From an Idea to an Online Community: Building a New Home for the AMU/APU Health Sciences Honor Society

When I became President of the American Public University Health Sciences Honor Society, one of the things I began thinking about was how we could create a stronger sense of community among our members. As an online university, our members are spread across different states, time zones, professions, and areas of the health sciences. We may share membership in the same Honor Society, but creating meaningful connections in a completely virtual environment presents a unique challenge.

We needed more than a place to post announcements. We needed a community.

That idea ultimately led to the development of our Health Sciences Honor Society Online Community at apus2hs.org.

One of the challenges facing any online student organization is finding ways to keep members connected and engaged. Email is useful for communicating important information, but it does not naturally create conversation. Social media can help members connect, but posts can quickly disappear from view, resources can become difficult to locate, and not every member uses the same platforms.

I wanted us to have a dedicated space of our own—a central online community where members could interact with one another, participate in discussions, find resources, learn about upcoming events, and contribute their own knowledge and experiences.

More importantly, I wanted to build something that could grow with the Honor Society. The goal was never to create a website that members would visit once and forget about. The goal was to create a living community that could evolve based on how our members actually use it.

Once the idea began taking shape, the next question was how to make it happen. I ultimately decided to build the community around MyBB, an open-source forum platform. A forum-based community gave us something particularly valuable: structure. Conversations can be organized by topic, resources can remain available long after they are originally posted, and members can return to previous discussions, ask new questions, and build on the knowledge others have shared.

However, I also knew that I did not want the community to feel like a generic discussion board. It needed to feel like ours.

Much of the development process has involved customizing the platform specifically for the Health Sciences Honor Society. That has meant working through everything from the visual design and navigation to developing features intended specifically for our organization. Some ideas worked immediately. Others required troubleshooting, redesigning, and occasionally starting over. As the community developed, new ideas often led to entirely new features.

What started as the relatively simple idea of creating an online forum gradually became something much larger.

One of the questions that has guided the development process has been, "What would actually be useful to our members?" That question has influenced many of the features and decisions that have shaped the community.

The platform now includes dedicated spaces for discussions, professional and academic resources, networking, Honor Society activities, and topics from across the health sciences. We developed a customized calendar and events system so members can see upcoming activities and opportunities directly within the community. Events can also be organized based on their intended audience, helping us manage activities for the broader community, inducted members, and organizational leadership.

We have also developed customized tools for creating more engaging content. Health sciences-specific icons and formatting options allow posts to be organized and presented in ways that better reflect the many disciplines represented within our organization. Behind the scenes, private areas of the community provide the HSHS Board with spaces to communicate, plan activities, document discussions, and coordinate the continued development of the organization.

Each of these features has been developed with a larger purpose in mind: creating one central environment where the Honor Society can communicate, organize, connect, and grow.

Building the community has also been a learning experience for me personally. I am not approaching this project as someone whose primary profession is web development. My background is in healthcare, military leadership, nursing education, and administration. Developing an online community has required me to apply skills from all of those areas while also learning entirely new ones.

There has been a significant amount of problem-solving involved. Developing and customizing the platform has meant working with code, databases, templates, permissions, user groups, plugins, and website design. It has also required thinking beyond the technical side of the project.

A feature can work perfectly from a technical perspective and still not be useful if members do not understand how to use it. Because of that, the development process has also required thinking about communication, accessibility, organization, user experience, and community engagement.

In many ways, building the platform has reinforced something I have learned throughout my career: leadership often involves identifying a need and then being willing to learn whatever is necessary to help address it.

Although a significant amount of work has gone into the technical development of the community, the technology itself is not the most important part. The people are.

A forum can provide the infrastructure for a community, but it cannot create engagement on its own. That is why one of our goals moving forward is to encourage members to see themselves not simply as users of the community, but as contributors to it.

Every member of the Health Sciences Honor Society brings something valuable. Our members represent different academic programs, professional backgrounds, career stages, and areas of expertise. Some are experienced healthcare professionals, while others may be preparing to enter the field. Some have backgrounds in clinical care, while others bring experience in public health, healthcare administration, research, education, emergency services, behavioral health, and many other disciplines.

Bringing those perspectives together creates opportunities that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

One of the possibilities I am most excited about is creating more opportunities for members to take an active role in the community. Members can start discussions, share resources, answer questions, and connect with others who have similar professional interests, but participation can go even further.

We encourage members who have knowledge, experience, or an interesting topic to consider hosting a webinar, virtual presentation, panel discussion, workshop, study session, or other online event for the community. You do not have to be a professional speaker to contribute. Perhaps you work in a specialized area of healthcare that other members would like to learn about. Maybe you recently completed a certification and can share your experience. You might want to discuss graduate education, career transitions, research, leadership, or an emerging issue affecting the health sciences.

These opportunities allow us to learn from one another while also giving members the chance to develop leadership, teaching, presentation, and professional communication skills. The community should be a place where members are empowered to create opportunities, not simply wait for opportunities to be created for them.

One of the greatest strengths of our Honor Society is the diversity of disciplines represented by our members. Healthcare challenges are rarely solved by one profession working alone. Nurses, public health professionals, healthcare administrators, researchers, educators, emergency medical professionals, behavioral health specialists, and countless others contribute different perspectives to the health sciences.

Our online community gives us an opportunity to bring those perspectives together. Someone studying healthcare administration may learn something valuable from a nurse discussing patient care. A public health professional may introduce a population-level perspective to a conversation about healthcare delivery. A member considering graduate school may connect with someone who has already completed the program they are considering.

Those connections may begin with a simple forum post, but they have the potential to grow into mentorship, collaboration, professional relationships, and new opportunities. That is the kind of community I hope we continue to build.

The development and implementation of the AMU/APU Health Sciences Honor Society Online Community is still an ongoing process, and there will always be opportunities to improve it. As members begin using the platform more actively, their participation will help determine what comes next. New features can be developed, new resources can be added, and new events can be organized. Some ideas will work well, while others may evolve into something completely different. That is part of building a community.

My hope is that future HSHS leaders will continue developing the platform long after my time as President has ended. The community was intentionally built to become an organizational resource that can continue growing from one leadership team to the next.

The long-term success of this project will not be measured by how many features we develop or how much code is written. It will be measured by whether our members find value in it. Did someone make a professional connection? Did a discussion help someone understand a topic differently? Did a shared resource help a member succeed academically? Did someone discover a career opportunity? Did a member host their first webinar or presentation? Did someone feel more connected to the Honor Society because the community existed?

Those are the outcomes that matter.

Creating the AMU/APU Health Sciences Honor Society Online Community began with a relatively simple idea: our members deserved a dedicated place to connect. Turning that idea into a functioning community has involved planning, development, experimentation, problem-solving, and a considerable amount of learning along the way.

But the platform itself is only the foundation. What happens next depends on us.

I encourage every member to explore the community and find a way to participate. Introduce yourself. Start a discussion. Respond to someone else's post. Share an interesting resource. Attend an event. Host a webinar. Ask a question. Offer your perspective. And if you have an idea for something we have not thought of yet, share it with us.

As President, I am proud of what we have built so far, but I am even more excited about what this community can become.

This platform was developed for the members of the American Public University Health Sciences Honor Society. Now, together, we get to build the community that lives within it.