Tags: #community #devrel #okr #strategicdocs **Community in 2022** 2022 (and beyond!) is poised to be the biggest year for community yet. Let's explore why: ·     Traditional "broadcast" marketing is reaching its saturation point, and channels that aim for deeper connection are missing the mark, too. ·     ⏩ In response, brands are starting to look to the successes of organic communities and affinity groups as a solution. ·     Cultural factors push our relationships online ·     More companies interested in building communities ·     ⏩ **A note:** we'll mostly talk about community in a brand & business context throughout this course (because that's where most of you are going to be employed); but, many if not all of these best practices apply to community building more broadly. ·     Community Manager role professionalizing; more interest in the career path o  More roles open for CMs o  More high level roles in community o  More specialization for community roles  _A sampling of community tools available in 2020._   **Why Community?** ### Qualitative reasons: ·     More knowledge of & connection with customers or target user persona ·     Easy place to conduct research; less labor-intensive path to voice-of-customer ·     Leverage 'low hanging fruit' of community generated content to create more genuine marketing ### Quantitative reasons: ·     Positively impact retention and other customer health metrics ·     Acquisitions "Community Qualified Leads" ·     Reduced cost for support, product research  **Audience vs. Community** ·     Aspirational vs. Descriptive ·     Choose the right tactics to fit the channel or approach ·     One warrants a professional CM role, one warrants...an entire marketing and customer service department! ·     Distinguishing between how a brand uses this terminology can help: o  Job seekers evaluate job postings o  Choose roles that are specific enough to let you grow your career o  Current community managers advocate for what's in and out of scope & focus their expertise on the right things o  Shift to a trackable mindset  **Community with a Capital C** This is the type of community that most professional community managers work on in their day to day, and this is the type of community we're talking about when we drill down on metrics, tactics, career ladders, and more. ·     **C**oncrete ·     **A**llows response ·     **P**lace/Platform ·     **I**nteractive ·     **T**rackable ·     **A**llows opt in/out ·     **L**evel **💡If you'd like to dive deeper into understanding Capital C communities,** **check out our free course****! ▶️**  **Skillset of a CM** ·     Strong generalist ·     Project planning and organization ·     Ease with technology ·     Communication ·     Strong personal boundaries (this one is twofold!) ·     Data-augmented ·     Industry knowledge (this one is twofold!)  **Day to Day of a CM** ·     Moderation & Engagement (next week, week 5) o  Removing stuff that violates terms o  Responding to what's already happening in the community o  Using strategies to proactively engage members ·     Content Creation (next week, week 6) o  Creating short term content on a daily/multiple times a week cadence o  Creating or collaborating on content based on what's happening in the community (case studies, etc) o  Creating exclusive content or hosting workshops for community members ·     Strategy, Ops & Project Planning (week 3, week 4, week 6) o  Planning, launching, and managing programs o  Designing on onboarding sequence o  Designing and maintaining internal team process ·     Research & Collaboration (week 5, week 6) o  Working with product to research new features o  Working with support to determine FAQs o  Working with content to harvest "low hanging fruit" of user-generated-content **The Great Engagement Wars**  1.   Quality vs. quantity 2.   Proactive vs. reactive **Rules of Thumb** 3.   Have a clear, explicit picture of what quality contributions are in your community...and what they aren't. 4.   Know your "why," and make sure goals have a "then what." 5.   Use proactive engagement to model great contributions. 6.   When you push for engagement, there should always be a benefit to the member—regardless of if they are engaging actively or passively. o  Consider "Calls to Connection" rather than "Calls to Action" 🙂 **Content Features & Cadences** ·     If communities are a product, your content cadences are your community's features. They are the value prop for your community. o  When I say content: _that includes conversation starters_ o  Community content is bi-directional ·     Most communities will have a few levels of content cadences tracked on a content calendar. As the cadence gets broader, the level-of-effort for your team increases: o  Daily* 🍞 = engagement prompts that model & elicit ideal member contributions §  Slowly, daily cadences will be "taken over" by your community members; in early communities, it's essential for admin to seed these discussions o  Weekly = rituals, low-effort live events like Q&As, office hours o  Monthly/Quarterly* = medium-high effort events like partner workshops, product feedback groups, challenges o  Yearly = industry research and reports, summits/conferences, in-person celebrations ·     What these cadences do in your strategy: o  Give people a reason to open up your community → "Come for the content, stay for the community." o  Give people "social vulnerability insurance" → a reason to be in the community that doesn't require them to go out on a personal limb. The "snack table" of communities. o  Provide shared knowledge and vocabulary to build relationships.  **Engagement plays that support daily content cadences** **Rituals** Recurring, anticipated prompts (A.K.A rituals) can be a good play to rely on if you're looking to start handing off ownership to some of your members. **Examples of rituals:** ·     Weekly goal prompts ·     Friday digests **Good for:** ·     Helping members build the habit of going to your community ·     Helping members start to take ownership of community engagement ·     Balancing out a content schedule without having to create completely new content each day **Words of Caution:** ·     Use rituals sparingly. One or two per week is about right. Over-reliance on rituals will make your community feel inauthentic and lacking spontaneity. **Tagging Members**  **Engagement Flywheel** 7.   Start by asking a question. Try to ask questions that are open ended: something that gives your community members the chance to share an **opinion** or **strategy**. 8.   Read & respond to every comment. Ask follow-up questions, whether they seem related or not. 9.   Suppose you get 20 responses. Choose 3 of the responses that are the most interesting (or rather, most aligned with your ideal community posts). Look for comments that have room for expansion, where it seems the poster has expertise to share, and where you had genuine follow-up questions. 10.                 