The State of Banktastic

You have built some cool things here that you likely won’t find elsewhere, but I can totally understand where you are with this decision. I’ve set up a couple of Ning communities and it certainly is easy and they are just about to launch their version of a certified app store, so you will likely be able to find what you need there or even build the apps you need.

After spending a lot of time in the Ning forums which have now moved here: http://getsatisfaction.com/ning/ there is a lot of dissatisfaction around the inability to move data out of the site if you want to eventually move it. A platform that people seem to be talking a lot about now is SocialGo http://www.socialgo.com/ I don’t know anything more about it other than it gets high praise in the Ning forums!

Of course, there are also open source platforms like Drupal http://drupal.org/ and Joomla http://www.joomla.org/ but these will still likely require a lot of custom coding on your end.

Good luck. In the end, it’s the people that matter, the platform really is secondary in my opinion.

I particularly like the Q&A section of the site – very helpful!

Brad -

I have enjoyed the community as well but agree with Tim. Given a clean, pleasing UI with the basic, expected features, the platform is inconsequential – it’s all about the people. I joined a similar social media site called KC Social Media Club which is a Ning site. I’m not a big fan of Ning at all, but what’s displeasing most about KCSMC is that it’s simply not very active.

I love your videos and have found valuable feedback when I ask a question in the Q&A section from time to time. Without knowing what Banktastic’s specific mission is, I would look for ways to make this site sticky where folks will want to come back frequently. In the banking technology circles, I suspect that there may be folks having difficulty finding the right kinds of people to follow on Twitter or blogs of interest. It could be that one feature of Banktastic would be an area where folks who are in related businesses submit their Twitter handle and your site has a continuous feed of banking related Twitter feeds.

I also suspect that in-depth technology reviews would be valuable and would keep people coming back for more (assuming you Tweet and email your user base that there are new articles on a regular basis).

What makes all successful communities successful is a vibrant and extremely active community. To that extent I think you will find, in general, that credit unions are more likely than banks to be involved in social media and using these tools as channels to communicate with their peers.

Good luck my friend and feel free to call or email me if you need help with any of this.

Just use http://expressionengine.com/ – plug-in architecture, forums, membership community, commercial support… you can still customize the platform when you have development time, but it’s otherwise a mature product.

Agreed with Tim & Scott, although I don’t have any experience with Ning specifically. Between Ning, Joomla, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Movable Type, and WordPress, there’s plenty of great products to choose from, free or not. In my experience, Drupal can be tricky to figure out, but incredibly powerful.

(About all I pay attention to is the discussions, BTW.)

Thanks to everyone so far for their comments! You guys make it much easier to decided what is the best way to go.

@Tim – Totally agree, it’s about the community first.

@Katie – Excellent, we hope to keep you coming back for more

@P Mikal – Thanks, we will definitely check it out!

@Scott & Elaine – This is one we struggle with…if our community was only about us producing content, why wouldn’t we just use Wordpress and go on. It seems that one of the big draws back to our site is connecting with similiar minded ppl in the same industry which lends itself to more ‘networking’ technologies.

Again, thanks for the help and keep those comments coming!

What makes Banktastic all that it is is the attitude you guys at GG have. You are open and authentic and are totally committed to community building.

I must admit though that from time to time I have wondered why you would spend valuable time building a community platform (I may be alone in this, but I do consider Mark’s time valuable) when there are perfectly good communities that are constantly being upgraded and enhanced.

You have the right skills for the hardest part of community building, which is turning files sitting on a server into a thriving, breathing group of humans who share information. The technology it rests on is the least interesting part.

Huzzah!

I personally like the Q&A section the best.. and use the Vendors section the least. For me, there are two keys to success: 1) quantity, and 2) quality. The quality – of the participants, the questions, and the answers – is there. Would love to see more quantity – meaning, more people (which will drive more high quality Q&A). My suggestion would be to leave the technology development alone for a while and build up the network. There’s competition out there (for FI-related networks), the key right now isn’t slicker technology.

@William & @Ron – Thanks for the kind words. The only thing I’d like to add is I totally agree that we aren’t looking for slicker technology. If we do change, however, we would look for things that our current platform doesn’t do but only if its what the community wants to continue fostering community, not for the sake of the technology.

Follow me? Anything come to mind?

Thanks to everyone that has responded so far…your input really helps.

Also, thanks for all the software recommendations. We will definitely be taking a look at these, but as many of you have expressed (and even I as one of the resident nerds realize) this platform is secondary to the people and the conversations that make up Banktastic.

In fact, I believe it always has been this way and that’s why you won’t see me sulking around at the thought of moving away from the platform that we have all put a lot of time, effort, and resources into.

We wanted to start an open, easily accessible community and wanted to give that community tools to facilitate that kind of conversation. At the time, we looked around and, not seeing anything that we felt was good enough, decided to build our own tool to do this.

Looking around today, we see a very different tool landscape and feel like the community might be better served by an alternative platform. But this conversation is about more than just finding a replacement platform for the one we’ve built. (Though that is part of it.)

To me, this is just another one of the countless decisions we’ve made in regard to this community. People are still inherently good. Openness will still win. And Community is still King.

Long live the King! :)

I meant to add this to my last comment. If you find that none of the free or open source solutions work, I found this awesome chart that compares many of the white label platform solutions out there.

http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/wlsn_comparison_chart.html

Right now you offer a free service, but you may want to explore a paid subscription model to cover the costs of your technology and your time commitment.