[Post by Maggie McGary]

In addition to being a community manager for an association, I’m also a member of several associations—all of which have both listservs and recently-launched white label online communities. In each case, the shiny new private community sits, bereft of activity, while the listservs continue to be members’ lifeline to one another. I don’t get it. I hate listservs. Here is this much better way to communicate yet nobody seems to be taking advantage of it. Why?!

I know the whole social media ROI question remains 99.9% unsolved so it’s no wonder that associations seem to be pretty tentative in their implementation of white label networks. However, I can’t help but scratch my head at the strategy most associations seem to use when they launch a white label network: they a) don’t hire a community manager and b) don’t shut down their existing listservs.

I get it: the ROI of social media and/or community management have yet to be definitively proven so most associations are reluctant to staff for it. Or, it’s a budget thing rather than an ROI thing and they have no money to fund a new position. I get that. But what I don’t get is an organization basically cutting itself off at the knees by failing to close its existing online community—its listservs and/or discussion forums—when they launch the new, more feature-rich platform.  It then turns into the perfect storm of failure: change—which people hate--combined with nobody at the helm of the new place. What incentive is there for members to flock—unattended—to the new platform if the existing one still works fine?

I can already see how this will play out. These new private communities will languish, unattended, and after a certain period of time associations will declare the whole thing a failure and pull the plug. Which is sad, because it doesn’t have to be that way.

At the bare minimum, if associations aren’t going to staff for community management, can’t they at least give members only one option when it comes to where the community lives? Am I missing something?

Maggie McGary is Online Community & Social Media Manager for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)