Building an online community enables collaboration. It has the potential to engage a target audience that builds trust, increases brand visibility, or even addresses their pain points. Most importantly, the emphasis is on establishing a mutually beneficial relationship for the user base to voice. This is where industry masters can answer & even build online forums that are trustworthy, educational & engaging.
Learn how we assisted a US-based start-up offering marketing solutions to keep up with this trend and build an online community portal that allows users to connect with different users & industry experts for answers to their queries.
Project Overview
The founder of the North American startup marketing agency had the vision to create an online community that promotes knowledge sharing. It would enable users to collaborate on varied topics & across industry segments, including – business/entrepreneurship, science, law, retail, real estate, arts & entertainment & more. And, most importantly, even get answers from industry experts. They were in pursuit of an experienced technology partner to develop this single-view platform to grow and engage with a group of like-minded people that lasts.
Challenges
- Limited/no technical expertise to build an online community
- No strategic approach to defining user roles and workflows
Solution
To design a successful Q&A platform, our team helped with end-to-end planning & design, starting with tech platform selection, defining the workflows & functionality, feature finalization & implementation, with required integrations (social and otherwise). It also included user training and after-launch support & maintenance.
Choosing the Right Platform
Flutter was chosen for developing the cross-platform app. It helped construct a two-way communication stream between native code and Dart to offer a near-native performance because it runs on compiled code.
Key Features of the Online Forum
- Dashboard – creation, update & management of community content
- Ask questions – users can add questions of their choice and set them in the right topic category
- Multimedia support – to share audio and video formats
- Activity feed – contextual and relevant content based on the user’s selection
- Add answer – Users can respond to the questions that reflect in their feed.
- Dynamic search functionality – to find relevant topics and questions quickly
- Bookmarking and social sharing – with required plug-ins & integrations
- Rating system – for high-value contributions from experts along with a listing of the most popular and preferred ones
Monetization Model
- Ask The Advisor – User pays a certain amount to ask questions of their choice
- Commission Model – Certain percentage of the fees asked by high-rated advisors, is charged by the app
- Search Listing (within the app) – Advisors can pay a certain amount to feature in the app’s premium listing to get more consultation opportunities
- Payment gateway integration – for users to connect with advisors and advisors to pay for premium listing
Benefits
- 40% ease of solving issues efficiently for users with the right response mechanism
- 30% increase in sign-ups after the initial launch of the application
- 55% boost in engagement across communities
Customer Profile
A US-based startup marketing agency
Technologies
Flutter, Firebase
30 Min
