I know many community folks who made their way into this role because they enjoy working with people or making connections. It’s a great way to start the path, but it can leave room for skill gaps. Take me, for example. As I mentioned in my intro, community started as a hobby and morphed into a career. When managing a company community for the first time, I was happy to answer questions, help connect members to resources, and write content. It didn’t take long to realize I needed to develop additional business skills if I wanted to continue along any sort of career path.
Prior to my foray into a community career, I spent many years in higher education. And while I worked in one of the business offices—and even in an IT group until I left—creating a business case, tracking metrics, creating KPIs and justifying ROI was very different from an enterprise company. I had to relearn a lot. You may want to focus on your community members to the exclusion of almost everything else, because you see them as your number one priority (and it can be enjoyable). But you’d be wrong—you have other stakeholders and you’re accountable to them as well.
It Starts at the Top—But Also the Bottom
You’ve probably been told that your community goals should roll up to company initiatives, but why does that matter? If you want to show why your work is important, it has to tie in to what other people in the company care about. If you want the community included in the budget and the overall business strategy, you have to find ways to measure what you do and tell the story of how it impacts the organization.
In general, the CEO will have strategic initiatives that roll down into different areas of the company. Each executive will then have initiatives that roll up into the CEO’s most important focus areas. And then their teams will have KPIs (key performance indicators) that tie into those. (This is extremely oversimplified to illustrate the point.)
Your goal is to look at your strategy, figure out what you need to do in the next x amount of time (quarter, year, etc.), and make sure that it relates to and contributes to your team’s goals. My greater team is called Awareness Marketing and we are tasked with creating opportunities for people to learn about JumpCloud. It may be with press releases and the number of articles and mentions we get; or the number of customer case studies and white papers we complete. For the community to impact brand awareness, we have several ongoing initiatives around content (both on the community and social media) and events (meetups and our weekly livestream). Without this clear connection to the wider business, I wouldn’t get to do the “fun” stuff like create incentives to reward our loyal customers who help each other troubleshoot, answer questions, volunteer for early access programs, and give us excellent product feedback. And those tie back into the business as well.
Go For the Value-Add
There are additional ways to link to business objectives and get other parts of the company involved. This depends on where you sit, but since we’re talking to a marketing audience, let’s focus on approaching teams outside of this area. When you can deeply embed community into multiple groups and workflows, you add business value. Rosie Sherry of rosieland shared a terrific mindmap of how to co-create in community on LinkedIn (and Twitter). Co-creation isn’t just for the community team, though. It’s fantastic for product and support.
Product
When you have a vibrant community full of your ideal customers (whether they use your products or not), it is perfect for collaboration with product. If they aren’t in the community already combing through discussions and topics, they are missing an amazing opportunity. Our product team has already asked for beta signups, volunteers for early release programs, and feedback on future enhancements. They give demos during our weekly livestream program and viewers ask lots of questions. If you can support product ideation, even better. There are several ways to implement a program like this, from having customers vote on features you’re already considering, to having them submit their own requests and voting on the ones they like most. They vary in complexity and level of effort, so you’ll need to work with the product team to implement them fully. I can’t emphasize this enough: the last thing you want to do is partially start an innovation program and not staff it appropriately.
Support
Another area of opportunity is your support team, and it goes beyond asking that team to answer questions in the community. If you don’t already have a separate knowledge base, the community is an excellent place to host support content. What are the most frequently asked questions in support cases? Would it save time if customers could read a related article before filing a case or that support could send out instead of retyping the same instructions over and over? There’s a lot of value in 1:many support content. (See a case study we did when I was at Cisco.)
Sales
Do you work with your sales team to produce customer case studies? When your customers share their stories on your site, it’s a great opportunity to turn it into something more. Alteryx has done an excellent job of this with their customer stories section. They have an entire space dedicated to how their customers are using the community and their software—see this JPMorgan Chase & Co. example. Alternatively, you could open up sharing and let your customers tell everyone how they use your product themselves. Take a look at how Miro has done this with their Miroverse site.
I also encourage sales and customer success teams to follow their accounts and customers in community. It’s an excellent way to get to know them, understand how they work, and any pain points they have that may not come up on calls. Also, it can be a fantastic opportunity to surprise and delight your customers when they least expect it. At one company, we sent a gift card for dog training lessons because a customer mentioned they had a new dog and wanted to train them soon. Another time, we sent a baby gift to a new parent because they mentioned paternity leave for their newborn. It shows you’re paying attention and you care about the individuals you're interacting with every day.
Measure What Matters
It’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics where you’re counting page views instead of impact. What “impact” actually is differs from company to company. Think about what I said earlier: for my team it’s brand awareness. How we measure it is complicated, but we look at who’s signing up for the free version of our product and what drove them to do so. Community site visitors coming in via search can contribute to that. So can weekly IT Hour viewers. These initiatives—and many others—are business drivers for us. We also track how many community site visitors and registered members we get in order to keep tabs on growth—at least until we are further along in our journey (our community site is still less than a year old).
“What gets measured gets managed” can be helpful to remember but only if you are measuring the right things. This can be complex and full of obstacles if not done well. Work with your manager, stakeholders, and other team members to get the list right. Talk to community peers if you think any of them may not have enough of an understanding of your work or to level set expectations.
You’ve Got This
Connecting your community to the business strategy takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. I have longer term goals around renewal rates, satisfaction, and MRR/ARR in community (versus customers who aren’t community members); whether people who join the community eventually become customers; and how many potential customers our meetups reach over time. The data collection takes months and the system integrations could take even longer. And the community needs to be in existence for at least a year or two before we can even begin to start looking at theories. This is the long game, y’all. Sephora, CA Technologies, and others have done it—we just have to align the correct resources.
I’m saying that you can do this with time, patience, and resources. Learning the more advanced pieces of community takes years. But read some of the books and sites, listen to some of the podcasts I mentioned, and you’ll be a lot further along than I was in the beginning. And you have awesome peers here in mCommunity to reference as well. I look forward to seeing what great things you do next!