Online community challenges or community icebreakers is one important aspect that helps in building a community. We all know what role they play in a community and what all one should do to host challenges in the community.

But in today's blog, we're going to give you some real-life community challenge examples from some of the leading community-led organizations of India. We'll tell you what was the purpose of hosting these online community challenges, how did these community builders host these online community challenges, and what did they achieve out of them?

We know the feeling of wanting to have a super-engaged community that can also help in achieving organizational goals.

We can totally relate to that feeling!

That is why, in this blog, we'll provide you with online community challenge examples of:

1. How To Host An Icebreaker Like A Pro
2. Executing Educational Programs To Increase Social Media Presence The Right Way
3. How To Implement An Online Community Challenge Successfully

... And much more!

Besides this, if you're in search of a platform where you can set up and grow your community, then check out LikeMinds right now! The platform comes with inbuilt tools that make managing subscriptions a breeze.

Hosting An Effective Icebreaker - By Shelton Desouza From Stoa School

Shelton Desouza is the Community Lead at Stoa School, which is a leading Indian virtual school for alternative MBA. A unique program that they run in their organization is icebreaker challenges. These had very generic questions, which one would use for a normal icebreaker. For example: Talking about which city you're from.

Shelton says, "But what I realized was that I could convert this into more meaningful conversations... So, recently what I started doing is... I have a 3 part event. So I have a 3 structured event."

"I put people in breakout rooms, random breakout rooms. First question is always sort of to break the ice and make the mood. Second question is hard-hitting, like talk about that one job that you tried for but didn't succeed. Talk about your failure at college." adds Shelton.

In his experience, hosting an icebreaker challenge that is broken down into different stages, really gets people to open up.

He said, "And then I close the session with something that is super fun, which is, I put people in groups randomly and I'd say something like Kunal Shah's hired you as an advertising company for CRED. Here are your constraints: You gotta use an elephant, you gotta use a celebrity, come up with a one-pager for an ad."

He thinks that a last fun icebreaker activity like this allows the members of your community to bond. It gives them some common ground to work through. And not just this, it lets them test their creativity and create something from that while also being vulnerable.

Shelton Desouza also suggested a tool for hosting icebreaker challenges with ease. He said, "So this is something that I've done or at least experimented with in the last couple of months. However, a tool that I'd recommend, that I've started using is this tool called Gatheround. I think it is one of the best tools I see now that's there for icebreakers."

So, here you go!

Not just the complete strategy, but you also have a really cool, and fun tool suggestion that lets you design a lot of unique sessions for your icebreaker challenges.

Also Check Out:

• Daily Struggles In The Life Of A Community Manager
• The Diagnosis Plan For Online Community Engagement

Executing Educational Programs To Increase Impressions - By Ritu Mukherjee From NextLeap

Ritu Mukherjee is the Community Lead at NextLeap and she executed an educational program that changed the impact of the LinkedIn feed. They launched the Associate Program Manager (APM) Fellowship and 350 aspiring Program Managers signed up for this program. And one concept that they wanted to test was - 'The best way to learn is when you start teaching it to somebody else'.

They had various questions to address about this concept. She tells, "How do students would essentially do that? They're not gonna sit with people and start teaching. How do you internalize that learning to truly assimilate it?."

"Why don't you talk about it on social media? And today at the end of the day, everybody would go out on the internet and talk about: this is where I am, this is what I've been doing. So we had this particular piece where we made them realize that they could do this if they wanted to." Ritu added.

And to their surprise, they had ~70% of the 350 folks actually signing up for that particular activity. They went out on LinkedIn and Twitter and did this daily for 30 days. And after about 3 days, they started receiving direct messages from folks in the industry saying, "Guys, what's happened to our LinkedIn feeds? Everything is all about Associate PMs and Product Managers."

In Ritu's words, people started asking, "What are you guys teaching that even we don't know about? The whole idea was can you get your community to come together, asynchronously, do something similar, but at the same time, do it in such a cohesive manner that they kept rooting for each other. And I think that's again... one of those magical things that happen."

And from a business point of view, most of the work that one does, whether magical or not, has to have some business impact. Otherwise, the business teams will start questioning you: Why have you been doing this? What is it that you want to achieve out of this activity? So, for NextLeap it was about achieving impressions.

To which Ritu adds, "But if you ask me in terms of metrics and what it is that we typically look out for? Is a north star of every single learner who comes into the NextLeap ecosystem. If your north star is say get a job, can we get you there? If your north star is upskilling and ensuring that you are there, can we get you there?"

So basically anything that helps NextLeap measure that, is a north star for them.

...And Here's Another One From Ritu As An Ex-Community Builder For LXME

Ritu Mittal Mukherjee shared another strategy for hosting an online community challenge successfully. Prior to NextLeap, Ritu served as a community builder for LXME - India's first FinTech platform that is community-led completely. And one of the online community challenges at LXME was that women were not going to start investing straight off.

Ritu says, "But at the end of the day... LXME was really... trying to get women to start talking about money and making it extremely normal. It's not a big deal if a woman talks about money is what we wanted to establish. So one of the quick hacks that we did workaround was, we started something that was called as a 365-day challenge on January 1st, and its ends on 31st December this year."

"Every single day we called out one number in the community. That number could be any number between 1 and 365. Suppose I call out a number 22, I call out a number 238, that's the amount of money that woman had to save in her savings account.", she added.

And this online community challenge was a huge success because it benefited both, the community members as well as the organization. At the end of that challenge, on the 365th day, every woman would have saved 66k rupees. And this community initiative became such a huge success, that in 48 hours, the community had 1k new members in our community.

Ritu explains why, "These women wanted to share this particular challenge with all their friends, family, sisters, bhabis, nanands (sisters-in-law). The families joined in. Why? Because this was the place where numbers were being announced and till date those women continue to stay there because when they came with that very tangible reason - I want to save 66k bucks."

And that is how this online community challenge benefitted the organization as well. They were able to achieve their retention goals as all the women ended up staying for all the conversations till date in that community. So one learning that comes out of this online community challenge is it is also important to show value to members from day 1.

In Ritu's words, "And at times, if you can show a tangible value, nothing like it. So think of these little things. Very small simple things, but they actually help you with a lot of growth."

So, the next time you start planning your next community challenge, think of how it will provide value to your members.

And on that note, if you want to learn how to grow your community effectively, then join CommunityHood today! Here you'll find real guides and mentors who'll guide you through regular live sessions and help you upskill yourself to build thriving communities.

Key Takeaways!

1. Consider categorizing your icebreaker challenge into 3 stages like Shelton Desouza for Stoa does.
2. Along with questions, try to include a fun activity too in your icebreaker challenge.
3. While planning your community challenge, think how you can achieve your goals through it.
4. Think of hosting online community challenges that can bring your community together and keeps them rooting for each other.
5. Ensure that your online community challenges provide value to the members from day one to get high engagement.