Reach out to the posters of those comments, and ask them to create a post of their own that expands upon the comment they made. Here's an example of what an outreach email might look like: Hey [Name], [Your name] here from [your organization]. Hope this finds you well! I've enjoyed seeing you in the new community and I hope you're finding it to be helpful. [personal note] I actually wanted to reach out because I read your recent comment on this post [hyperlink post] regarding [reference post topic], and I think others in the community might benefit from hearing more! I was wondering if you might be down to create a post of your own going into more detail about this—things like, [outline a few elements of what you’d like to see them post about]. Since our community is just getting started, I think it would be lovely to start building up some conversations about experiences and best practices. If you're in, hooray! If it feels natural, I might ask that you end your post with a related question that might invite some discussion on what you've shared. If not, no worries—I know writing takes time and I'm so grateful for the presence you've had in the community so far! Warmly, [Your name] 11.                 Lather, rinse, repeat 🧴 🏆 **Sign of success:** You should start to see organic posts of a similar caliber start to appear in your community unprompted. 'Engagement plays' are different than strategies or approaches—while strategies and approaches govern how you design for engagement and what you hypothesize it will do for your business and members, engagement plays are bite-size, testable levers you can turn to try to increase engagement in your community, especially when it's new. You can borrow plays from other communities or invent your own—over time your toolkit will expand.  **Moderation: Proactive** ·     Your best tool to ensure a healthy environment in your community is optimizing for quality. ·     Create community guidelines that are adequately specific, while also understanding that you are not writing a legal treatise 👩‍⚖️ o  **Community Club Code of Conduct** o  **Zapier Code of Conduct** ·     Create contingency plans for your specific community, with the knowledge you won't think of everything. What are some things that could go wrong, and how would you deal with them? Whose help would you need? ·     Emphasize community values, not just _rules_ of engagement. These should be explicit for at least your team, and also community members. ·     Redirect & remove content that doesn't serve your purpose.  **Moderation: Reactive** ·     Have a reliable cadence to have eyes on all content in your community daily. As you review, you'll decide: o  What needs a response, and what doesn't o  Where you can prompt engagement from other members o  What violates your terms and needs to be removed o  What needs to be escalated, for positive or negative reasons, to other members of your team o  **Some communities with sensitive topics may require more frequent coverage ·     Enforce your guidelines evenly. Ask for second opinions when you're unsure. ·     Have a willingness to adjust your guidelines based on the realities of your community. Your initial guidelines can and should be adjusted with time. ·     De-escalation. o  Breathe, and take conflict in stride. Every community conflict is a learning opportunity, and as the community manager you have the opportunity to help communicate that back to your organization. o  Move to private channels whenever possible if discussing something sensitive or personal. o  Acknowledge and echo what members have said, so that they know you understand, even if you can't give them the answer they want. o  Set expectations and next steps. Be transparent about timelines, and don't make promises you can't keep. Don't be afraid to put something on ice if you need more time to make a decision about how to respond, as long as you set those expectations. o  Make strategic decisions about when to explain something in-depth versus when to try to curb a conversation from continuing. o  Be aware of your audience. **The strategy of community software decisions** Choosing a community platform is often equated with having a community strategy. This isn't the case. For the most part, platform decisions will not make or break your project. But, there are ways to approach this decision that will make it easier for you and your team. These approaches can help you be effective in starting to make software decisions for a project, _even if you don't know or have first-hand-experience with every community platform on the market._ Let's look at a few grounding ideas for choosing the right software for your community project. **Rules of Thumb** 12.                 There is no "best community software" (or "best ______ software")—but there is usually a best choice for your specific project. 13.                 Don't get too hung-up on "built-in" features. 14.                 Bundled isn't always better. Focus on the features you really need. a.   Price - "the gym membership" b.   Focus & execution - "the Renaissance man" **Lightweight Framework** 15.                 Start with a vision for your community—both the content features and the audience—and evaluate software options against that vision. 16.                 Begin with a list of "must haves" and "nice-to-haves." Include: o  Member experience §  Communication style—synchronous vs. async §  Basic content paradigm/hierarchy o  Admin experiences §  Metrics/analytics §  Moderation tools §  Admin levels 17.                 Support for content features 18.                 Look & feel, learning curve, usability 19.                 Technological compatibility 20.                 Price  **Understanding the Landscape**  **Enterprise Community Platforms** **Examples:** Khoros, Vanilla Forums, Insided, Chaordix, Zendesk **Major pros**: ·     Feature-rich platforms designed for communities _and organizations_ running at scale ·     Will tend to favor features designed for more traditional corporate outcomes, like sales and customer service ·     Often include features with more specified use-cases, like ideation/feedback boards or built-in knowledge bases **Majors cons:** ·     Pricing can be prohibitive at entry and onerous at scale (i.e., prices based on number of admins, page views, or users) ·     Higher learnings curve for administration ·     "Busier" appearance for members **Good for:** Enterprise companies operating at a large scale (both the community and the organization) who require these features and can make use of the bundled approach **"Big Social" or "Network Effects" Platforms** **Examples:** Facebook groups, Slack, (Discord) **Major pros:** ·     Prospective members likely already have an account & high familiarity with these platforms, which reduces member learning curve and jump-starts habituation ·     Lively, real-time feel supported by engagement-rich features ·     High stability due to design for massive amounts of users (few outages, not very buggy, fast load times) ·     Free to start **Major cons:** ·     Limited control over community culture, since members arrive with pre-set behaviors and conceptions ·     These platforms are not built with community in mind, and features that support community specifically