Beyond the Dashboard: Don’t just report. Influence.

Well, hello everyone. It's so nice to be here in this faraway land, in this faraway room. I'm glad you all found it. I know I had a little bit of difficulty getting here, but it's really nice to be here.

Before we begin, I always like to thank our video and AV team because they're behind the scenes doing their work. So thank you so much for getting all of this ready, prepared. Guys, this is amazing work. I'm really excited about being able to share with you a few things that I think are going to be relevant to the work that you're doing as community builders or folks that are looking to bring customers together.

The talk today is Beyond the Dashboard, and I titled it that because most of us are good at filling dashboards, putting in numbers, reporting on things. But what I want to bring to mind today is how do we take that beyond what you currently have to a place where you can actually influence the people that have the budget, influence the people that are making the decisions. And that's not always an easy thing to do. So a little bit of context on myself.

My name is Juan Garza. I am a customer advisor at GainSight. I have been building communities and leading communities for many, many years across SaaS, developer, enterprise environments. And I've really sat in your seat.

I have been asked the difficult questions. I have been told that my reporting needs to be improved. I have been challenged on the metrics that I've been bringing. And so that's the kind of insight that I want to bring to you today to help you as you continue to prepare and lead your communities as well.

We're going to take an approach today in three primary ways. The first one is we're going to look at the measurement problem. And I promise you, you're not alone there. The second one is going to be social evidence for community.

And this is a great piece of information because it's going to give us ammunition to be able to do the next part, which is telling the story, translating everything that we're getting into things that we can actually use again to influence those decisions that we need to be influenced in favor of our customers, in favor of our communities. And then finally, we'll end with some Q&A. So if you have questions or further comments, I would love to hear about how things are going with you. And even if you have a question and we don't get around to asking or answering it, I'll be around.

Feel free to pull me to the side. I'd love to get to know you and find out more about the kind of work that you're doing. So let's begin with the uncomfortable part, the measurement problem. I want to ask you three questions and I just want you to take some time and let these sit with you for a minute.

How much is your community contributing to customer retention right now with a number attached? Number two, what is your current community's pipeline forecast for the next quarter? Or alternatively, what is your community's germ prevention forecast for the next quarter? Finally, number three, how much money have you saved?

Are you saving or is being saved because of peer to peer support responses in your community? Now, these may sound high level, but they are actual questions that are being asked today. And if these feel hard, they're meant to be. But that's why we're here, to try to uncover ways to answer these questions.

Most of our reporting today actually looks like this. We're looking and we're bringing numbers on how many posts we have, how many page views do we have, how many events have we had, what are our participation rates, how many new joiners do we bring in? Those kinds of things are what we're bringing to the table. But across from that same table, you have what the business is looking for.

And they want retention numbers, they want germ prevention numbers, they want time to value reduction, they want feedback loop information. They're speaking a completely different language than the one that we are talking. And so what we see is that community activity does not equal business outcomes. And that's the gap.

That's the problem. And it's not unique to us, but it does affect us because community is still fighting for a seat at the table. So to put this more bluntly, activity does not equal business success. So the question isn't how do we get better metrics?

That's what we're always looking for. What do I need to go measure? What do I need to go find? No, no.

Instead, think through how do I connect what I'm already measuring to what the business really cares about. So let's zoom out for a minute. And let's imagine a brand new company that is going to launch, I don't know, in a couple of months, a new SaaS company. What this company is going to need in order for it to be successful is customers and product usage.

And a lot of both. We know this. Every company, though, is going to have the same basic structure built in. You're going to have revenue and growth functions.

You're going to have product and technology functions. You're going to have customer facing functions as well. And they all sit between the company and the customer. But here's the thing.

Your online community is already doing work that touches every single one of those functions. We just need to be better at framing it that way. So when you look at your most valuable customers, a pattern seems to emerge. Think of your power users.

Think of those that are involved in your CAB programs. Think of those that are continually giving feedback. Think of those that are your event regulars. Most of those are already a part of your community.

They're already engaged, which means that they're already leading towards those higher success rates. But we can't claim attribution. We have to correlate specific things to include community as a touch point for those results. Many organizations aren't connecting those dots, and it's our job to do that right now.

So let me say something that I think is going to be very liberating. At least it was for me. The attribution problem is not yours to solve alone. Every other team in the company is also struggling with this.

