being a Community Owner on Hive: Motherhood 1st Anniversary! || My Hive Journey

Motherhood turns 1 year old today and OMG what a year has been, I originally made the community to have a place where I could talk about all the things I wanted to talk about my motherhood experience and I did it also to celebrate last year Mother’s Day. at first i didn't actually made more than just created it, then i realize how to have a successful community you need more than just making one.

You can read the first post I made about it HERE and the official introduction of the @motherhood account later on HERE

Here is my view on being a community owner/admin

Owning a Community

Is a LOT of work, you may think well there is nothing to do, you just have the community there and let others use it to post, and well is not as simple as that, you need to make it thrive, you’ll see even tho in Hive we are working towards attracting content creators by offering a place censorship resistant and with decentralization but truth be told, currently people don’t post in communities that doesn't have the backing of a major curation project and major curations projects won’t support your community unless you have content creators making good quality posts, so you have to work, do the hard work of trying to attract content good quality content to your community and make your community get notice by curations projects to support said content, so in a way is like trying to promote your own posts but in a higher scale cause now you are promoting a lot of people posts.

Growing your community

A whole year has pass and I can say proudly Motherhood has gone from only 1 subscriber (me) to 806 all organically grown, with over 236 active users, now I know community statistics suck big time but I still celebrate those numbers it means the hard work has paid! But with bigger numbers you may think I don’t have to work as hard to attract new members, wrong you have to keep the work if you don’t want to lose all that you have done so far.

Challenges

To get people interested to participate in my community I tried the challenges first weekly then daily. It has proven to be effective but this also brings a lot of work too, you have to come with new ideas every single week, since I do daily challenges like the blogging challenge community but themed base only for moms or dads, this means I have to come with at least 8 new ideas every single week.

Curation

You have to curate your community not only to reward good content creators, but to keep it plagiarism free and to mute content that doesn't belong in it too, so you have to read a lot. This not only to make your community look good but to attract big curators too, if a project knows your community has good quality content but is cover with plagiarism and content unrelated to it you won’t get support, communities are supposed to make the curators work easy by being moderated so you have to keep a neat and clean community for them to find you.

Also leaving even if not so high upvotes but more moral support ones plus some comments to a lot of the posts made in the community make our members feel seen and read, you have to interact with your community members and make them enjoy being in your community.

Tips and Prizes

I'm going to be honest I'm not fan of offering tipping for good comments like I seen in other communities, I have done it a few times, but to be honest those comments don’t seem I don’t know organic, the people commenting are doing it for the tip not because they wanted to and I just don’t like it, I do it mostly when I see a good post with an important message or asking for help/opinions and try to drive engagement that way. I like to give tips to community members who deserve it for doing amazing jobs with their posts or comments without us asking for it.

For prizes we do weekly challenges so in order not to go bankrupt we do a small prize to get the people to join the challenge but not big enough to get fake entries just looking to get the prize, we also do a few special challenges a long the way to get the non-moms or dads of Hive to join in and give away a bigger prize that times cause the participants pool is bigger. This comes mostly from the same posts rewards from the community account.

Is there any pay for having a community?

There is more work than pay, if you make community posts and they get upvoted lucky you get some rewards from that but since you have to save some of that for tips and prizes is not like you are going to be rich from those, the real payment is not monetary, in my case I love seeing the community thrive and reach the place we are in right now. I feel proud I have created a beautiful, safe and welcoming place for parents to share their stories and experiences without fear of being judge.

My suggestion is make a community on a subject you love to talk about, and that even if you don’t know well enough you are willing to know more about, do it cause you are passionate about the subject and you want to see it grow, don’t do it for the money or you will be disappointed (unless you have a huge following).

Being an owner of a community can be a lot of work but it can also be so rewarding and worth
It.

Used all the tools at your disposal

Take advantage of all the amazing tools @peakd give you to make one and make it more amazing. Peakd has:

• Preferred topics this way you can recommend your members what tags to use in their posts and you can see less the use of not related tags to your community.

• Curated content this allows you to have a curation account and showcase directly in a different tab of your community all the curated content you consider is worthy of being in it.

• Chat this is to try and move the conversation from discord to Hive, is a slow work in progress since a lot of people are still attached to the easier and richer in features Discord but you can have it activated too so your community can have a place to live chat whenever you want.

• Landing page you can select what page you want users to open when they get to your community this allows you to make the curated content tab to be the first thing they see when they get there.

• Badges now this is not exclusive to the communities but is a good option to make one to give out to your members.

This are a few of the awesome tools you have at your disposal on peakd and I think if you have them use them! I tried to take advantage of all of them to make my community look even more pretty.

Mods

Now this is maybe the most important thing to know about community building, you can not do it alone, even if at first you may think you can, at the end you want the community to grow and when it starts doing just that you will need help.

I have the joy and privilege of counting with 2 awesome moms who help me a lot with Motherhood they are @elizabeths14 and @marybellrg, they are trust worthy and hard workers without getting any real pay lol, the commenting, the curating all that is a lot of work to do it alone when you have more than 806 members, I'm not rich so I cant really afford to pay them much but I do suggest you allow the mods to have content created from the community accounts with them set as beneficiaries as a way of paying them for they hard work.

I can’t seriously not thank enough these amazing ladies one of whom actually does it all from her phone since she doesn't have a PC and she does it with 3 kids! I have just 1 and I have not idea on how she manages to be this awesome.

Find yourself people who is as interested in the community topic as you are to help and make an amazing team of curators accordingly to the site of your community.

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@ocd's community incubation program

Here is the thing way back when i first made the community i applied ot the program, id dint even had any subscriber to it, so i was told to work on it a bit and come back, this to be honest was the thing that made me realize how much work i had to put in to make Motherhood a place where people wanted to created their posts on. I suggest if you want to create a very niche community to make it, start promoting it and get some members first before you pitch it to the OCD team that way you can prove how you are willing to make an effort and are not just after their support for their vote.
The Motherhood community isn't on the program, i haven't actually applied to it again, and is not like we don't want to be in it, but we have been very lucky to have some awesome curators like @canadian-coconut, @theycallmedan, @aliento, @appreciator support who we are very thankful for and even tho we are not in the OCD program we do enjoy their curations on some post from our moms from time to time, this proves that you don't need to actually be on the program to be a successful community, you can attract awesome curators and even the OCD team to your community if you have awesome members who make quality content in it.

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This is my view on community ownership, a lot of hard work but rewarding non the less!

If you are a mom, a dad or just want to talk any subject related to parenthood, please consider joining the Motherhood Community.

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