According to AdAge, the starting point of any succesful web community is finding a niche that is currently underserved, and then serving that community better than anyone else. Perhaps not surprisingly, the tools to build a community are no longer the real issue. The “Four C’s” to consider as a higher level framework are:

Content
Quality content remains the best way to attract people. There are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from? Does it provide indisputable value? How can a regular flow of quality content be maintained?

Context
Context means investing time in knowing how your users will want to engage with their community — then enabling them to do so. In short it means serving users the right experience, at the right time.

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Connectivity
Communities thrive on activities that are relationship-based. It’s not about mass communications but more about micro-interactions. It’s important to design experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions. This means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder. If you’ve invested in building a community framework, you need to play host if you’re lucky enough for guests to arrive.

Continuity
Communities that thrive often evolve to meet the needs of users. Communities such as this and others need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained.

The takeaway: building communities requires a lot of work and demands a variety of skill sets. It also, crucially, has to be built around a brand or cause that has the strength to galvanize entire groups of people. If that sounds like it might apply to your organization, it might be worth the hard work that inevitably lays ahead.