Sales cannot perfectly attribute revenue to a specific touch point. Marketing also struggles between last click versus multi-touch. Customer success many times can always prove that they saved an account through the different things that they do. So build credibility by acknowledging this and let this shift your thinking.

Allow this to be the thing that guides how you are creating your community programs. So this is where we pivot. You know, I know, we know that community works. We have lived it.

We have seen it. We have experienced it. We are building it. The challenge is backing up what we know to be true with evidence that other people can trust.

And let's talk about why this works because it's actually our best tool. This section here is one of my favorites because it takes community out of the soft and fluffy box and plants it firmly into behavioral science. So what I'd like to do now is share two perspectives with you that are going to give some fundamentals as to why people even contribute or want to belong or join in communities. That is going to set up a foundation for other things that we're going to be building upon, which are going to help you then influence those people.

Help you then influence those decisions that you want to be influenced. Let's begin with social identity theory. This theory here is going to inform us that people, all of us, derive a part of how we see ourselves based on the groups that we belong to. Now what I'm going to do here is show a box that explains this theory a little bit and then underneath there's going to be a little takeaway for how we should be thinking about this for community.

Now remember that everything that I'm sharing here affects us as well, not just our customers. When we think about belonging to a group immediately we begin to think of the us versus them. And in community this is really interesting because members are going to defend, recruit, and also receive bad news more amicably than those who are not part of the group. So when you belong to a group immediately you begin thinking about those in your group in a different way than those who are not part of your group.

Let me put it this way. And it even works when you're put into groups arbitrarily. So if I were to divide this room in half, this group on this side, that group on that side, we could say, okay, all of us are here because we care about customers, we care about them getting quick answers to their questions, we care about them connecting and networking. We want them to have access to our products and be able to solve their problems.

We want them to be happy. That's great. We're all united. But the moment I say this group over here and this group over here, something in our minds splits us off and now we begin to look at the other group and we begin to compare.

And it's the same with any group that you belong to, whether it is one that you formally join or one that you are put into. So consider this. Those who are in your group are going to be the ones that you are going to defend. Those are going to be the ones that you are going to take care of.

That's the reputation that you're going to be fighting for. And those who are not in the group are going to be perceived as the out of group, which means you don't necessarily care for what's happening over there as much as what's happening here. In community, this matters because leaderboards, badges, recognition programs, all of these tactics and strategies and programs that we create to have those specific groups. They're not just gimmicks.

They're powerful tools to help people feel like they belong and we get to engage them in a deeper level. Finally, identity threat. Now, this is the one that should be keeping us up at night. Why?

Because if the group is threatened, we take that very personally. So things like migrations, things like loss of support, lowered activity, that hits us in a deeper level than if it happened to somebody else. So when members see this, and if you've been in community long enough, you know that when a community member leaves, they don't go alone. They usually take other people.

This is a social thing that we're building here. So for community, we can say that community membership does in fact come with an emotional cost. Be careful. Be careful how you grow this.

Be careful how you nurture this because as you know, loyalty is easily lost, easily lost and very difficult to rebuild. Let's move on to the endowment effect. Now, this effect is really interesting. And I would liken it to the TV show Hoarders, if you're familiar with that, right?

You've likely seen the show where you've got individuals that just buy a bunch of stuff and then their house ends up getting flooded and just completely filled with things that they don't need. And then an intervention needs to happen and you get an expert coming in and they're trying to pull things out of the house. And what's the response of the owners? How do they feel?

They're at a loss. They can't get rid of that. I can't get rid of this thing. Even for things that we would look at as garbage.

Why do they value it? Because of this effect. Because we tend to overvalue something if we own it. This is important as community builders because we can use all of these things to help us design our programs and to increase the engagement that we're looking for.

So when it comes to forming a group or forming a community, we can see that those who spend time building it are going to have a deeper sense of ownership. This is very strong. It's a very good thing to be tapping into. We also see that ownership is going to increase proportionally with the amount of time that's been invested.

So for us, contribution programs are going to be very powerful retention strategies in disguise. You're going to hear a lot of people talk about, yeah, engagement and community engagement. This is where we're moving. But we want to give a framework, a foundation as to why we're driving so much engagement because all of this is built to improve that.

Protection. If you own something, you are likely going to protect it. If you own something, you are likely going to defend it. And if you own something, when the threat is there to have it removed, you are going to feel it.

