Why Your Enterprise Community Strategy Is Failing (And What to Do About It)
You Don't Have a Community. You Have a Database with a Login Screen.
There are over 130 online community platforms on the market. Most of them will not help you build a community.
That's not a knock on the technology. It's a recognition of a fundamental misunderstanding that costs organizations millions of dollars and years of wasted effort every single year: the belief that the tool creates the community.
It doesn't. Humans do.
After many years helping organizations like SAP, Humana, Facebook, and Greenpeace build and fix their community strategies, I've watched the same mistakes play out over and over. Companies buy the platform, announce the launch, and then wait for belonging to happen.
It doesn't happen. And here's why.
First, Let's Settle Something: You Probably Have a Network, Not a Community
Before we talk about what's going wrong with your community strategy, we need to agree on what a community actually is — because most organizations are confusing two very different things.
A network is a set of connections. LinkedIn is a network. Twitter/X is a network. Your company's 50,000-person Slack workspace is probably a network. These are spaces optimized for reach, visibility, and broadcasting. They're designed for traffic, not trust.
Making friends on LinkedIn is like making friends on a freeway. You're both moving fast, you can honk at each other, maybe make brief eye contact — but you're not stopping, and you're not building anything real.
A community is something different. Real communities form in what I call the "cozier warrens of the internet": discussion forums, private groups, member spaces that are designed for depth of interaction rather than breadth. They're places where people slow down, show up consistently, and start to actually know each other.
The distinction matters because the strategies that build networks actively work against communities. Chasing follower counts, maximizing engagement metrics, pushing high-frequency content — these grow networks. They hollow out communities.
If you're applying network-building tactics to a community-building goal, you've already failed. You just don't know it yet.
The Three Layers of Safety a Real Community Requires
For trust to develop in an online space, three conditions need to exist simultaneously. Think of them as nested layers of safety.
1. A trustworthy platform. Members need to believe the space itself is stable, private, and not going to be sold, shut down, or turned against them. This is one reason data ownership and platform governance matter far more than most community managers give them credit for. When your members are on a rented platform you don't control, trust has a ceiling.
2. A credible convener. Someone — a person, an organization, a brand — has to be worth gathering around. Members need to believe the convener has legitimate standing and genuine commitment to the community's purpose. This isn't about brand authority in a marketing sense, but about whether members trust your intentions.
3. Benevolent members. Even a great platform with a credible convener fails if the community tolerates bad actors. Moderation is structural and essential. The culture members experience daily is defined by who is allowed to stay and how they're expected to behave. If they don’t believe in the benevolence of other members, they simply won’t stay.
Remove any one of these three layers, and trust collapses. And without trust, you don't have a community — you have a network where people are afraid to be honest.
The 5 Obstacles That Kill Enterprise Community Efforts
Here's where the practical problems live. These five obstacles commonly come up in many of the enterprise community engagements I work on. If your community isn't delivering results, at least one of these is almost certainly why.
1. No Dedicated Community Manager
This is the most common and most damaging mistake. Organizations build a community platform and then assign management responsibilities to someone who already has a full-time job. Community management gets treated as a 20% task bolted onto a marketing role or a customer success function.
Community building is skilled, relationship-intensive, ongoing work. It requires someone who is listening every day, recognizing and encouraging members, facilitating conversations, identifying friction, and acting as a consistent human presence. You cannot do that in the margins of another job.
If no one owns the community as their primary responsibility, the community is at high risk and will likely flatline. Not because the members don't care. Because no one is there to help it grow.
2. Platform Obsession
Organizations spend months evaluating community platforms, negotiating contracts, and customizing features — and then declare the community "launched" when the tool goes live.
But the platform is not the community. The platform is just the venue, the house where you’re holding the party. Worrying too much about which platform to choose is like spending six months customizing the perfect conference room and then being surprised that no interesting meetings happened on their own.
Technology selection matters, but it's a secondary consideration. The primary considerations are:
Who is this community for?
What problem does it solve for members?
Who will run it?
How will you measure success?
Answer those questions first. Then pick a tool.
3. Misaligned Expectations
Executives want ROI on a project timeline (“Get me X result in 3 months”). Community building operates on a program timeline. These orientations are fundamentally incompatible unless you reframe expectations before you start.
A project has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A community is ongoing. It evolves. It requires sustained investment. The value it produces compounds over time—but that means the early months often look like they're not working, even when they are.
Organizations that frame community as a project kill it when it doesn't show returns on a project schedule. The reframe you need with leadership: community is infrastructure, not a short-term return. You don't launch infrastructure and then stop funding it when it doesn't generate immediate revenue.
4. Meaningless Extrinsic Rewards
Gamification done wrong is one of the fastest ways to poison a community. Organizations discover that adding points, badges, and leaderboards can drive behavior — and then they over-index on it.
The result is a community full of people chasing status signals instead of helping each other. You've incentivized performance, not contribution. The members who genuinely care about the community's purpose get crowded out by the members gaming the system.
Effective gamification is simple and unobtrusive. It recognizes real value — substantive contributions, helping new members, sharing expertise — rather than manufacturing artificial engagement. When in doubt, err toward less, not more.
The deeper principle: if your retention strategy depends on rewards rather than on the community actually solving a meaningful problem for members, you don't have a community yet. You have a loyalty program with discussion threads.
5. Communication Gaps Between Community and Organization
This one is underappreciated. Communities generate insight. Members tell you what they need, what frustrates them, what they wish existed. They surface product ideas, service failures, and unmet needs — often before those signals show up anywhere else.
That intelligence is only valuable if it reaches the people inside your organization who can act on it. In most enterprises, community sits inside marketing or customer success, disconnected from product, HR, sales, and leadership. The feedback loop never closes.
When members feel like they're talking into a void — that their input is collected but never responded to, never shapes decisions — they disengage. And they're right to. You've asked them to invest in a relationship that isn't reciprocal.
Fix this with intentional internal routing. Who receives community insights? Who is responsible for responding? How are decisions informed by community feedback communicated back to members? These aren't community questions. They're organizational design questions. And they determine whether your community has a reason to keep existing.
Community Is a Program, Not a Project
If there's one idea I'd ask you to carry out of this article, it's this: community is not something you build and ship. It's something you tend, continuously, as a core organizational function.
The companies I've seen build genuinely valuable communities — the ones that retain customers, develop talent, generate insight, and create the kind of loyalty that marketing budgets cannot buy — treated community as a strategic program with dedicated leadership, sustained investment, and long-term accountability.
The companies that failed treated it as a campaign with a launch date.
You already know which one your organization is doing.
What to Do Next
If you're reading this and recognizing your community in these failure patterns, the good news is that none of these problems are unfixable. But fixing them requires an honest assessment of where you actually are — not where your platform dashboard says you are.
That's the work Clocktower Advisors exists to do.
Whether you're trying to diagnose why an existing community isn't performing, build a strategy before you invest in a platform, or make the internal case for dedicated community leadership, we can help.