can be limited ·     Slack: pricing scheme designed for different use case, doesn't support scaling for communities; free version doesn't preserve legacy conversations ·     Facebook: data 👿 **Good for:** Companies with no audience or no reliable way to reach their audience, who are trying to build their community in tandem with their audience. Companies whose target audience are particularly resistant to software learning curve friction. Companies who target professionals who use Slack for work. **Creator-Focused/"Community-as-Product" Platforms** **Examples**: Mighty Networks, Circle, Disciple, Tribe, Edition (and many more) **Major pros:** ·     New entrants to the market, designed specifically with the communities of today in mind ·     More modern view toward feature sets: features will tend to support robust content programs, engagement, niche communities ·     Simpler feature sets that favor flexible, multi-purpose implementations ·     Simpler pricing schemes designed for smaller businesses, startups and independent creators ·     Easy to learn and administer **Major cons:** ·     Newer platforms have higher bug potential ·     Fewer features, in general ·     Less familiarity for members ·     Newer platforms will also have less scaling potential, not just from a feature perspective: i.e., not as well stress-tested for high traffic implementations **Good for:** Independent entrepreneurs, content-focused communities and businesses, startups  **Supplemental Technologies** While as a community manager, the main technology you'll work with is your chosen community platform, there are a few other greatest-hits you'll want to be familiar with. When you're continuing with your content calendar project, you'll be asked to use some of these supplemental technologies to make your calendar more robust, and to test out creating content using these platforms. **Forms** **⁉️** **Examples**: Google forms, Typeform, Survey Monkey **Great for:** community-wide research, getting members to opt-in to private programs, or even running quick surveys if your platform doesn't have them natively **Live Video & Events Platforms** **📹** **Examples**: Zoom, YouTube Live, Toucan, Meet Butter, and many, many more **Great for:** community workshops and classes, roundtable discussions, or even rotating breakout rooms to help your community members get to know one another **Spreadsheets & Database Tools** **📊** **Examples**: Google Sheets, Airtable **Great for:** Tracking small, manual programs that require applications (like networking or mentorship programs); keeping track of research, and member-specific information Overall, a testing mindset is your best tool. If there's something you're trying to accomplish in your community, turn to your professional network to see if anyone knows a tool for it, and test it with colleagues.  **Workflow Examples** **Monthly Live Workshops** ·     Trello to track leads for workshops, moved them through from lead, to interested, to committed partner ·     Google Calendar embedded into my community to announce workshops and let my members remind themselves ·     Typeform to collect registrations and questions in advance for workshops ·     Email to remind registered members of upcoming workshops ·     Zoom to host workshops and Q&As **Curated Networking Program** ·     Community announcement with embedded Typeform to announce program ·     Google Spreadsheet downloaded from Typeform results to track program participants, interests, and matches ·     Emails to make matches **Why do we strategize?** **💪🏼** Many communities are started without strategy. Because we all have experience with communities in the cultural sense, even those who are not professional community builders will tend to assume that communities can be run based on good intuition alone, or may even feel that being strategic about community is inauthentic.  This is not the case—we need strategies for our communities, at inception _and_ while they grow, to run them effectively. Strong strategies for communities are actually a part of what empowers community managers to infuse the authenticity that comes from the community into other parts of the business. Why we strategize: 21.                 It forces us to choose a tactic, even if it's the wrong one—which lets us measure what works and what doesn't. 22.                 It also forces us to actively de-prioritize out-of-scope ideas, even good ones. 23.                 It ensures our actions in community are aligned with our goals for the larger business. 24.                 It makes us consider best practices in context, vs. relying on boilerplate tactics. 25.                 It helps us confidently communicate our work and outcomes to others.  **Components of a community strategy** 26.                 Goals and measures of success 27.                 Research & validation 28.                 Content, feature, and gating plan 29.                 Socialization 30.                 Technical & implementation plan 31.                 Activation & rollout plan  **Goals & Measures of Success** ## **Answer questions like:** 32.                 Who, outside of the company, is this community for? What do they get out of it? 33.                 Who inside the company is this community for? What do they get out of it? 34.                 Are there any conflicts between what we want to get out of this community as a company and what our members want to get out of this community? 35.                 What are the main metrics my company already tracks? Which ones does this community have the biggest potential to impact? 36.                 How will I measure success at launch, in the first six months, in the first year?  If your community serves a persona who is different than your company's core customer base, it's worth it to spend some time defining your community persona or target audience.  When doing this, be as specific as possible—include demographics, psychographics, and personal details to humanize your persona(s). Visualize your persona(s) as you design. You can continue to add more detail to these groups as you learn more about your actual prospective community members during validation. 👍🏻 Community goals should always be expressed both in how they impact members and in how they impact the company. 👎🏻 For community project, "anti-goals," or defining what's out of **Goals & Measures of Success** scope, is particularly important. **The Deliverables:** 37.                 Visible documentation (document, slide deck, internal wiki) of: o  Community goals, phrased to include both member and company outcome o  Community persona(s) and/or target audiences o  Timeline of when different metrics will be tracked, and targets along the way  **Research & Validation** ## **May include things like:** 38.                 Auditing and analyzing any existing community efforts 39.                 Doing competitive analysis o  Look at your direct competitors' community efforts to determine what's expected by your members and what opportunities you have to expand on what already exists o  Look at exemplar & model communities 40.                 