So a perceived loss, even if what you're going to gain has advantages, you are going to think twice before moving over there because this is something that you own. And the other thing, well, it's brand new. I'm not sure if I'm going to get the benefits that I'm looking for. So for us and community, the feeling of ownership raises the exit barrier in a way that pricing strategies just can't touch.

Finally, erosion. If over time the thing that we value is depreciated, not cared for, then we are going to accelerate and disengage, which in our community, we are going to see that poorly moderated or deprioritized programs are no longer worth protecting. So what happens? What do members do?

They leave. And as we saw before, when they leave, they don't go alone. They take others with them. So you actually begin to suffer in multiple ways.

So I want to use these two things as a bridge to connect the activity that you're seeing and tie that into the business value or the business goals that you are being asked to deliver. And you might say, how do I do that? Well, I want to present two experiments using these different theories or these perspectives to help you be able to build some of that credibility. Let's begin with the first one.

This is experiment number one. We're taking a look now at the social identity theory, and we want to test whether being personally welcomed is going to increase engagement activity. Now, intuitively, we know that if somebody joins a community and you have somebody welcoming them, they're going to feel like they belong and they're probably going to participate more. But have you tested that?

Do you have the numbers to prove that? If not, here's how you can do it. Begin by separating your brand new members into two groups. And the first group, you're going to send them your standard welcome message.

Hey, glad you joined. So glad to see you here. Come here and introduce yourself. Make sure you click here.

All of your standard thing. The second group is going to receive a more tailored, a warm message, a message that includes words like us, a message that preferably includes a blurb or a welcome from a power user or somebody with a lot of authority within the community. And then once you do that, measure engagement rates. Measure depth of engagement at, say, 60 days, 90 days, 120 days.

It's your community. You know your people. You know how traffic looks there. But see, is there a difference between just a standard welcome message or the warmer message?

For the endowment effect, we have members in every community that just disappear for whatever reason. They just leave. So let's design an experiment to see if we can actually activate loss aversion and bring them back, get them active once again. And here's how I would do it.

Go through your member list and find those members that have been inactive for an X number of days. I put 45 days here. It could be 90 days. And then what you're going to do is you're going to message them.

One message is going to be your standard. Hey, we miss you. It's been a long time since we've seen you. The second message, though, this is a good one, is when you're going to send to them and say, hey, your posts are still being viewed by other people.

That question that you answered is continuing to help other people. Hey, those badges that you earned, we've actually tweaked them. And people are coming to you or people want to meet people like you. In other words, begin to frame that message as here's what you have contributed and here's what you would lose if you don't come back.

And then measure engagement rate. 60 days, 90 days, 120 days. You know your communities tried. See what happens.

I think what you're going to find is really interesting. So these experiments give you a foundation. And that's the point. You're not going to be asking leadership to just trust you.

You are going to show them a methodology. This goes beyond the instincts that you have to the data science and to ties to human behavior that are going to demonstrate the value of what you're bringing. So beyond those controlled experiments, there's also three other types of measurements that are going to help you. The first one is proxy metrics.

Now proxy metrics are those things that your community can attribute or contribute to, not necessarily attribute everything to. But these are things like, OK, out of the X number of members that we do, how many of them are community members? Right? That's a number that you can go find right now.

Or out of those that are community members, how many of those have expanded? Or how many upsells have we had because of these individuals that are in the community and out of the community? These are things that you can begin to tie in. Again, not attribute, but you can correlate those.

Your proxy metrics use them. On top of that, you also have natural experiments. Now these natural experiments are going to support the value of your community with things that have already happened. These are things that you did not have to do.

So if you have a net new community, what was engagement like? What was product usage like? What was feedback like? What was attendance like before the community was opened?

Before it was launched? Measure that before and after. You don't have to do anything. The numbers are already there.

What were renewals like before a webinar program and then after the webinar program? What was engagement like before your super user program and after the super user program? The numbers are probably there. Surface them and combine them with the proxy metrics.

Finally, we have these qualitative signals. We all know this story. One example is just an anecdote, but five, six, seven that are similar in themes. That's a signal and that's what we need to be pursuing.

So take a look at those. The best thing that you can do here is to triangulate. This is going to be a defense for you. Combine these whenever possible.

Now, we get to the part where you actually walk into the room and influence a decision. Now, you've heard this before, but I want to make it more concrete. You are reporting in community language and those across the table are listening in business language. What's missing?

