Technology integration is the use of technology tools to allow community-builders to organize content, schedule, plan, create content, and manage the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks inside your community.

As a community strategist, I believe it is important to align your community goals with your business goals to cultivate revenue and build a thriving community.

This all sounds great unless you are one person trying to be the community-building team, the marketing team, the sales team, the lead-generation team, and the content creator.

Tech tools help you as a community host to create a plan for your community that allows you to find calm and cultivate the community you are excited to lead.

A few tech tools include:

• Google Workspace email offers you the ability to send invitations to your members, organize your contacts, and create templates for you to send out.

• Trello Project Management offers you the ability to manage your community launch plan by visually organizing, scheduling, and assigning tasks.

• Google Drive allows you to store your content and share it with collaborators, partners, and support staff so that all of your resources are in one place.

• Google Docs provides you with a system to create content that can be shared and used to collaborate for ongoing projects and content.

Tech Integration helps community hosts in a few ways:

• Helps create confidence in your process

• Allows you to streamline your community-building efforts

• Give time back into your day do more things you enjoy

• Build effective systems for your team (if you don’t have one yet — you will!

Learning new technology can be challenging and it takes time — but with a bit of effort, using tech tools to create a workflow for yourself will give you more time in the long run.

The key to tech tools is to only focus on what you’ll need for the tasks in front of you at this very moment. To do that you’ll need to have a clear understanding of your community-building roadmap, launch plan, onboarding plan, and marketing plan.

Here is a checklist to help you identify the tools that will most benefit you in the community-building stage you are currently in on your leadership journey.