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Table of Contents

• What is Community Software?
• The benefits of Community Software
• Typical features of Community Software
• The cost of Community Software
• Considerations when purchasing Community Software
• Relevant Community Software trends

What is Community Software?

Community software is a tool that helps businesses build and manage virtual spaces to connect individuals with shared interests, goals, or activities.

The solution automates the administrative processes in maintaining forums and helps manage and measure the effectiveness of online communities.

Community software is also known as social software, collaboration software, or groupware.

The benefits of Community Software

Community software can benefit businesses in many ways, including:

• Greater customer experience and brand visibility: Community software helps organizations keep the conversation with their customers going via discussion boards and threads. This improves customers’ overall experience with the brand. Additionally, it helps in reaching out to a larger audience.
• Direct customer feedback results in better decision making: Discussion boards are one of the essential features of community software. This feature allows businesses to capture direct feedback and gather ideas from users. Businesses also get direct visibility into what the community is discussing about the brand and its products or services.
• Efficient marketing opportunity: With the ability to engage more customers, community solutions offer a platform to promote products and services by displaying promotional content and other ads.
• Improved customer engagement: With features such as gamification, contests, surveys, and polls, community software lets you improve customer engagement. Customer engagement can further be improved by inviting community members to interact and post their achievements and scoreboard with others, either on the same platform or on their social media channels.

Typical features of Community Software

• Discussion boards: Create threads, post and respond to questions, ask questions, and share ideas in online forums/groups.
• Group management: Manage groups of community members by assigning categories and tags to the groups and edit policies related to adding/deleting/removing members to/from the group.
• Membership management: Create, track, and manage profiles of community members.
• Member directory: Store key information about community members in an online or printable list/directory.
• Access controls/permissions: Define levels of authorization for accessing specific files/folders.
• Alerts/notifications: Notify community members about updates, events, issue resolution, etc.
• Content management: Create, update, and monitor web content and ensure brand consistency for all written materials that are distributed to stakeholders.
• Ideation: Create, develop, share, and store new ideas.
• Knowledge base management: Create, store, and share information and support articles from a centralized database.

The cost of Community Software

Most products in this market are priced on a “per month” basis. Pricing can be divided into three pricing tiers based on the starting price.

Price ranges*:

• $21 - $30
• $30 - $58
• $58+

*The pricing included in this list is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offering found on vendor websites on Jan 15, 2021. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentiles of pricing information gathered from vendor websites of sample products.

The above list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise or premium product that is priced higher may include additional features such as gamification, surveys, built-in CRM, reward programs, and advanced behavioral marketing.

Considerations when purchasing Community Software

• Integration with existing applications: You would need to track the details of all the members of your community. For that, it’s essential that the community software talks with the applications you’re already using. Such applications may include tools for customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, help desk, and social media management.
• Scalability: Community management software will allow you to build a strong community. However, whether it will allow you to handle growing members in your community is a question that you must ask the vendor.
• Customizability: Designing a community platform that aligns with your brand and supports your overall goals can help build trust and user engagement. It can help users easily recognize your brand and make them feel more comfortable. But to do all this, you’ll need to model your community to reflect what is unique about your brand. And that depends on how customizable is the community software you’re choosing.
• Analytics, insights, and metrics: Analyzing parameters such as likes, dislikes, and hit topics can help you make impactful changes in the community. A community system that offers analytics capabilities, will help you to program your content as per customer requirements.

Relevant community software trends

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is automating community management: Community solutions enabled with technologies such as AI and machine learning can help community managers use enormous volumes of conversation threads to draw valuable insights. AI technology can also automate notifications across the community and offer chatbots and virtual assistants to help customers find answers quickly.