Modeling different types of communities and running the ideas by internal and external stakeholders 41.                 Conducting user interviews with members who fall into your target community persona to validate what you're considering offering ⭐ 42.                 Surveying larger audience segments to further validate trends in user interviews ## **The deliverable:** 43.                 Visible documentation (document, slide deck, internal wiki) of: a.   Trends and learnings from user interviews—both qualitative and quantitative are valid (i.e., 50% of members felt events were the most important community feature, multiple interviewees described themselves as "introverts", etc) b.   Any quantitative insights learned from surveys or audits that you'll use to inform your decisions c.    Competitive analysis  **Content, feature, and gating plan** *Note: some of this work can and should happen overlapping with research and validation. As you start to get a clearer picture of what you might offer in your community content-wise, you can begin to run these ideas by interviewees, or look for where your ideas overlap & exceed competitors' communities. **May include things like:** 44.                 Determining content cadences for your community at the daily, weekly, monthly level 45.                 Identifying what types of content and learning opportunities your community members will only be able to access through the community 46.                 Proposing a plan for when various content cadences will launch (making sure that if you are launching a new community, there's at least one piece of highly-desired exclusive content launching with it) 47.                 If your community will have access levels (free and paid, or based on skill or experience), determining how different content features are scoped to different levels **The deliverable:** 48.                 A member-ready "pitch" of what you access as a community member—think of this like a feature comparison page for a software or another product. 49.                 A content calendar for your first month or quarter  **Socialization** ## **May include things like:** 50.                 Meeting with leadership to share your research and recommendations so far 51.                 Choosing one or two stakeholders from each department and meeting with them to get department-specific feedback 52.                 Asking to present at a company all-hands or team-wide meetings 53.                 Ensuring the documentation on your project is publicly available in a place where your team knows how to access it ## **Tips for effective socialization** 54.                 Choose one or two advocates in leadership to buy into your vision early. Outside of those people, wait until your research is further along before you ask for feedback—but don't wait so long that you don't have time to implement important feedback that might affect teammates. 55.                 Be clear about what's already decided and what you're looking for feedback on—don't ask teammates to share feedback on project elements you are sure you won't change. 56.                 Defend your project from scope-creep. Reference your anti-goals to do this, and have a publicly visible place to keep track of recommendations that are good, but not prioritized. 57.                 If you suspect your project will get pushback from specific teams, try meeting with one trusted team member one on one to discuss concerns, and then have them present and socialize the project back to their own team with you. ## **The deliverable:** 58.                 All affected team members are informed and supported to collaborate in any needed ways.  **Technical & implementation plan** ## **May include things like:** 59.                 Determining the main software platform your community will run on 60.                 Determining ancillary softwares your proposed community needs (i.e., pro Zoom account) 61.                 Coordinating with technical collaborators to accomplish any flows you can't set up yourself 62.                 Testing login flows ## **The deliverable:** 63.                 A feature comparison of the technologies you considered, along with your decision 64.                 User flow charts for complex implementations  **Activation & rollout plan** ## **May include things like:** 65.                 Determining what channels you'll use to market your community (if any) 66.                 Deciding who will be invited to the community, at at which times** 67.                 👍🏼 It's generally recommended that you intentionally limit the speed at which a new community grows. Inviting 10 or 25 members and getting to know them well is better than "opening the floodgates." 68.                 Developing an onboarding sequence for new members (email, in-community, or both) 69.                 Developing a plan to activate new members (such as a tagging strategy, or other engagement plays we discussed in week 2) ## **The deliverable:** 70.                 A quarter-to-quarter rollout plan that includes elements like communication channels, what content features are available when, and any important dates and assets that are needed to support the plan 71.                 A list of early members you'd like to invite (at least your first batch) 72.                 An outline of your onboarding sequence 🔄 Strategies aren't a one-time thing to develop and deliver. Even if you have an existing community, elements of strategy work should be re-evaluated continuously as you grow so that you're always acting with purpose. **A new approach to Community, Support, Product** **Some historical approaches:** ·     Most communities from large brands are support **forums** (examples: Apple Discussions, Facebook Help Community) ·     Community seen as a way to **outsource** knowledge base documentation to members and **reduce** support inbound ·     Support forums used almost exclusively for Q&A, **solving immediate problems** (or, "Break & fix" problems, according to Higher Logic) ·     Product oriented communities with a 'suggest & upvote' paradigm ·     Traditional support happening in a community setting 📌 Looking at traditional support communities through the lens of Capital C Communities **A new approach:** ·     Seeking greater alignment between community goals & company goals ⭐ ·     Support embedded in a higher level of training, education, and best practices ·     Product feedback solicited through long-lasting relationships, with an eye toward giving value back ·     Support and product are a piece of a larger community program geared toward creating lasting connections and varied value for members and company  **Community & Support** **Why community appeals as a support channel** ·     **Limits of support in public** Unclear if desired benefits are as effective as they seem. ·     Difficult to ensure accuracy of responses, in the moment and over time. ·     Difficult to train community members to accurately interpret the patterns they see in community. ·     Members may choose community (or