Starting a new forum is easy! All it involves is a domain name, a server, and a forum platform… but what then? It pretty much falls down to one word: Community!
What is a community?
The dictionary has a few good definitions
com·mu·ni·ty –noun
1. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
2. a locality inhabited by such a group.
3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the ): the business community; the community of scholars.
A forum should have a theme, a common interest of it’s members, a reason for them to keep coming back. To pick this, it’s best to simply go with what you yourself enjoy the most, as that’ll give you a jump start on getting that community going. Why?
You will have an understanding of such a theme
You will then have the basic knowledge to get conversations going
You will likely have friends and/or family that also have similar interests.
They will also likely have the basic knowledge to get conversations going.
Now that you have a small base of members within your newly founded community, get those friends and family members to share your site with their friends (and additional family members). Word of mouth is the best advertising after all!
Though friends and family are simply not enough to maintain a community unless that is specifically why you started it (That is how Facebook started, but that’s a different story). What you need now is the other points about getting those conversations started and going.
Fill out your community with various boards based on your community theme. Don’t start big, in fact start small! Break your forum into a few basic sections. Three or Four main sections are plenty to start. Here is an example set up.
Announcements
~ Suggestions
Your theme
~ Child forum
~ Child forum
~ Child forum
Your theme
~ Child forum
~ Child forum
~ Child Forum
General discussion
~ Forum Games
~ Specific OT discussion
Announcements should be a place only admin and mods can post, so adding in a place for member suggestions is a good idea. This will allow them to help you shape the community to their wants and needs (as you are there to serve them as much as they are there to serve you.)
At the end I have General discussion, this will allow members to have a place to “chat” a bit which is good, as no one likes to talk about one thing and one thing only. It’ll give them greater cause to come back if themed threads that interest them are running a bit slow. I added games, as diversions are a nice way to keep members active. For some game ideas check out this blog entry: Forum Fun and Games. If you find that there are specific areas of off-topic discussion that keep cropping up you may wish to add additional sub-forums to this area. Though in most instances it’s best to stay away from ‘politics and religion’, as that generally just turns into a troll fest.
The themed sections are just that, aspects of your main topic with tangents upon those aspects under the main headers. Do not go overboard, start basic and small. Once you see certain themes within these sections become prevalent make a child forum for them. This will help you keep every board on your forum active at all times, which can be really hard in the beginning.
There, now you have your base community (friends of friends and their families) and the community is set up, but you are not done yet as it’s time to get those conversations going! However, that’ll be something I’ll talk about in the future.