple community types can ensure that the community you want to build is unique in its appeal.
When planning your online community, consider the purpose it will attempt to fulfill for yourself as the community creator and for your members. How will you convey to members that the online meeting place you’re offering has unique value, can solve their problems, and includes people just like them?
Chances are, once you’ve answered these questions you’ll have a pretty good idea about which of the seven types of community listed above best fits your needs. Looking at the other six types and adapting the purpose of one or more of them will help you to ensure that your community idea is unique and valuable.
Conclusion
I’m going to channel for a moment the sentiments of my colleague Darren Gough to suggest that listing community types may not be of any real importance at all. Obviously, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of writing this piece if I fully believed that, but if a concept cannot stand up to scrutiny it’s probably not worth blogging about in the first place, right?
If a given community isn’t ever going to purely be one type or another, if every community is unique in its own way, they why bother to define it as one in the first place? Do we really need a genus and species of community in order to wrap our heads around what it is and how it works?
I’m going to argue that we do, if only to introduce newcomers to the breadth and variety of what communities in the computer-mediated space can be and the functions they can serve.
Getting started with building an online community can be tremendously daunting if you’ve never created one before, so it’s my hope that by providing this discussion of categories I will be helping more purpose-built communities come into being.
Don’t be discouraged by the task because communities online are an essential and often overlooked part of a resilient digital strategy for engaging with the people who are most important to you. Now that you’ve gotten a bit of background, you may want to read about how to build an online community.
Would you like to talk about building an online community? Schedule a call now.