social media) over private support _because_ they are hoping to create a stir; this can negatively impact the overall tone of your community. ·     Some community platforms are not built to replicate support queues and may lack crucial features for success (like connecting community account to other account details, ensuring you answer every response, and advanced tagging and integrations). Consider whether community is your best available tool to provide support. **Successful approaches & examples** ·     Go beyond simply trying to reproduce a help desk in a community setting, apply a community-driven approach to providing support ⭐ o  ~~Answering a product question and moving on~~ —> ask a follow-up question that continues the conversation, or tag in another member based on what the question taught you o  ~~Focussing on quick fixes~~ —> focussing on proactive education that builds power users o  ~~Only talking about the product~~ —> talking about the things members who use the product have in common that have nothing to do with the product o  ~~Only offering a support forum~~ —> offering a full suite of proactive community features (remember your content cadences) o  Define clear boundaries in advance and stick to them. This includes removing posts that violate those boundaries. §  No account-specific or private information §  Limits to troubleshooting (i.e., stuff that affects everyone > stuff that affects only you) §  Where to report bugs o  Giving important information that surfaces in the community a permanent, formalized home (i.e., knowledge base or FAQ)—while it can be good that conversations in the community "live on," expecting it to be optimally organized & searchable is a tall order ·     Emphasize peer-to-peer ·     "Teach a man to fish" **👌🏼 Some examples of support-oriented communities that are going beyond the traditional approach:** ·     Hubspot ·     Atlassian ·     Squarespace Community **Collaborating with support teams** ·     Community can help inform tone & sentiment, and help your support team approach an issue ·     Community trends can help identify whether issues are widspread ·     Defer to support team policies, and never create a "mom said no so I asked dad" environment. Back up the boundaries your support team enforces ·     Ask to be included in support training, both during onboarding and ongoing training ·     Ask to access support team tools, and set up policies for how you'll collaborate on them **Differences at small and large scales** ·     Extremely small companies may choose to emphasize support in a community because they don't have a support team. If you find yourself in this position, make a proactive plan for how this will change as the support team and resources develop. ·     Extremely large companies with scaled community teams may be better equipped to provide high-quality support in a community setting due to bandwidth.  **Community & Product** **Who will you work with on a product team?** ·     Most likely, "PM" (Product Managers) or "PMM" (Product Marketing Managers). ·     PMs define what customers want and how it fits into business objectives, design solutions and scope (i.e., what features will meet the need), and manage execution to completion between technical and non-technical teams. ·     PMMs define "go to market" (GTM) strategies to help roll out new features, drive adoption, and communicate them to customers. **Potential for community & product** ·     For small companies who are just getting started building their first product, community can be a great opportunity to build collaboratively with early users o  Build with Users newsletter is a great place to see examples of this ·     Community can be a good home base for product feedback because feedback is visible to other members, which reduces duplicate requests ·     Community can help product teams not just to understand the feature request on the surface, but the context behind the ask—this helps you avoid building the wrong things o  Example: Mixpanel's QBQ Community ·     Create ongoing relationships with trusted members who provide better feedback over time and are easy for your product team to access ·     Identify members who have expertise to share, even if they don't self-identify **Avoid:** ·     🚫 Generic asks for help without giving anything back (i.e., "I'm looking for feedback on x feature") ·     🚫 One-off questions and research calls ·     🚫 Setting up a "popularity contest" for features where members democratically choose and dictate what the product team works on ·     🚫 Making time-bound promises to your community that you can't keep about what you will and won't build ·     🚫 Managing feedback on an ad-hoc basis, mixed in with regular conversation ·     🚫 Seeing your community as a static resource to mine for product research **Embrace:** ·     ✅ Learning more about your members in a genuine way so that you learn where they can contribute, what features they might want to talk about ·     ✅ Providing proactive product education ·     ✅ Creating a dedicated home base for product feedback where your team and members can easily access and with easy-to-understand guidelines and norms ·     ✅ Ongoing relationships that your members get something out of, too ·     ✅ Helping members understand what your product team does with their feedback, and how it's prioritized ·     ✅ Providing ongoing transparency on what you're working on and why **Collaborating with product teams** ·     Set monthly or quarterly cadences with PMs, PMMs to review requests and trends that are coming in through the community ·     Stay on top of your product team's schedule so that you know what they're working on next quarter, and can incorporate their themes into your content calendar proactively ·     Help product teams use community best practices to get the best research insights from community—don't be afraid to manage this process vs. letting each individual PM take their own approach ·     Help connect PMs with the best members to interview and get early feedback from ·     Ask product team members to contribute content and expertise to your community 🌟 In most orgs, product folks stand to gain a lot from a highly functional community—I'd aim to get them "on my side" and understanding community at a high level as soon as possible. **Understanding Community Outcomes (& their relationship to metrics)**  ·     We're going to be talking about understanding business models and how to approach community metrics next week ▶️ For now, we're digging in to _what companies are hoping to get_ out of building communities ·     It takes time to effectively measure a community quantitatively. That doesn't mean you need to re-prove the core value of community before working to build one—you just need to understand the recognized outcomes in the industry ·     Hypothesized/desired outcomes & metrics are a value cycle a.   You hypothesize these outcomes because other companies have already proven them b.   You make an investment in trying to reproduce the outcomes c.    