People Who Need People

Wise believes that the key to getting people to buy K2'smerchandise is to provide them with good service.

"If someone is riding K2 skates, they might be inclined tobuy a snowboard if they felt like they had support directlyfrom us," she says. Finding a way to manage its onlinecommunity has allowed K2 to provide that support moreefficiently and convert K2 skiers to K2 bikers.

When Community Is the Product: American CancerSociety

For the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society (ACS),fostering a sense of community among cancer patients,survivors, their families, and ACS's donors and volunteersis an implicit part of the nonprofit organization'smission. For ACS, community is about more than Web-basedtools; it's about helping people cope and survive.

What's special about ACS's website, Cancer.org, is how itsdesign leads users to community. When the ACS undertook theredesign of its website last summer, it analyzed whatcommunity meant to the organization and its constituents. Italso explored how the idea of community should manifestitself on the site, and it mapped how visitors move throughthe site to find applications that connect them to others.