from HEMA
Live Q&A: The Future of AI in 2025. Join the free webinar with AI expert Patrick Klerks on February 6 What if your online community delivers more reach than your TV show? Are you then a TV show with a community? Or a community with a TV show? A relevant identity question, given that the consumer communities of VARA's Kassa and Tros Radar are growing rapidly. Since most communities do not reach this mature phase, it is interesting to examine the practical lessons of Kassa and Radar.
Two competitors in a room
It was a unique moment during the 31st meeting of the professional association Community Management Netherlands on March 25. The driving forces behind VARA's Kassa (Ad van der Ree & Jeroen Olthof) and Tros Radar (Jacob de Vries & Jeroen Koster) for the first time in a room, talking about their online communities. I don't want to tar both programs with the same brush, but you can call them competitors.
Both programs stand up for the Dutch consumer. Both communities have their origins in their TV program. Both have a large and active online consumer platform. And they are both in a space to share the ins and outs of their online communities. With 160,000 (Kassa) and 180,000 (Radar) users and an online reach that is about to surpass the TV reach, there are many practical lessons to be learned!
Lesson 1. Provide a connecting factor
An online community is more than, to put it bluntly, an online platform where the interaction mainly takes place between a visitor and the owner of the platform. On many Facebook business pages and service forums, for example, you often see a response to a post from the underlying organization, or a question to the underlying organization.
The characteristic of a lively community is precisely that there is interaction between the members of the community, that they know how to find each other. This does not mean that the underlying organization does not play an active role (see also the practical lessons below), which will certainly have to facilitate the connections within the community. This is only possible if the members share 'something' with each other, a common interest.
Checkout community Question & Answer
Checkout's 'Questions & Answers' section
In that respect, the Dutch consumer market is a 'gift that keeps on giving'. Van der Ree (Kassa) indicates that the Dutch consumer is badly off compared to the countries around us, where there is an ombudsman who solves problems 1-on-1. In the Netherlands, there is only an ombudsman who solves problems between the government and the citizen.
This context, combined with a constant stream of positive and negative consumer information, ensures that Kassa and Radar can offer an (online) platform for the Dutch consumer. Where not only interaction takes place between the visitor and Kassa or Radar, but also consumers know how to find each other, help each other and fascinate each other.
Lesson 2. Build from the core of the community (and nurture it)
The proportions of Jakob Nielsen's 90-9-1 rule may be outdated by now, but an online community is still made up of different rings. You have visitors, members, active members and the core of the community. The core of the community is a relatively small group of fanatic and active users who are mostly active on a daily basis.
Tros Radar did not present any specific figures (mainly the big picture was on bahrain mobile phone number list the slides), but Kassa gave a nice glimpse behind the scenes regarding their participation ratio: the Question and Answer community consists of 160,000 members, with 3,000 active users and 30 'core members': the Kassa experts. These experts are mostly domain-specific: at the beginning in 2004, 9 main categories were identified in order to connect experts to them as quickly as possible. A large group of people 'benefits' from the knowledge of a relatively small group. That small group is therefore crucial for a healthy activation and growth of an online community. Where Ad van der Ree borrows a fitting quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm:
The Kassa Experts are also regularly involved, for example they are invited to the VARA office for a meeting: the target group often knows better what they want than the organization that facilitates the community. In that respect, a community is a real communicative goldmine to gain target group knowledge.
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Lesson 3. Get a Flywheel
To build a successful community, you often need a long breath. 'Build it and they will come', usually does not apply. The mature phase that the communities of Kassa and Radar have reached, with thousands of online activities, does not come out of the blue. The previously mentioned community core group is very important for a daily living community, but not sufficient for scaling up a community. For that you need a flywheel, a catalyst.