You measure the effects of your work to further optimize your effort **Quick comprehension check** **#1** Why is understanding _hypothetical_ community outcomes important to showing the value of community, even if you haven't established a community you can measure yet?  **Four core outcomes of community** ...relationships. But we don't have to tell you that! **Retention** ·     _The core hypothesis_: members of our community will stay customers for longer (or make more repeat purchases) than will customers who are not members of our community ·     _Measured by_: cohort comparison of community members vs. non on metrics like lifetime value (LTV) and churn ·     _Good for companies who:_ o  Have a separate core product than their community (like a software company) o  Have business models based on recurring revenue (subscriptions or repeat purchasing—even if there is no extra-community product) o  Want to measure the success of a community based on business health metrics they already track ·     _Community programs will include:_ o  High-value, exclusive opportunities for members only o  Support & learning opportunities emphasized ** o  Intentionally hindered growth (like an application process or other qualifications needed to join) **Acquisition** ·     _The core hypothesis_: if we give value in our community, some members of our community will become qualified customers and we'll gain credibility and brand awareness in our space ·     _Measured by_: community qualified leads ·     _Good for companies who_: o  Are comfortable with a longer-term investment in community before ROI o  Are building a community before building a product o  Who want to see higher returns on smaller lead groups, vs. lower returns on larger lead groups o  Need to do "category definition" o  Sell premium or enterprise products with a long decision-making process ·     _Community programs will include:_ o  Content focused on thought-leadership o  Content channels outside of direct community (like one social media channel) emphasized o  Referral programs and emphasis on bringing in new members in o  Content that's less exclusive, and available for public viewing ·     ****Building a community is not a quick & easy way to build an audience to sell to.** You will still have to use regular old audience-growth strategies to build an audience _for_ your community, and using community as a sales channel is not recommended. ·     ▶️ _Why's that?_ o  Undermine your community purpose & erode trust—being sold to is not typically a strong enough reason for people to build relationships & be vulnerable o  You kill the conversation o  If you want to promote your brand inside a community, it should always feel like exclusive access, not an up-sell. **Content** ·     _The core hypothesis_: community members can help us validate and generate our most valuable content, which plays a role in our marketing ecosystem ·     _Measured by_: time and money saved ideating for content cadences, producing content, and producing the wrong content. Sometimes, also qualified leads. ·     _Good for companies who:_ o  Use content marketing as a large part of their marketing stack o  Emphasize featuring customer stories and use cases (via case studies, blog posts, social media, and more) o  Are still within the first year of establishing their community ·     Community programs will include: o  Formalized user-generated content (UGC) programs (like AMAs and workshops with members, a member contribution blog, social media series that feature members) o  Ways to 'pitch' content ideas to the team o  An emphasis on high-quality conversations and best practice sharing, vs. ephemeral conversations (chatting or quick break fix interactions) **Research** ·     _The core hypothesis_: community members can help make the right decisions for our company by including voice of customer in everything we do ·     _Measured by_: time and money saved building the wrong product, easier access to customer research for all teams ·     _Good for companies who:_ o  Are companies 😂 o  Are still within the first year of establishing their community ·     Community programs will include: o  Informal research opportunities like quick questions and content calendars designed with research in mind o  Formal research opportunities like a select customer counsel, demo and feedback sessions, and in-depth surveys **Quick comprehension check** **#2** What are some differences you might expect to see between communities optimized for _acquisition_, vs. communities optimized for _retention_? **Quick comprehension check** **#3** Which community outcomes can we expect to see every community striving toward? Which community outcomes depend on specific company goals and setups?    **Which outcomes should we focus on first?** ·     Content & Research outcomes should be focussed on within the first year. ·     After about a year, focus should shift to retention as well. ·     If your community optimizes for acquisition, it depends.  **Can we have it all?** ...probably not. ·     Every community should focus on research, and almost all communities should focus on content as an outcome. ·     Unless you have unlimited bandwidth and resources to start and maintain multiple communities, you should probably not focus on both retention and acquisition. **Understanding your company's business model**  ·     Put more simply: _how does your company make money?_ o  One time or subscription purchases for goods and services o  Usage or transaction fees o  Advertisements and data o  Brand awareness / market share / network effects for another brand ·     ➡️ Lots of in-depth examples here and here ·     What are the core metrics your company already tracks? I.e., a subscription-based business might track Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Lifetime Value (LTV) o  As a CM, you should be aware of the core metrics your company _already tracks across the organization_—these should inform how you optimize your community o  Optimizing this way means you avoid "teaching people why community matters." Instead, you show it matters to what they already care about ·     You should always ask about a company's business model during a job interview. Aim to understand how they make money directly or indirectly, who their customers are, and how they already reach and speak to customers. ·     **➡️ Look for alignment between company goals and customer goals: this usually means a community product will be a more natural fit (example of mismatch: Robinhood)**  **Exploring business models & community** **Seamless:** ·     B - B - C marketplace for ordering food, diners are the end user ·     15-30% commissions on orders for restaurants  **Three "Buckets" for Community Metrics** **1️⃣** **Community metrics tied to _business metrics that are already tracked_** **⭐** ·     **Retention**: cohort comparison between your average community member versus your average non-community member customer on dimensions like churn, MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), LTV (Lifetime Value) Example: o  You have an overall customer base of 1000 paying subscribers. o  300 of them are members of the community, 