Don’t confuse money with value

If your project doesn’t have immediate or scalable ways of making money to sustain itself, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing in there that can help you. If the community is large enough, it may well contain the resources to sustain itself by voluntary activities and donations. Not everything needs to be run by organisations and paid for in hard cash. All communities rely on good will; they are all ‘voluntary organisations’. So if enough people want the service to exist, how can you involve that community in sustaining itself?

Let the users solve their own problems. As the amount of work grows, so does the number of workers. SavvyChavvy were able to harness the enthusiasm of the community to moderate content, control access to the network and stimulate conversations, meaning the network can now continue to be run by volunteers. The more you rely on the community for sustainability, the more you can keep focussed on what they need.

Of course, while there are many examples of online communities set up and maintained by enthusiasts, that’s entirely different from a situation where a public agency or non-profit organisation creates an online system and hopes that users will make it self-sustaining. If they don’t ‘own’ it, they are unlikely to commit to maintain it. Online communities need online facilitators ... and they probably need to be paid.

So if you want the community to support the platform, be prepared to lose control of it. And if you need control, be prepared to pay.