Meet Lisa Wong, General Manager for Kinora.
Lisa has been a “pink” on eBay’s very active online community while working there, and helped to run several community based support workshops. The eBay seller community was very strong globally and in Australia Lisa built relationships with that community, sponsored and attended meet-ups and seller events – which eventually became an annual conference. She was at eBay when the seller community took eBay to court for a feature that they said was anti-competitive. They won.
Lisa truly believes in the power and purpose of communities: “Communities are life-giving, passionate, connected and give people sometimes mission and purpose. This is why when the opportunity to build Kinora – post Covid for the population of vulnerable peoples – it became clear that an online community would need to be at the centre of it.”
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What’s unique about working on your community?
There are several unique things about Kinora.
Kinora is a safe and moderated online community for those living with disability, their families and carers to get the most out of their NDIS situation.
The community is central to Kinora, but it is supplemented by an engaging editorial calendar and a service provider marketplace.
The editorial calendar gives us to opportunity to present different perspectives and options on how to use an NDIS Budget. The biggest ‘customer’ problem/challenge is that the NDIS is hard to understand and navigate and very few people end up using all the funds allocated to them.
We realised early on that part of being able to present NDIS options and even solutions, it needed to come from service providers. However, there has always been an imbalance of power between those living with disability and service providers – especially now with the NDIS and the sector being seen as a growth area. There is the sense of a money grab from service providers with low government regulations and checks on actual service quality and value for money.
We have allowed service providers to join the community, but we have clear and enforced guidelines on rules of engagement. We acknowledge that service providers are ultimately motivated by their livelihood, so we give them the outlet to advertise themselves through the marketplace but ask them to engage on the community as experts and add value by answering questions and offering solutions.
What’s one important lesson you have for community managers working with sensitive topics?
See above about Kinora!
What’s your favourite community right now and why?
I have noticed that Quora has updated their primary customer journey to start with a FB-like feed with FB-like advertising. I’m just observing now if it’s lost its power as a place to crowdsource answers and insights.
What do you consider the most exciting thing about the community management space today?
It’s old news, but I’m still very excited to see how community forums, instant messaging, and social media are co-existing as integrated experiences. No one is doing this especially well right now but it is evolving.
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