Key things to think about when starting a new community or adding your groups to Communities on WhatsApp.
Empower and collaborate with your admins and members to build and maintain a rewarding community experience.
See how people from across various sectors are using WhatsApp to grow their communities.
"We try to foster a closed, tight-knit community of volunteers to ensure meaningful conversations. People joining are committed to various social activities, events and fundraising campaigns."
- Alin
Devoted fans of the wildly popular K-Pop boy band, Bangtan Boys, are known as “The Army.”
Some wear tiny stickers on their face showing the band logo - a double trapezoid, representing the open doors of opportunity.
BTS Army Indonesian coordinator Karlina Octaviany wears her trapezoids at the corner of her eyes.
She says being part of the Army is not only fan-girl stuff but also about raising social awareness and spreading positive messages from BTS’ song lyrics.
“We share knowledge and constructive stories of the Army from our respective professional fields,” said Karlina.
Each fanbase within the Army has a different purpose: The Boys of Bangtan raise money, The BTS Army Help Center focuses on mental health, Purple Star on philanthropy and a free early childhood education center. Army Team ID handles streaming and voting for BTS awards and Trees from the Army conduct environmental actions like mangrove planting.
With hundreds of members in each fanbase, Karlina was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with their different needs and demands.
Now WhatsApp’s new tools make it so much easier to monitor and manage all of these groups.
“WhatsApp Communities is very helpful for quick coordination and communication. With the announcement feature, it’s so easy to post across WhatsApp groups, so no member misses the information,” she said.
As the groups get bigger, safety and user security is essential, especially because the majority of fans are female and prone to gender-based abuse, scamming, spamming,and doxing.
Karlina says, “with WhatsApp Communities, we can monitor all of this. We can mitigate risk from the beginning.”
One of the Army’s proudest moments was using the Communities announcement feature to raise Rp 400 million (US$27,500) in a single day, for the victims of the tragic stampede that killed more than a hundred football fans in East Java.
In the future, Karlina hopes to open even bigger trapezoidal doors of opportunity and further the group’s contributions to society.
She also dreams of coordinating an Army academic conference, just like the one held by her fellow soldiers in South Korea.