A translation. Whose job is that? It's ours to translate. How do we take what we are currently measuring and what we're doing to make it more concrete?

And translate that into the goals that the business is wanting to see. How do we get them to care about the things that we're currently measuring? Well, let me walk you through how each of those functions maps to go to market goals and what are the things that they care about? Do you remember that list of the internal teams that sit between the company and the customers?

Let's talk about this and let's begin with the revenue and growth functions. Here we have sales teams, marketing teams, customer success teams. These groups care about brand awareness. They care about revenue.

So experiments that tie into that share those with these teams. That's what they care about. Product and technology teams, they care about the use of the product. They care about product market fit.

Your community is a living, breathing feedback loop. Access it. Send those signals their way. Connect to those things with them.

Your customer facing teams, that function support professional services onboarding. They're wanting adoption. They're wanting self service. In your community, you likely have peer to peer responses and that is a proof of concept.

So go in there and increase that. Go in there and connect those teams to these functions of your community. Because if we zoom out, ultimately what we find is that every single function of the business wants this. They all want more customers and they all want happier customers.

And here's the thing. Your community right now is producing both. They're already there. You know this.

So let's close the loop on our two experiments. The first experiment, if you remember, was this warm welcome. This is the one where we were going to tell people, hey, we're glad you're here versus a super user coming in and making that language about the us and the group and all those kinds of things. If your engagement depth increases, you have now proven that a warm community does in fact drive higher engagement and you could utilize this in new ways.

How can we tie this into a go to market goal? Well, it's going to correlate very nicely with time to value reduction. How? Well, if you can drive.

If you can drive higher engagement by leading people into your Q and a discussions or your product life life life cycle discussions, then what you are actually able to begin to tie and connect. Is that onboarding cohorts if you group them into those say those different sections are actually driving more product adoption. Why? Because we know that people who engage more actually use a product more.

For the second experiment, the loss of version one. If your engagement increases here, you have now proven that community members find value in their involvement and are actually stickier as a result. So what go to market goal? Can we connect that to obviously retention?

How do we do that? Well, if you're able to raise that engagement, then you can argue that customers feel like they're going to lose something by leaving a goal. So you can connect it with product, renewal behavior. Follow those renewal cycles and see if those members that you have reengaged are renewing at higher rates.

Those are the ways that you can begin using these things to bring that business value to the table. So I'm going to end here with a sampling breakdown of how you can think about your community programs and how you can connect them to the go to market goals. Now what you're going to see is there's a clear line here. I've tried to bold some of the words that I think are going to be maybe more interesting for you to follow.

But what you're going to see here are two things. Number one is loyalty and the other one is going to be engagement. We always begin with engagement and engagement drives loyalty, which then drives affinity, which then drives a thing that you want to driven. So take a look at these go to market goals.

Retention and term prevention. Engage customers renew. True or false? We know that to be true.

We know that to be true. So loyalty is going to be increasing. You're going to be growing that and that is a leading indication. It's going to be a leading indicator of those renewal conversations.

So how can you connect that piece to the business goal? I've already shown you an experiment and you can actually trace and follow the data to show members who are in the community and are engaged at this level tend to renew more. Builds credibility. All of a sudden, you're attaching a dollar amount to your numbers, and now your business leaders are listening.

They want to know more. Look at expansion revenue. Look at pipeline generation. We know that we already knew that we want to really work together to show, what are the ruby something that has been beneficial to in your life.

You're happy to share that with others. Our customers are as well. Can you prove that? Can you link that with your community programs?

You can. Start measuring it. Start driving that. Take a deflection, time to value reduction, all of these things.

I'll leave you with this. Loyalty can be measured. But affinity and perceived value, those are attitudinal, which means you have to ask for those. So survey them.

And then combine both of those pieces of data to influence the teams that you need influence for those go-to-market goals that you're wanting to bring about. And that's the framework. Understand why your community works psychologically. Design experiments that produce evidence.

They go beyond just your hunches. And then translate that evidence into business language for the specific teams that you are wanting to influence. Now, before we go into the Q&A, I did mention that I was part of the advisory team at Gainsight. This is the kind of work that we do internally.

If your community is struggling currently with a strategy, with reporting, with what kind of metrics should I be bringing to the table, with a strong business case, with where should the community move next, these are the kinds of things that my team can help with. And we'd be more than happy to connect with you, find out more about what it is that you may need. And so if you would like more information, feel free to scan that QR code and it'll take you to a form you can fill out your name there and we'll get back to you. But that's the kind of work that we do.

