Online Community

Developing an online community gives Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) throughout the state of Arizona access to their peers and other resources to assist them in serving their clients or their businesses.

We created the Connect community to assist our members, and it has become one of the highest-rated member benefits offered, with 22% of members engaging in the community.

The success of the community is attributed to the volunteer members who stepped up to engage with their colleagues. We reached out to a select group of influential members and gave them a tutorial on how the community would work, to help them feel comfortable on the site. We then worked with them to develop some posts that would elicit responses from their peers, and they each took a week to post their prompts and to respond to others. This was set up for the first few months, and then we touched base to reassess and see how much progress we had made.

Other members quickly joined in and started posting questions and other items when they saw their peers posting. The planning and volunteer engagement got the community off to a great start.

In addition to those activities, we created training videos and written instructions to assist members in understanding how to use the platform. We developed guidelines for the community to help members understand what should be posted in the community and what should not. Staff reached out to members to guide them when posts did not fit with the discussion or community.

We have ongoing marketing efforts to ensure that existing and new members see the value in the community and the types of discussions they are missing if they have not joined the communities. There is one main community for members and several others for specialty areas.

One of my favorite comments from members is that participating in the online community made her two-person accounting firm feel like a firm of 200+ with all the CPAs she could consult in the community.