Building your community on the wrong platform is very costly. So it pays to do some research and make an informed decision.

This post aims to create a comprehensive list of items to consider when you shop around for a software platform for a spiritual community. 

The Specific Needs of a Spiritual Community

Apart from the generic online community requirements, a spiritual community has a few specific characteristics:

• It needs to provide a space for in-depth communication and exploration. This means a clear, distraction-free interface. It should allow composing long essays if needed and have text formatting capabilities to help with the longer posts’ readability. In other words, it needs to encourage deep thought and make it easy to express that.
• It needs a good way to track and come back to a discussion maybe months later if there are new insights or new posts on that topic.
• It needs to be beautiful – while this is a very subjective criterion, you can look for good design, harmonious color palettes that make the pages aesthetically pleasing.
•  The interface needs to be user-friendly. As intuitive as possible, with a straightforward mobile design and no jarring or unexpected changes or updates. 
• It should allow for more detailed profile pages for the members. On that page, individuals can show their personality, interests, and story and connect with other members one-on-one.
• Take into account the privacy concerns: who is ultimately the owner of the data shared by your members. (Hint: if you use a social network for this, the network is the owner)
• The technology providers that enable the community need to be integrity.

With that in mind – let’s jump to the list of requirements.

Comprehensive list of requirements for a Spiritual Community Software Platform

Since the list is so long, I have divided it further into subsections.

Business Requirements

1.  Support for paid membership – not only does this keep out trolls and energy vampires, but it provides a way for the members to support the community back and make it sustainable.
2.  Basic Content Management System – allows you to create public pages that explain what your community is about. These can be very focused landing pages or a blog.
3. Privacy concerns – do you care who stores and who owns the data that your users create? There are three camps here: self-hosted solution: you store, and you own everything. Hosted solution: the platform provider stores the data, but you own it. And social media: they store it, and they own it, and you are a guest there. The choice here is straightforward: if you have an able developer on your team, then self-hosted makes sense because you will handle any maintenance in house. If not, go with a hosted solution. If you go with self-hosted and don’t have a developer, the maintenance costs are likely to burry you. 
4. Does it have an API for integrations – this is optional for more basic communities but a must-have for larger ones that will require more automation to manage. An API allows you to extend what the platform can do by integrating it with other services like email automation, learning management systems, automatic zoom call registrations, etc. Think Zapier. 
5. Server Requirements – if you buy a self-hosted platform, then you’d better have a tech person in your team who can figure this out. Else you might buy something that you cannot use, or the server’s costs required to run it are too high for you.
6. What is the maintenance cost – if you have to hire a developer to maintain the platform, that will quickly become your highest cost. Keep this in mind if you are contemplating a free, self-hosted community software. It can get you started with no fees up-front, but when you need help (and you will!), it will be challenging to find someone trustworthy and pay them to update the software or fix the problem. Because of this, I now recommend to anyone who is non-technical to choose a paid hosted solution, where someone else keeps things running smoothly. Maintenance and free vs. paid is a complicated discussion; drop me a line if you’d like to hop on a call. 
7. Can you do backup easily (or export the content) – if you plan to build a business around this community, backups are the best insurance policy against data loss or hacking. Even with hosted services, those who claim they have “internal backups” do not trust that. Ask how you can do your own backups that you can save on your computer. I cannot stress how important this is in the case of a business. It also prevents “lock-in” to that specific platform. Content that you can export, you can later import elsewhere with some help. 
8. Google Analytics Integration – as a business, you need to track what works and what doesn’t. The platform may offer its Analytics tools, but that may not be enough.

User Experience

9. Web Push Notifications – this is a technical term that simply means getting notified on your phone or your computer browser that there are updates in the community. It is not a must-have, but it helps with engagement and real-time events where it is important to be there on time.
10. Easy Registration with Facebook or Google – this goes to the user experience side of things. If they can log in with an already existing account, it means one less password to remember. This choice does create some privacy issues if you connect via a third party provided (like Facebook or Google), but that may not be important to some of your users. You should always keep the alternative of a simple direct sign-up.
11. Accessibility – can people with disabilities use the platform effectively? 
12. Bookmark system – allows users to save in their profile posts or other locations of interest.
13. How is the onboarding experience – can you direct users at first login to a particular page with tutorials? Is there a good help system? Are there pointers around the interface to help the new users find their way around? This feature is more of a “premium” option, but it could help members move from trial to paid.
14. Notification Center; do you need Facebook like notifications in the top-right corner? They enable your membership to stay on top of important updates.
15. Rich text editor for posts – specifically for spiritual communities, to allow for long and thoughtful responses. You should also be able to quote or partially quote a previous post that you are responding to.
16. Does it work on Mobile – this is a must. The platform needs to be optimized for Mobile, not just “barely work.” At the moment of writing, in the communities I have access to, 60% of users are from Mobile, and that number will continue to grow.
17. Dedicated Mobile App – you don’t need to worry about this unless the performance is an issue or mobile notifications, or you have a need to integrate with the device sensors to create some kind of customized experience, like a meditation space or mindfulness reminders. This feature is highly advanced and not something most communities care about. 