And so with that, thank you. And we'll open up to any questions. (audience applauding) I'm not just saying this because I talk about this every day as a CSM here, but that was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing all of that.

Saw a lot of pictures being taken. So let's get into the Q&A. And as I mentioned before, just hop on the app and you can add your questions and upvote what you definitely want sent to the top and answered by Juan. So how do you handle the annoying, that's just correlation not causation trolls that don't know what they're talking about, asking for a friend.

Yeah, yeah, I think I know a friend is being asked here. There's trolls, I mean, you guys are community leaders, they're everywhere. And so what you need to do is come in with your defense, have your data ready, have your story ready, frame it correctly, anticipate some of these things. And of course you're gonna have naysayers.

But the strongest defense you have are the experiments that you're on and how tight they are. Now, the longer that you have, you're gonna create a baseline, but the more time you have to expand on those, the more trends you're gonna be able to demonstrate, which then can lead into that correlation, not causation discussion, and you can have firm around when you present this to senior leadership. What is the best business metric to report if I can only do one? Curious of your thoughts here.

Oh man, that's like, where do you wanna go eat? You know, what do you want for dinner? I think what this comes out to is a lack of understanding, and I'll flip it this way, an opportunity to uncover what your business is going to profit from the most. Depending on the maturity of where you work, depending on the product that you're working with, depending on the amount of time your community has been active, all of these things could depend.

Maybe you're looking for just number of members in your community. Maybe you're looking for attendance at regional events. Maybe you're looking at product usage. I mean, who's to say you are the ones that know that, and you're senior leaders.

So what I would encourage you to do, what I would recommend that you do, is that you have a sit down with that leadership and understand what are the things that you need? What are the things that the company is looking for? Because at the end of the day, they're going to be looking at community as a contributor or a detractor from what the business is aiming for. So what is the best business metric?

I hate to say it depends, but that's an opportunity for you to uncover it. And it's probably gonna be different than somebody else's. And this is where the nuance of your personality and the nuance of your team are gonna come into play as to how you bring that about. So at the same thing, it really all depends about what your, again, leadership wants and is looking for.

And sometimes I get customers who come in knowing what to do, but again, not what to measure and what to show off. So what would it take for community to be seen as strategic function rather than support in its early stages? Yeah, good question. A lot of communities begin as support because that's a really standard and really simple use case.

And I wouldn't speak against doing that. I think a support community is a strong case to begin to show ROI. That's just a quick one. And I think it's one that we want to stand on and build upon.

But I think in terms of being strategic, you can use support in a strategic way to drive cost savings, cost reductions there, to drive evergreen content, to drive peer-to-peer responses, right? More customer contributions. I mean, those are ways that you can make this a strategic move. So I wouldn't say support is maybe not the best place to start or the best place to start.

Again, it really depends on your environment. But support's not bad. On top of that, though, that's gonna depend on where the company's going and the makeup of your community. I like to say that communities are like little kids in a playground.

So if you ever drive by an elementary school during lunchtime, right, you roll down your window, you hear them all yelling and screaming, and they all sound the same. They've got the high-pitched voices, and it's just like, okay, they're kids, and that's what you say, they're kids. And that's what people think about in communities. They look at communities, they hear, and they say, oh, those are just communities.

But the moment you go into the school yard, and I don't do this unless you're a parent of the school, don't wanna get you in trouble, but the moment that you sit down with the child and you get to talk to them, then all of a sudden you start to uncover the personality traits, the likes and dislikes, you start understanding more about who they are as individuals, and it's the same thing with our communities, right? Most people are gonna say, oh yeah, community, we know community, it's where customers go to answer each other's questions. Yeah, but it's a little bit more nuanced than that. And so depending on where you stand, I would say, begin with support, that's great, but strategy would be what is a business looking for?

Interesting, next one. Where do you feel like you've overclaimed communities' impact in the past, and what would a more defensible story look like? I don't know if I wanna answer this one. Yes, I have overclaimed community in the past, and I've done it because my data was incorrect, so make sure that you have good data coming in.

