Keep them alive! Design and Evaluation of the “Community Fostering Reference Model”

Firms host online communities for commercial purposes, for example in order to integrate customers into ideation for new product development. The success of these firm-hosted online communities depends entirely on the cooperation of a high number of customers that constantly produce valuable knowledge for firms. However, in practice, the majority of successfully implemented communities suffers from stagnation and even a decrease of member activities over time. Literature provides numerous guidelines on how to build and launch these online communities. While these models describe the initial steps of acquiring and activating a community base from scratch very well and explicitly, they neglect continuous member activation and acquistion after a successful launch. Against this background, the authors propose the Community Fostering Reference Model (CoFoRM), which represents a set of general procedures and instruments to continuously foster member activity. In this paper, the authors present the theory-driven design as well as the evaluation of the CoFoRM in a practical use setting. The evaluation results reveal that the CoFoRM represents a valuable instrument in the daily working routine of community managers, since it efficiently helps activating community members especially in the late phases of a community’s LifeCycle

Building a Sector Reputation: The Strategic Communication of National Higher Education

What characterises strategic communication aimed at building the reputation of an entire public subsector? This is the main question for this study, pursued through content analysis of one-stop web portals for national higher education from the 21 countries listed in the Times Higher Education’s Top 150 Universities ranking. Findings show that strategic communication is formed by national governments to depict their higher education sector as a coherent whole without letting prominent universities “represent” the higher education sector. The tension between similarity and difference that often occurs in public sector reputation-building is handled partly by emphasising similarity concerns in the structure and format of the presentations, and partly by emphasising differentiation concerns in the contents of the presentations. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies addressing either the reputation management and branding efforts of single institutions, specific public sector entities, or those of nations, this study shows how higher education reputation-building integrates these different levels through strategic communication