Community Building

18. Private Messages – allows for one-on-one exchanges between members who want to connect and share details that would not make sense to post in the open community.
19. Profile Pages for users – this would be the user’s personal space inside the community to showcase their interest and make connections with other individuals. As a bonus, this page can also list the person’s activity for anyone interested to find their posts and updates.
20. Activity Feeds – they provide a quick look at what is currently happening on the platform. 
21. Media upload support for images, audio, and possibly video – sometimes a picture says it best. So the platform should be able to handle media uploads as smoothly as possible. I would be cautious with video uploads, as they use up both disk space and bandwidth. (Depending on your needs, it may be best to share video via unlisted YouTube links).
22. Calendar – useful to help the community stay in sync with regular updates or live calls. Make sure it works well on mobile devices too.
23. Moderation tools – you need to issue warnings and eventually remove bad actors from the community. Moderation tools are a must. And anything except tiny communities needs to have a “report” button that alerts the staff that needs attention. 
24. The Back end is important too – for large communities, you need to monitor what is going on, not only in terms of content and activities but also in server resources.
25. The support system;  for large communities, you may need a ticket system or a chatbot to help with common problems.

Engagement

26. Reactions to posts – it’s always nice to receive and send gratitude. At the minimum, it should have a “Thanks button.”
27. Emoji support – should be a non-issue with modern software, but worth checking.
28. Good search capability – this is very hard to do. It is not essential initially, but as the community grows, it is more and more relevant. Since this is such a challenging problem, I will give a pass to any software with a basic searching capability that works. If a “good search” is a must, you will spend extra resources to connect with services like Elastic Search that can help you out.
29. Tagging support for users – this becomes super useful as the platform grows, and it is difficult for one member to keep track of everything. It allows other members to say, “Hey, you, your attention is invited here!” 
30. Hashtags – are useful for large communities. Allows members to categories the topics, easily find them later, or follow a specific tag like “#manifestation” and get notified when someone posts something like that.
31. Email Notification Settings – each individual has a different preference for how much incoming email they like. The platform should allow some granular configuration of that. A simple On/Off switch is the bare minimum, but ideally, multiple switches are best: for new replies, being tagged, daily digest, and so on.
32. Mass Emailing capability: This is very important for announcements, reminders, and event invitations. It is different from, say, a reply notification because you need to email everyone at once, not just one or two members. You can solve this problem with dedicated email services like AWeber, but you need to make sure it is easy to integrate that service.
33. Instant chat options – instant chat messaging is not an easy problem to solve. A bad experience will make the feature useless, but a good one does require a lot of technical expertise to get it right. You will need to figure out if this is something that your community wants and if you can add it later. Some hosted solutions provide this feature for you. 
34. Member blogs or personal pages – does it make sense for your community for users to create their own space inside it?
35. Gamification – I am adding this here for completeness – but I find that for spiritual communities this is not helping with engagement. Creating connections is much better than playing a game.

Learning and training

36. Content Library – it makes sense for a spiritual community to have access to a private library of books, audio or video recordings, and other materials. Another thing to consider here is if only the staff updates the library or if the users can also contribute. 
37. Sub-Groups within the community – this is incredibly useful for study-groups or accountability-groups. It allows a handful of members to make the journey together and have each other’s backs, isolated from the community’s entire buzz, and not generating buzz themselves that other people don’t care about. Used wisely, these sub-groups can bring the community together. 

Customization and Extensibility

38. Theme Customization – it is best if you like the platform as it is—fewer costs for you and zero chance of messing up the colors. However, sometimes brand colors are essential, so in that case, you need to make sure the platform allows for that.
39. Feature customization and extensibility – this can turn “mission-critical” later on. If you discover that you need specific functionality, can you easily add it? Can you buy a plugin? Can you hire a developer to write the code? The online environment is in constant change. I would recommend that the platform be either extensible through plugins or have a developer in your team help you out. Changing the software can cost you a lot of money and a drop in membership. So it pays to be able to make incremental updates to your system. 

How to Use this list

Likely, you don’t need all the features, but it pays to be aware of them. The way to use this list is to extract the features you need and sort them by priority before you shop around for a community building software. The sorted list will make the choice process much more comfortable!

Caution about free software

Free software has zero money costs upfront, and it is very tempting to start that way. You could use it as a test pilot, but as soon as you see it working, you need to either move to a paid platform that includes updates and maintenance or look for a developer that can do that for you. Do not wait until an emergency shows up, or your costs will skyrocket, and the choice of “free” might cost you the community. 

Do you still need help?

Let’s talk and find out what you need.