How do you pull together a volunteer event? How do you put the word out and get helpers? How do you tell members of your bowling club about the sudden change in location or game time after a leak in the typical spot?
Communication often falls short, and resources for improving it may be even more limited.
Free community platforms allow groups and organizations to engage and schedule on a startup, nonprofit, or neighborhood budget. Choosing the right community app for one’s specific group and cost-effective needs is important for successful social building.
What is a Community Platform?
A community platform is a digital place for members, like minds, neighbors, and more to share logistics, ideas, events, and everything in between in one connected, collaborative website or app.
There are many types of community platforms, such as real-time chats, social media groups, and all-in-one hubs, each with its own benefits around discussions, messaging, content sharing, calendars/scheduling, and more.
Community platform examples
Many community platforms exist right under our noses.
For instance, Facebook Groups is a high-engagement space, where creatives, alumni, and so on congregate and coordinate. Members partake in polls, easily tag one person or @everyone for announcements, hold live discussions, and create new member introduction guides. However, privacy and ad content control functions are sparse.
Slack, a common workspace messenger, can integrate with many tools and organize users into dedicated channels. Yet it is more desktop-designed and not as mobile-friendly for discussions and updates on the go. Discord, often used by gaming communities, can require a learning curve and is more niche.
RedeApp GO is on a mission to support tailored, active communities and event types that need more resourceful options, including a more privacy-based and intuitive, on-the-go design.
How/Why RedeApp Customers Use Our Free Community Building Platform
Compared to other community apps, RedeApp’s GO online community software platform cares about the messengers just as much as the messages they send. Here are the key reasons many customers use our free community-building platform:
- Secure: No data mining for advertising, unlike Facebook Groups
- Structured Privacy and Permissions: Controlled space, unlike the limited permissions in GroupMe
- Mobile-First: Design for easy on-the-go access, unlike desktop-first Slack
RedeApp GO specifically helps neighborhoods, volunteer groups, and affinity communities with these technological advantages that are also economical.
A Free Social Community Platform for Neighborhood Communication
When it comes to neighborhood chatting and groups, RedeApp GO allows structured communication of rich media and information with posting permissions in place.
That means when neighbors share forms, contact information, or photos and videos about a local garage sale, pet adoptions/rescues, new neighbor logistics (amenities, schools, town hall bylaws, etc.), and clubs, it is all secure.
Volunteer Scheduling for Events
Many customers come from the nonprofit sector, where RedeApp is used as a free management software. Churches, rescue groups/centers, hospitals/care centers, and so on can target their messaging to pinpoint and confirm volunteers’ commitment and availability. All email types are accepted, which makes it seamless to communicate across volunteers. If documents need to be shared for their signup process, RedeApp GO is a file management hub for that process.
A Platform for Community Engagement and Events
RedeApp GO makes planning community events and getting people to attend them a seamless experience. Examples of events could be a church luncheon, local town hall meeting, club outing, or county art show.
Such groups can centralize their events in one access point, with easy read tracking and announcement tools. Having one location for all essential tools, resources, and direct messaging, eliminates app-switching and grows swifter event scheduling and coordination.
How Can I Build My Own Community?
Before member building, event planning, and steadily engaging, a community needs a unique identity and a secure, communicative place for that identity to be expressed. Here are the steps to follow when building your own community:
- Company Formation: A strong community foundation starts first. Establish your community purpose, who your community is for, and who your founding members will be.
- Community Platform Setup: Research and find the communities app that meets your community’s goals, audience, and feature needs. Your community type (industry, affinity, or event) will determine what content, privacy and permissions controls, messaging, and event creation options you need—and which app meets it.
- Community Participant Outreach and Engagement: Get new members acclimated with any community guidelines in a holistic document. Interact with current members with fun content like polls, user post and video creations, and Q&As. And continually celebrate and electrify your community of members with shout-outs, events, and other exciting recognition ideas.
The right free community engagement platform will make the engagement and event building seamless. RedeApp GO’s is an all-in-one platform for that seamless operation, including the App Hub that allows for easy integrations of different communication, rewards and recognition, and scheduling tools in one place.