According to OurCompassion (OC), the community, which was launched in June 2009,  is “a place for all of us to come together and get organized on behalf of children living in poverty.”

This is an amazing organization that serves more than 800,000 supporters who are sponsoring more than one million children worldwide. The OC community serves as a place for supporters to share, organize and speak up on behalf of children living in poverty.

During our discussion, Katie shared how the OC community was instrumental during the Haiti Earthquakes as it played an important role in facilitating communication with supporters around the world. Through this tragedy, the community went from being a new, young endeavor into a key player in the grand scheme of Compassion’s social media strategy as it became an integral part of their disaster response approach.  With the community, they were and continue to direct Compassion sponsors to the community for further support and information.

What they also found was that through this, the community naturally displayed new levels of “social maturity” (commonly looked for on social networking environments) as members showed deeper levels of friendship and honesty as they all worked through this tragedy together.  

My video interview with Katy is below. Please take a moment to hear what she has to say about OurCompassion.org and please check out their community for more information on how you can get involved.

We chatted a bit about his passion for online communities, what goes into successfully creating and managing one and why brands should create their own.

Check out my discussion with him for yourself below

Do you “got community?” If so, what makes your community so successful? If not, what are you waiting for??

Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable

Chris Brogan wrote about the difference between audience and community where he said “The difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing.” Well, I happen to love that statement and believe in it completely. What he was trying to say, or at least what I interpret what he was trying to say (Chris, you can correct me if I am wrong later)  is that slapping up a bunch of content on your site in an effort to attract an audience does not a community make. It’s effective if you want to draw some eyeballs – especially if the content is really great, but you can’t call that community.

So what is community?

In the latest Awareness webinar, Rachel Happe and Jim Storer of The Community Roundtable along with Adam Zawel, XPC Community Facilitator at Palladium Group presented “The Community Maturity Model.”

During the webinar, Rachel brought us through the different phases of The Community Maturity Model while Adam shared his first-hand experiences building and managing Palladium Group’s community.

According to Rachel, community is about the relationships between the people in your community and not just a content-rich website (the “audience” Brogan referred to). It is these relationships that drive engagement, passion and long term relationships. Reminds me of Ford Motor Company and their success in using social media to drive that passion for its vehicles.

A few key takeaways were shared by listeners via Twitter. My favorite, of course, is the tweet about the correlation between offline and online building community

• themaria Lessons in community: if you drive a lot of members to a site without prior relationships, it will fall off. (via @rhappe) #awarenessinc
• themaria .@rahppe says she’d prefer a smaller, passionate community than larger community that just languishes, i couldn’t agree more! #awarenessinc
• dltegart (via @rhappe) “managing a community is like making risotto” #awarenessinc
• mightymegasaur love the idea getting members to an in person event, something we are looking at next year#awarenessinc
• karyncooks @mightymegasaur We believe in offline/online building community. Hard to convince clients that offline will drive online. #awarenessinc
• themaria Internal evangelism and education are a huge part of community management. There should be other people helping out #awarenessinc
• karyncooks 1 in 1000 rule: Likely to have one problematic community member in 1000 member pool. Make them adhere to TOS. #awarenessinc
• karyncooks Track community month over month – not any 1 thing that moves the needle that much within smaller time increments. #awarenessinc

You can check out the complete webinar below in case you missed it or just want to watch it again. Slides are also available for viewing here.

So, where does your organization fall within The Community Maturity Model? I would love to hear what you are doing within your organization to drive engagement. Have questions? Share those in the comments too.

What’s coming up next?

Be sure to register for the next Awareness webinar taking place on Thursday, December 10, 2009 with Caroline Dangson of IDC titled “Socializing the Enterprise: Breaking Down Operational Barriers to Social Business Success.” Register here.