Problems with professional community apps
Professional groups, networks and communities are awesome, but they can be more productive
ConnectPlus
Making professional communities valuable again.
Professional groups, networks and communities are awesome, but it needs some care.
Here’s a list of 46 fundamental issues we see with professional community apps.
With ConnectPlus we plan to fix these, one at a time.
Connections
You can’t easily find the members relevant to you from 100s of members
You can't message everyone and find out who's relevant to you
No relationship building is happening unless you take explicit actions on it
You can't search for people based on their interests or credentials
You don't have much information on the members’ background, unless you check their website or social media profiles
Members are showcased as yet another contact in the contact list while each relevant member connection can be very valuable
Life is too short to be among uninteresting people. Finding like minded people energizes you.
Content
Too many messages to read, don't know which one is relevant for you
You don't get summary or key highlights of the community on a weekly basis
There's no way in which it can capture the best highlight of the day curated from all the members and content
It’s not easy to find valuable content which was previously shared in the community
Information is not organized, there are different types of too much information that’s shared
Collaboration
There’s no specific features enabled for networking among the members
There are no organic collaboration opportunities triggered
There's no option to showcase your work or services
It's difficult to promote your services without appearing spammy
Communication
Existing apps don’t encourage or make it easy for 1-1 communications
Admin controls
Admin messages and posts get lost in the clutter of the other messages
Admin cannot remove a member without letting the entire group know most of the times
Admin cannot bring into life the actual power of community which the members could experience at least once in a week
Admin cannot delete an inappropriate content posted by a member
The app doesn’t tell you what you can do as an admin to improve your community engagement
The app doesn’t help you understand what your members want
You don’t get to maintain a database of your members most of the time
Interactions
Maybe you don't want to interact with community daily, yet it shows up on your screen
There's no option to reply to a new message as a thread most of the times without bothering everyone in the community
Muting and archiving doesn't help, the message or posts show up on your screen again
You can't exit the group due to FOMO, but there's no option of temporary exit or stay inactive
You can't react to a message without explicitly replying to a message
There’s no option to create a temporary conversation group of three or more people so that others are not disturbed
Internal experience
You cannot create sub groups or interest groups inside a community for focused discussions
Expects you to be in browsing mode where you scroll endlessly, while what you ideally want is the app recommending you relevant information, after processing all the information
There's not much visual design elements that are used to make the communication and presentation better
There's no incentive for being an active participant in the community unless the admin takes initiative to make that happen
Treats community is a group discussion, truth is group discussion is one of the ways in which a community can engage
There’s no specific functionalities enabled to provide different experiences for different communities
There are not many tools which are designed for mobile first
Most of the tools are designed for work collaboration and for tech savvy users
External experience
Your phone memory gets eaten up with all the media forwards which you'll have to manually clean up
It just won't stop buzzing keeping you distracted all the time
Productivity
It wants your attention on an hourly basis, if you leave it unattended for a week, you can't catch up with the conversations and interactions happened over there
It treats all messages equally. There’s no way to separate and understand Important and urgent messages from the members
There's no way to find out what the message is all about without reading it
Unread messages create mental fatigue and FOMO
You end up spending mindless time on random conversations
Doesn't help you achieve your personal community goal
Fixing these is not at all an easy job.
We’re excited about the future of communities and how ConnectPlus can be a part in helping communities unleash its power and potential.
We’re on a mission to make professional communities loved and productive again!
To stay tuned and get a beta invite send an email to magic@connectplus.co or sign up at connectplus.co
If you’re crazy about communities like us, tell us more about your community in the email.
What’s your professional community about?
Which of the above problems you resonate with?
What’s the no. 1 challenge that you’re having with your community?
We’re all ears.