Selecting the right platform for your communities can take more work than the decision to build communities. The simpler reason is the long list of factors that come into play when deciding the right platform for your community. Often, communities are started on a platform but soon outgrow it for one reason or another.

We recently did an event with some of the best minds in the community building industry to uncover all about Community Platform Migration: Reasons, Challenges, and Best Practices For Easy Transition.

Let’s dive in!

A lot of times when stakeholders are thinking of starting a community, they would start on a platform that is not the ideal choice for the long term for a variety of reasons. There are tonnes of such examples such as starting a community on a forum kind of platform or a WhatsApp/Facebook group because those are the platforms with the least barrier to entry and early implementation.

Sometimes, despite choosing a proper community platform, it may still not be suitable for the target audience for various reasons.

At this point, the challenge is to identify if there is a need to shift the community to a different platform, if yes, what are the tricks to access and identify a platform that will check all the key parameters such as data migration, security, cost, ease of access, etc. At the same time, the community team also needs to develop strategies to incorporate the feedback of existing community members ways to ensure the least friction while migrating, and the metrics to test the success of the migration process.

Watch the video or keep reading for insights on each of the aspects of community platform migration.

Is there a need for platform migration?

We opened the discussion with the most crucial question that guides every other step taken after that. Identifying and understanding the need for migration. What are the signs and indications of the need for platform migration?

To this question, Brian Oblinger, our first panelist responded with this:

One of the things I have seen in all the years of community building is that a lot of times we fail at strategy or tactics and we blame vendors, technology, or platforms. Often you see this idea in organizations that if we switch platforms or if we migrate, all of our problems will be solved and our strategies will work. However, a lot of times it is a failure of strategy to keep it very real. I want people to pay very close attention to that before we talk about migration.

I do think there are clear reasons to migrate. Typically those reasons would include

• You have outgrown your existing platform: seen a lot of times with platforms like Slack and Discord etc. where people start on these platforms but hit the magical barrier of 3-5 thousand (especially in the case of B2B or enterprise communities)
• Technical requirements from the business such as security, and integrations that are necessary for you but aren’t offered by the platform you are currently using
• Better experience for the customers: Sometimes even when the strategy and platform are working just fine, but as a team you know that you can deliver a much better experience for your customers and users and go to another level if we have a much refined overall experience.

We then asked Mark Schwanke, our second panelist who has also done platform migrations for enterprise communities over 5 times to understand at a deeper level the reasons for migration and he described three categories/reasons for the migration:

• Platform closure: A couple of times it was because the platform was at the end of its life so it was a necessity to move to another platform.
• Add-on benefits: Other times we used the CRM of another platform, they also had a community platform so we moved just to do a cost reduction as well as for closer integration points - not needing to build whole another level of integrations
• Compliance issues: There have been times when the community was originally built on an open-source platform but we needed something that was enterprise-level as well as fulfilled regulatory requirements such as HIPPA or ISO compliances. Being able to get all the add-ons/integrations and enhancements was a bonus (and a criterion) in such cases.

When posed with the same question, Madhurima Mantha (Maddy) highlighted one key behavioral aspect: the target group.

Many times, you end up deciding upon a platform without putting much thought into it for reasons such as cost, features, ease of use, etc. but it’s really important to pick your platform based on the target audience. Understand where are your community members, what will be comfortable for them, and whether will they be using the community that you are trying to create for them.

She shared an example of one of her previous roles where they had to shift the community from Slack to Discord because their users were a lot more familiar with Discord instead of Slack. The tool made a major difference here since it was difficult for the members to even join the community.

We concluded this segment with a clear understanding of the fact that Migrations are hard. It takes a lot of time and effort to migrate and it can even derail your overall community strategy for months or even a year in the case of an enterprise community. So if it’s something you have to do or need to do you should weigh the consequences and opportunity costs before getting into migration.

This can include the time taken to revive the community member count and engagement to a similar level as well as understanding if there are going to be substantial enough cost benefits to rattle the community by making such big changes.

Questions to ask yourself and the vendor when migrating:

1. Ancillary cost of migration - engineering effort, communication efforts, and the trade-offs of migration, etc.,
2. Subscription and usage cost of old vs new platform,
3. Cost of enhancements - add-on features,
4. User-friendliness, possible impact on user activity, countermeasures,
5. Customization abilities and feature comparison of the new vs existing platform for your use case.

P.S. If you are ready to migrate your community and create in-app social features, contact us to learn more about our highly customizable, scalable, and easy-to-implement SDK solutions that come with a lot of pre-built widgets.

Tips for a smooth transition during platform migration

It’s a given that you can not move your community without talking to your community members in the process. Not only is it crucial from a trust standpoint, but it also allows you to understand what more the members are seeking from your community. The feedback gathered at this stage helps in selecting a platform that can be a middle-ground place to suit the needs of both the business as well as users. We asked our panelists for some tips on how to include the community in the process before, during, and after and this is what they shared:

1. Including the community and the super users in the migration process: ask for feedback, inputs, and suggestions for the drawbacks of the existing platform and test the possible options if possible with a select few members to get input on the experience with the new platform.
2. Extensive communication: Inform the community members through the process about what will remain the same, what will change and what are the communication channels for them to seek support during the migration process.
3. Transparency with the management: Align expectations and communicate clearly about the changes in member engagement and the timelines for it to reach back to earlier levels
4. Transparency with the users: all the panelists agreed that a community is usually forgiving if you can be honest with the members about the reasons for migration. Even if it’s not a very fancy and rosy reason and is primarily for the business benefit.
5. Migrating in phases instead of trying to do it in one shot - allows the management team to test the new platforms, refine and address any unforeseen challenges, and incorporate feedback for the next batch of users.