700 are not. o  Your average community member stays a paying member for roughly 6 years before churning. o  Your average non-community member stays a paying member for roughly 4 years before churning. When comparing your average community member to your average non-community member (that cohort of 700), community members remain customers for +50% longer than non-community members. ·     **Acquisition**: community qualified leads. Just as you would track how many leads you got from other marketing channels, you will track leads via this channel. Over time you may wish to compare your conversion rates from this channel vs. another channel, or begin to track retention for these leads vs. leads acquired another way. ·     **"Health Check":** your company may have a custom metric or multiple metrics that are considered to contribute to "customer health." Community typically has the power to influence these types of metrics (again, you're doing cohort comparison). Limits of these metrics: they show correlation, not causation. You can be more exact if you track the same customer before and after community. **2️⃣** **Metrics about what's happening in your community (i.e., "engagement metrics")** ·     **Monthly Active Users:** ⭐ o  Tracks the relationship between overall community membership and engagement o  Tells you when to optimize for growth vs. retention and engagement within your community o  30-70% is normal and healthy, but the actual percentage matters a lot less than the stability of the percentage. Example: In community A: - You have 200 total members. - Your members all pay directly for access to the community. - Your community members were all invited based on having attended events put on by the company over the last year. - You have 70% MAU month-over-month. (or 140 total active users) **In community B:** - You have 10,000 total members. - You initially automatically created accounts for all 10,000 of your customers in the community, but they don't pay extra for it. - Your community management team has been working hard on building 1:1 relationships with some users to improve MAU, because they've seen that the community plays a huge role in retaining customers. - You have 20% MAU month-over-month (or 2000 total active users) ⭐There is a huge amount of variation within your MAU binary in terms of the actual level of engagement. Added granularity into engagement levels, and how these map onto business outcomes, can also be incredibly helpful if you are able to track at this level. For example: you may track engagement personas and be able to tell that getting someone to the next engagement level has a business outcome. We'll be having a guest speaker come in to share more on this. ·     **Number of likes, comments, posts, etc** 😐: o  Mostly not useful to report outside of your direct team. Widely considered to be "vanity metrics" because they lack a "then what." o  Might be somewhat useful when you're starting a community and trying to ramp up organic engagement. Aiming for member contributions to "match or outpace" admin contributions is a good early goal. o  Can be useful if you're evaluating how many moderators or team members are needed. o  Can be useful to gut-check your engagement efforts. o  Useful in a community audit. ·     **Number of members/member growth** 😐: **** o  Should be intentionally paced: i.e., start small and grow exponentially (some exceptions at _huge_ companies, but you still take a "grow small" approach). §  If you do grow really fast, faster than you can build relationships, add a layer of intentional relationship-building on top of your community efforts at scale. o  OR reverse engineered from business goals if absolutely necessary: i.e., "we want to produce 3 community-sourced case studies this quarter. We assume that only 10% of all members will make posts throughout the quarter, and only 10% of posts will be high quality enough to produce case studies. We assume only half of those we ask will agree to participate in case studies. Therefore, we aim to grow the community to 600 members this quarter." o  Not very useful outside of the context of MAU. **3️⃣** **Metrics that track community's impact on other elements of the business** Overall, it should be enough to set goals and cadences with these departments and stick to them—i.e., measure yourself based off of the binary of meeting or missing objectives. However, it might be helpful to extrapolate the actual business cost of some of these efforts if you work with a leadership team who will only see the value if communicated quantitatively. ·     Product: sourcing user interviews, user advisory board, feature ideas, etc ·     Content: sourcing case studies, blog posts, User Generated Content (UGC) for social, etc. ·     ▶️ Some content efforts already have a Return on Investment (ROI) associated with them. When community contributes to these efforts, you can use these existing measures to evaluate the use of community as well. ·     Support: Service Level Agreements (SLA), First Response Time (FRT), case deflection ## **A couple of helpful thoughts:** ✅ The concept of leading & lagging indicators can be helpful for community builders. Does the metric you're looking at predict an outcome, or measure an outcome? (For example, event registrations versus attendees; engagement rates vs. reduction in churn) ✅ Metrics take time and resources to accurately track. Keep your ideal metrics in mind as you design your community—even if you don't have the ability to track them right now, make decisions that enable you to do so in the future. ✅ Metrics take time to normalize. For example, MAU will be almost useless in your first few months after a community launch. ✅ With leadership, focus on communicating the metrics you can track as well as the hypothesized outcomes for community. **Why is being an internal "community expert" so important?** ·     Community's growing fast, and those who really "get it" are scarce. It's also evolving really quickly—so it's important to keep learning as the field grows 🌟 ·     You might end up in a position where you are actually the only person who understands community best practices. Unless you're really lucky, you might know more than your boss! ·     This is what makes being a community manager right now so exciting—but also a bit scary!  **Community-led**  Learn more about community-led and the community-led pledge here! "Community is central, not treated as a bolt-on to sales, marketing, support, or any other department. Community is community." 