Where do you see your community in the next five years?

[Toni]

Some of us may be in the beginning stages of our communities and others may be in the later stages of their communities, whether your community is brand new or a few years old, we all have a vision of where we would like to see our communities in say the next five years. 

Taking a look at your community as it is now and looking to the future, where do you see your community within the next five years? Do you hope to have achieved anything in particular? 

 

[Shortie]

With the communities I lead at the moment, my main aim is to get content and high-quality content within them which I know over time will help my site greatly. 

In the next five years, I hope to provide a community that people enjoy visiting to share their knowledge, learn more and be able to enjoy the community as a whole. 

[Kane]

My long term goal is to build a marketplace in my community for buying and selling digital products and digital services. I want my community to be a platform where people know only find information but also use it for business. Hopefully, I will be able to reach that goal in 5 years.

[JoelR]

I find a lot of new or legacy admins try to overly focus on activity: more members, more posts, more topics. Those are all great, but those goals are a consequence of underlying actions and they don't address the tactics needed to make that happen.  What is their plan to generate X new topics every month? What is their plan to attract X new members? 

I find that focusing on goals with concrete, identifiable metrics is more valuable.  This month, I want to create X new resources in the research paper section.  Next month, I want to create Y new links in other section.  

[Nomad]

Creating smaller goals and trying to reach that goals cis better than just focusing on numbers. For instance, if you plan to build a community with 0ver 1000 active users, you also need to plan concrete steps to reach there. Currently, I am focusing on building evergreen content so that my community develops into a resource site in the next 5 years.

[Maria]

I don't know if I would be still running my community 5 years later. Sustainability is a great issue in the world of online communities. While the owners find difficulty to manage resources for running the community, users are also bored from using the same community and they go else where. Communities are failing to provide a platform that users will remain loyal for years just like they are doing on social platforms.