Unifying the community experience with MyGate Feed
Turning a visitor management app into a community platform.
In most Indian cities, a large number of people reside in gated communities - yet there was no solution to help residents discover and connect with each other. MyGate was perfectly positioned to solve this, but its communication module was used only for official admin-to-resident notices.
Based on previous research, a hypothesis was formed that adoption of community communication could have a major positive impact on overall app engagement. With more user-generated content on the platform, the expected outcomes were increased average session length and higher organic app launches.
Understanding what drives community engagement.
User interviews were conducted around the theme of social engagement as part of the overall App redesign. The research efforts specific to this project were mostly secondary in nature.
By correlating data on family size and years in residence with user classification, it was evident that community engagement is directly correlated to rootedness and sense of belonging-social engagement is correlated with sense of belonging, and the goal became converting 'Young Mobile' users to 'Young Participants'. Owners tended to communicate and engage more with fellow residents, while tenants with less than 2 years in residence showed less interest.
A study listed factors contributing to a sense of belonging: feeling at home, satisfaction with community, agreement with its values, and the ability to influence decisions or bring about change - manifesting as observable social interaction and exchange of information, help or goods.
Seeing this in MyGate's context, residents should be enabled to feel heard, stay informed, and contribute meaningfully to their community.
Ask for / Offer help
- Contacts & local news
- Local events
- Information exchange
Exchange goods & services
- Buy & sell within community
- Service discovery
Stay informed
- Community happenings
- Events & meetings
- Society notices
Influence decisions
- Raise concerns
- Collective opinions
- Decision making
One of the major question we had was whether to limit the communication within community or open it to the entire neighbourhood creating a hyperlocal social network. A mapping of all personas in a neighbourhood and the value they have to offer to each other was done to understand the potential benefits of enabling such a network.
- Finding people of similar interests
- Knowing your immediate neighbours
- Collective opinions & decision making
- Platform to raise concerns about the society
- Buying and selling goods
- Neighbourhood alerts
- Extended reach
- Raising concerns about the locality
- More dynamic content (more creators)
- Creating a collective push to drive some change from local authorities, utility providers
- Brands and small businesses can reach out to relevant target users
- Discovers vendors and service providers in an area
- NGOS and organisations can inform residents about events, campaigns, volunteering opportunities etc.
- Authorities have a channel to reach out and alert residents of an area
- Monetisation of brands and businesses
- Polarising debates (eg pet owners vs non-pet owners, families vs bachelors)
- People bringing out small grievances in a public forum
- Level of trust and concerns of privacy
- A lot of noise might enter into the feed
- Non homogenous pool of content creators
- Feed might be misused for promoting businesses
- Feed will end up being an advertising board if residents are inactive
The "Cold Start" Problem
As MyGate was never a social engagement platform, one of the biggest challenges was the cold start problem - without content creation, it is difficult to get engagement, and vice versa. To seed initial content, existing communications were analysed to find themes that could generate interest.
Defining the feed strategy before designing it.
The feed was designed to start as an internal channel for the community. Buy & Sell and Homes listings from other societies would also be introduced in the feed, as more reach could benefit both seller and buyer.
Based on research, the areas requiring additional effort were:
Content Seeding
- What are the right themes
- How frequent should seeded content appear
- Balance between seeded content and UGC
Nudges
- Nudging users to post around events and festivals
- Contextual prompts based on popular themes
Content Moderation
- Preventing users from spamming
- Blocking inappropriate content
Governance & Intelligence
- Equipping society admins with the right tools
- Users seeing relevant content at the right time
- Feed affinity towards a particular post
The community feed, broken into its core elements.
Each post type required its own structure, interaction model, and hierarchy of information.
- Text
- Image
- Video
- Opinion polls
- Elections
- Surveys
- Society Events
- Private events
- Homes
- Buy & Sell
- Listings
- Services
- Admin
- CEP Pulse
Designing the anatomy of community content.
To build a component library, feed cards were broken down into a few reusable building blocks. (Other than nudges, notices & collections)
Posts are used for generic communication or to initiate a new discussion. Expected use-cases here are residents asking for recommendations, initiating conversations around their concerns and conversations around events/festivals.
A poll is a tool for collective decision making or to gather opinions. Polls are generally created for elections, collecting feedback, or to run surveys.
Events are usually created by Management/Cultural committees around festivals or to organise competitions. Smaller groups or individuals can also organise events.
Nudges are used primarily for educational purposes and to push users to create content around a certain theme or occasion.
Residents can sell or buy goods via 'Buy & Sell'. The listings are visible across the city. They can also list their flats for rent or for sale. The listings from their own society will appear in the feed as listing cards.
Listings from other societies and MyGate's service offerings will be inserted into the feed as a collection.
The creation flow was designed to allow quick posting without too many steps and allow some personalisation as well.
A more advanced creation flow was created on the dashboard for Admins and MyGate's Community managers.
"Building a social product inside a utility app means earning trust twice - once for the utility, and again for every piece of content residents choose to share."
Results from the launch across three cities.
The community feed was launched in Ahmedabad, Kolkata and selected cities of Bangalore in the pilot phase. The initial impact was positive with engagement metrics showing almost 2x jump in low and medium engagement societies.
Post per society also improved significantly - low engaged societies went from 0.33 to 1.71 posts, medium from 14.1 to 18, and high engaged from 139 to 215. Overall 49.37% of MAU interacted with content across 116,310 monthly active users.
"A community feature lives or dies by its first week. Getting the cold start right - seeding the right content, nudging the right users - determines whether residents ever come back to post."