🚫**The old way:** seeing community as fundamentally something else (usually support or marketing) that's just happening in a different place; seeing community managers as gatekeepers to those channels vs. stakeholders in larger business goals  **Working with Leadership** ·     Why do community managers need to work so closely with leadership? o  In order to be community-led, you need community leaders. o  Community managers are often representing the voice of the brand to the brand's most loyal fans. They need to have the ear of leadership to communicate the wants and needs of the community, and to accurately represent the brand o  Creating functional communities is often a litmus test of how well aligned a company's goals are with the goals of its customers. The healthiest companies have this alignment—if it's not there, it will show up in community first. ·     In practice, this means: o  Community needs to have a line of access to leadership—either directly, or through a highly bought-in manager who supports and understands community. §  In a new role, choose a champion who has a voice that's listened to 🏆 o  Distilling down community concepts into how they apply to business metrics and concerns that leaders already care about—instead of trying to teach or convince them to care about new things o  Putting information into a format that's preferred and digestible. This might mean observing how leadership usually communicates concepts, and practicing with others you trust and getting feedback before you ask for the time of execs. ·     We'll have a speaker coming in who will talk about his experience working with leadership and ultimately becoming a part of the C Suite through the community career path 🤩 ·     🤫 We also have a course under C School for folks with their sights set on leadership roles (VP, Head of, C Suite roles) in community. Stay in touch with as your career grows if this becomes an option for you!  **Educating & Socializing Community-Led with your Team** ·     As a community manager who is part of an emerging field, part of your job is to educate your colleagues on community and it's role in your org. They may not know enough about what you do to proactively collaborate with you. This might look like: o  Helping them understand how community best practices might differ from general marketing, social media, or email best practices. o  Bringing visibility to what you do to your organization, and being clear about what goes into and what comes out of your work. This means not being shy about touting your most effective initiatives—especially the ones you worry might be undervalued! o  Giving colleagues examples of exemplar communities that you are modeling your program off of.  **In action** **🎦** ·     A colleague suggests you should grow your community membership faster, and wonders why you don't have more members. ·     → "In marketing on social media or on an email list, we often think that more followers is always better. But, in a community setting, this can actually be counterintuitive! Community-building best practices are to grow slowly and try to maintain a very high engagement rate as you grow. If you grow too quickly, you can end up with poor engagement rates—doing that would mean we'd miss out on the unique benefits of building a community in the first place." ·     Your product team asks to post a survey in the community that takes 45 minutes to complete. ·     → "That's a really high-effort ask for a community member. I know you're looking for high-quality research, and I don't think we're likely to get a lot of responses using that approach. Is there a way we can communicate why this survey is valuable to community members? If not, what can we do to incentivize them? If you're mostly looking for research volume, we need to make it easy and beneficial to participate. If you're mostly looking for the most high quality research and a lower volume is okay, can I ask ten community members to participate in this personally?" ·     You're trying to get a product ideation program off the ground in your community, and you're getting some hesitation from team members who worry about creating a public popularity contest for features. ·     → "I know that ideating in public feels like it could become a popularity contest. I have a great example for you to look at of another community that runs an ideation board who have successfully avoided that. They use their ideation space mostly to get more context on features and communicate on progress—it's not a voting system. Can I put you in touch with one of their product managers to learn more about how it works?" Leaning back on the community-led framework, we always have an eye toward creating community experiences that are beneficial for their own sake—not simply trying to leverage or mine the community for the benefit of other departments while abandoning community best practices.  **How to look for community-led in job listings** ## **How to look for community-led in job listings** ·     Look for EITHER (choose strategically based on your preferences): ·         o  An experienced community leader internally—ask questions about the communities they've managed in the past, how they dealt with them differently than a typical audience, etc. o  A team that's actively looking to be "managed up" ·     Look for job postings that emphasize being the internal voice of customer and helping inform company strategies, versus job postings that emphasize moderating and responding ·     Look for job postings that actively demonstrate an understanding of how community varies from broadcast channels like email and social media—most responsibilities should be closely aligned with the "Capital C" community, and not audience touch-points in general o  To clarify—the "Capital C" framework is not a gatekeeping device. Not every community should be shoehorned into this model. However, it is a good litmus test to understand how closely a community program adheres to standards and may provide the best opportunities for career growth. We should have a really high tolerance for well-thought-out innovation on this model, and at the same time have a skeptical eye toward companies using "community" as a buzzword. ·     Questions to ask: o  "Who is the vision-keeper for the community project internally?" o  "Who are companies you model your community off of, or whose community efforts inspire you?" o  "How do you think about the differences between community and audiences? What are the boundaries and intersections at this company?" ("What's the Venn Diagram of Community, Audience, and Customer?") o  "What are the core business metrics you're hoping the community will impact?" ("What's community's biggest opportunity to impact the business?") o  "How do you expect to see the community team grow in the next year? Five years?" o  “Can you tell me about your community as if it were a product? Where does it live, what are the features, & what does it cost?” o  “What experience/expertise does senior leadership already have with community?” o  “What problems throughout the org are you trying to solve with community?”  **Professional development for community managers** ·     Actively seek out content created by community thought leaders—and share with your colleagues! The Community Club Content Library is a great place to start, as is Twitter. ·     For early career community managers (and beyond!), trying to speak to a community manager at another company about once a month for thirty minutes to swap best practices and challenges can be a game-changer. ·     Look at as many examples of other communities—inside and out of your industry—as much as you can. Copy lovingly!