I have done it because I attributed things that were not necessarily attributed to community, and I think a more defensible story is just what I showed. It's to begin, create that baseline, use natural, very normal human behavior to tailor a specific outcome or to look for a specific outcome that then you can use to build other things upon, like the welcome message one, right? If you can drive engagement in a specific area of a community, do that same thing in this other area of community, and then do that thing in this other area of community. And once you have engagement growing in all of these areas, then start looking for ways to split that or to expand upon that.

So I think for me, really, it's that experimental phase and design that's going to help your story be more defensible, at least it was in my case. So when you present community metrics to leadership, what's the reaction and what are they really asking for? I think you covered a little of this, but definitely go into more depth with your experience. When I present or when we present community metrics to leadership, what's the reaction?

Well, it depends, hopefully they're related. Hopefully they're ready to give you more headcounts. Hopefully they're like, okay, how can we help you? How can we send more customer successful to your way or how can we send more product team members your way?

I think the reaction really has to do with the translation that we are providing for them. And I think that piece is really important because we're talking in a specific way and they're listening for other things. And the other thing they're listening for, let me just break it down for you because you know this and if you don't, it's money. That's what they're listening for.

Attach any of the things that you're looking for in terms of dollar amounts, cost saved, revenue earned, pipeline generated, ARR, NR, that whole thing. Attach what you're doing to that and all of a sudden the years are gonna perk up and you're gonna become more relevant. Senior leaders don't wanna know about, oh, people are really happy or they really enjoyed the drinks or we really felt this unity. That stuff doesn't really fly anymore.

But if you're able to say, in that event, we were able to drive or in the room we had X amount of ARR represented there or we had this pipeline for this amount. All of a sudden they're like, hey, that's actually a valuable event. How can then we send some salespeople your way to maybe help convert some of those leads? How do you talk to leaders about community visits or active users?

Everyone seems to have a different context. Yeah. Community visits or active users. I mean, to me, I've always seen community visits as people who come and visit and active users as people who do something.

One can be a subset of the other, but I think the differentiator is the action. If someone does an action, replies, asks, shares, likes, that whole thing, then that to me is somebody who has been active and then you can debate how, what that activity should look like or whether it's once a day, twice a day, once a month, three times a month, it's up to you. But I think that's a differentiator. A visit is somebody who comes, somebody who's active is someone who actually did something.

So someone here is considering starting a community for customers. The question is about where should it sit within the org? What things should they consider to choose its home internally? Oh, that's really good.

Well, unfortunately, a lot of us don't have that choice, right? We kind of walk into a company and it's already there. It's sitting in support or it's sitting in marketing or it's sitting under some other place. Those are the two typical ones that I've seen.

I've seen it in some other obscure places too, like IT, which is kind of weird, but I can kind of see why. But I can kind of see why if it's a tech company. If you're not able to influence and work with what you got, and if you see a home that would be better suited for the community, again, depending on the goals, what is the community trying to drive? Is it something that is going to increase more learning and education?

Then that's gonna be, maybe it goes in this way. Is it gonna be more product adoption, product feedback, product usage than maybe over here? Is it gonna be more discussion or events? Or is it gonna be, okay, then maybe it should sit over here.

So depending on what the goals are, and this is why it's so important for us to not be afraid to ask, what is it that the senior leaders want? What is the business looking for right now? And then connect what you're doing to that. That's also going to inform where the best place for it to be is.

I've been asked, I've been in companies where I was sitting under one team and then they asked me, hey, should we move? And I had to do this whole analysis. And in the end I said, you know what, just leave me here because this other team is a mess right now. And if we go over there, we're gonna get lost and we're gonna get eaten alive and they're not gonna understand what we're doing.

So we will suffer the constraints that we have, but at least I know that we can get things done here. So how can you track community and gain sight? Is there a specific dashboard that you use or that our customers can use? Yeah, there's several ways to track community.

There's several ways, there's several measurements that you can use. And especially now with all the new integrations, the MCP and all of these other functions, it's gonna be really easy for you to use already your native AI tools to be able to pull that information. So for me, I think, I mean, I track community in terms of activity, right? And that's what these dashboards are gonna do.

But what you wanna be looking at is more, well, let me ask, I mean, I could ask you all, what is a community, right? And I'm glad nobody asked that, so nobody put it in because I asked you first. But if I were to ask you, what is a community? What would you say, how would you answer that question?

Let that inform how you track what it is. If you define community in this way, then use those things to track it. If your company describes community in this way, track it that way. It's an interesting thing, isn't it?