Engagement During Platform Migration

One of the challenges that need to be planned and accounted for before the actual migration process begins is to plan for information sharing and community engagement during the migration process. There are many reasons it can be challenging starting from the simplest question of what exactly to communicate to more complex things such as communication style, schedule, and channels including on and off existing community platforms. You also need to plan for content migration from existing to new platforms wherever possible alongside the deadline for the closure of existing community platforms. When asked, our experts shared the following tips:

Community managers should try and create processes around the migration activity as much as possible. Communicate extensively about each step: when, where, and how it’s going to happen. If there are changes in timelines, communicate that as well. While it’s a given that you will lose some members, do your best to communicate in a way that helps you retain as many members as possible. - Brian Oblinger

One way to assess if your community can start recovering quickly is to see if it’s possible to subscribe or create a way to be notified about the conversation happening on the existing platform and then carry over those conversations to the new platform. While this is a manually extensive process, it allows to seed conversations on the new platform by utilizing an existing topic and conversation of interest - Mark Schwanke

Mark also suggested sending communication about the launch of the new platform in batches especially in case of very large communities to ensure that the platform can handle the scale and avoid any kind of technical glitches at the start.

Once your community architecture and platform are ready, onboard the first cohort on the new platform to get their feedback. At this point it is critical to keep the rest of the community engaged on the existing platform - not just for the metrics but for the value that the team provides and the members seek from the community. The members shouldn’t ever be made to feel that they aren’t a priority anymore. Communicate extensively the benefits the already migrated members are seeing on the new platform compared to the existing one and ensure that you have communicated ahead of time the expiry date of the current community platform. Send a save the date if you have to but make sure that the communication is crystal clear in all regards. - Maddy

Other tips from the panel:

1. If there is a feature that your community members have wanted for some time that you weren’t able to provide on the existing platform but the new platform has that capability - create a teaser and give members a glimpse into it to get them excited about the new platform
2. Focus on value to the community. Once you can do that, the business will automatically start to find value for itself.

Reducing Friction During Platform Migration

Communicate in as many ways and as much detail as possible. Create guided instructions for different steps including for onboarding and navigation of the new platform. Do 1:1 handholding, and conduct live onboarding sessions if needed.

It’s also crucial to remember that while you are migrating some members from the old platform there will also be members who will be joining the community for the first time directly on the new platform itself. It’s important to design and craft your communication to address the needs of both existing as well as new members of the community.

Don’t assume that everything will work out or that you have learned everything there is to know about the new platform. There will be sudden curveballs and sometimes the members may come up with simpler, more efficient solutions too. Keep an open mind and keep interacting with the members to understand the actual user journey post-migration.

Life After Platform Migration

While it’s difficult to assess how many people will churn during the migration it is important to be prepared for it and understand that the decision has been made to have a better experience. The cost of migration isn’t just monetary but it is also for the initial drop in engagement, member count, and the timelines to grow and sustain the community on the new platform.

Give it a long enough time, anywhere in the range of 6-12 months in the case of enterprise communities.

It is also possible that the community grows faster post-migration in terms of the new members who join the community post-migration if one of the reasons for migration was the ease of access.

The ideal metrics to track in these situations would vary depending on the objective of migration but some examples as shared by our experts include:

1. Tracking only active members when counting the migrated users
2. Understanding the growth in new member acquisition viz a viz old platform
3. Changes in user-generated content post migration

Future of Community Platforms

Brian thinks there will be a lot of consolidation of platforms, especially the ones that came during the pandemic. He is also looking forward to seeing what LikeMinds does in terms of building the next generation of community platforms.

Mark believes that there will be consolidation of a different kind where more CRM platforms will focus on integrating community features either through bing existing platforms or creating such features in house.

Maddy highlighted that the community industry is in a very nascent stage in India and it would be interesting for the evolution of the community industry on this side of the world.

Conclusion

There is no fixed format for reasons and success of platform migration but make sure that you are doing it for the right reasons, communicating properly to the community and ensuring that you are ready for everything planned and unforeseen once the migration is done.

About LikeMinds:

Done with experimenting and testing your community-building efforts? If you are ready to scale and bring the community within your app, instead of relying on 3rd party platforms, we are here to help you integrate community features in your app in just 15 minutes!!

LikeMinds elevates businesses in unlocking the true potential of their users through their in-app community and social network. Using LikeMinds, businesses achieve higher conversion and retention, by building custom community experiences in their existing platform unlocking community-led growth.

With LikeMinds, businesses get an easy-to-implement and highly scalable infrastructure with a fully customizable UI. All of this with a customization time of 3 days and a deployment time of 15 minutes.

Our Chat and Feed infra have pre-built widgets such as image carousels, PDF slides, short videos, polls, quizzes, events, forms, and more for user engagement and retention along with moderation capabilities to ensure frictionless community operations.