And I'd love to talk, whoever asked, I'd love to talk to you more about it afterwards. So come up and talk to me. I'd love to share some other insights with you. Best measurements to make product teams lean forward and take notice.

Best measurements. In my experience, the things that the product teams are looking for, they want to know and they wanna make sure that the things that they're putting out there are being received and acted upon favorably by the users. Now, I've also been a part of other companies that just push things out because it's just what they have to do and they don't care necessarily about whether there's a good fit or not. They're just really just in production.

But I think the thing, the measurement that really makes them lean in is feedback that speaks to their ICP. So we all know that we have long tail customers. We all have customers that don't necessarily match the goals of what the product team is looking for. But if you're able to match ICP customers with that product usage, that's really good.

They also want actionable feedback. They don't want just like pie in the sky. So they want actionable feedback that can actually turn a profit. So those kinds of things I think are always really good, which is why as community professionals we should be having these kinds of feedback cohorts and these kind of beta groups and these kinds of private communications with the product teams and all of these things, which I think are just unique ways to connect our customers with the product.

All right, it's day one. You've been tasked with building a community. Go get them. Where are you starting?

Yeah, very good. It's day one, you're tasked with building a community. It depends how you got in the door. If you applied for the job and you know it's day one, then you should probably have an idea of what go get a means and what you should be doing.

If you're internal and they moved you from marketing into, hey, congratulations, now you're leading the community, which does happen, then yeah, you probably need to do some research. Number one, I would say, if you're a Gainsite customer, we can help you with that. We can support you there. You saw the QR code, we can put it up later.

We can do that. What are the things that you need to do to get started? The most important thing that you can do is understand what is gonna be the purpose of the community. What are the goals that the company wants?

Start there, always. Everything else is gonna filter there because at the end of the day, that's what you're gonna be held accountable for is, is the community bringing things that help the company move forward? Our community launched three months ago with decent success and relevant participation. Congrats.

Sales, CS, educators are aware and promoting it, but new membership has plateaued. Is another mass invitation appropriate now or other ideas to promote? Yeah, I think as with everything, there's this high rise that eventually plateaus, maybe it drops and then it'll come up. I think we love the up and to the right kind of charts.

And if you speak to anyone who's been doing this for a long time, you're gonna have your highs and you're gonna have your lows. And the beginning is probably one of the biggest highs you're gonna have. That plateau is very normal. Actually, a decrease is probably what's gonna come next.

So if you see that in the future, don't be alarmed, that's just very normal. What you need to do here is now begin adjusting to the new normal. That's just what it is. You had this huge excitement, it's launched, everybody's ready, everybody's there the first day.

And then life happens, right? Work happens, people get assigned to other projects, things are deprioritized. All of a sudden the product team gets busy, marketing doesn't have time for this or that. There's headcount reduction.

All these things happen internally and externally. So there's gonna be kind of a natural normalizing of that curve. I would say don't measure everything based on that initial one. Kind of wait a few months and see what's happening.

Don't do another blast, but maintain the momentum. Maintain the engagement. If you said the community was there to help educate, continue providing educational content. If the community is there to continue connecting for networking and learning, continue to network, continue to provide opportunities for people to learn and share.

So continue doing those things and then you will kind of see that normalized and then you'll know in a few months from now whether another big invitation blast is needed or not. All right, we have this last question. If anyone wants to throw in another one, we have time for one more after this. But what sample size do you recommend working with when conducting these experiments that you showcased before?

Yeah, I would get the biggest sample size that you can find. It'd be great if we could say, actually I'm looking for 500 people. Over 500, that's too many. I mean getting 500 is gonna be a lot.

Go with what you have. Use that, baseline that. If you send something out and only 10 people respond, use those 10 people. Listen, marketing does this all the time.

Other teams do this all the time and they're attributing dollar amounts to this as well. You can too, it does work. You're creating a baseline, you are providing a sample. Part of statistical analysis is that.

Even if it's not statistically significant, it gives you a direction for where things are moving and it allows you then to iterate on in the future. So when it comes to that, I wouldn't worry too much about it. My biggest recommendation would be to get started. Do something, like get an experiment out there, start getting some data, start driving some of these results.

And then be thinking about, okay, now that I have this, what can I build on top of that? I think that's more powerful than the sample size. All right. Speak now, forever hold your peace, anyone?

Any last questions, thoughts? If not, thank you so much to Juan. That was amazing. Thank you, guys.