The Community Architect - A New Approach To Getting The Best Results From Your Community
Discover the emerging role of the Community Architect and how it’s changing how organisations develop communities. In this session, you'll learn why this role is essential in the ‘Community Everywhere’ era, explore six key activities of community architects, and see real-world examples of success. This talk will help you to integrate community architecture into your organization for maximum impact.
Okay, good afternoon everyone. I hope you all had a good lunch. My name is
Oliver Marit. I'm a
CSM here at GainSight and it's a pleasure to introduce a thought leader in the
community space,
something that's very true. Yeah, big in my work day and a big part of my life
at the moment in
terms of helping community managers succeed and get a maximum value out of
their community.
And there's no better person to introduce. I've been subscribing to this
content for a good
few years now if you haven't already, follow him on LinkedIn and subscribe to
the PIVA B newsletter.
But yeah, pleasure to welcome to stage Richard Millington, founder of PIVA B.
He's going to be
talking about the community architect. Give it up for Richard.
[applause]
Good afternoon.
Thank you sir. I appreciate that. It has to be one person in the audience I
need.
Okay, hi everyone. I'm just going to do a quick announcement before we begin.
If you're
sitting at like way at the back, you might notice these slides are a little bit
small.
So you may wish to come forward because there are some very information-dense
slides.
Anyway, with that in mind, yes, thank you. Please come forward. We welcome you
at the front.
So a quick show of hands. How many of you have been working in communities for
more than five years?
Okay, more than 10 years? 15 years? Okay, a quick round of applause for those
people. That's amazing.
So one of the things I've realized is like when we build online communities,
the playbook that we're using hasn't really changed all that much. And it works
a little bit
like this. Where first if you want to build a community, we decide what the
goals are.
Then we select what platform we're going to use. Then we will seed some
activity.
And then we'll drive people to the platform with the promotional activities.
We'll incentivize some experts to engage. And then we grow by search. And this
is what we've been
doing for a long, long time. And don't get it wrong. There's a lot of nuance to
each step.
There's lots of things you can do wrong at each step. There's lots of mistakes
that you can make.
But it's fundamentally how we've been building online communities for a long
time. This is the
playbook that a lot of us have been using for a long, long time. And my
argument today
is that this playbook isn't working as well as what it used to. There's more
problems with
this playbook today. Technology preferences of our audience are beginning to
change.
You might have seen of seeing yourself in your own behavior or of your audience
So it used to be when we had launched our online community, everyone would go
to that community
as be a forum based platform that we would use. It would have everything that
everyone would want.
It would be a place where you go to search what members are doing. It would be
a place where you
would talk about the topic that you enjoyed. But when was the last time you did
any of these things?
Actually think about this for a second. When was the last time you searched for
contact to connect with on a forum? That was a rhetorical question, but thanks.
It wasn't Reddit. Reddit is another thing. We'll talk about that in a second.
Or when was the last time you even spent time with friends in the forum?
This actually used to be a thing as well where people would have a friendship
group,
their launch forum, and you'd engage there. And it doesn't be recently where we
found a
representative sample of 1400 Americans, usually an online tool. And we began
to ask them,
where do you prefer to go for each use case? For anything that you want, where
do you prefer to go?
And the pre-purchase information, they turn to reviews and recommendations and
their brand website.
Online communities, I don't know if you can see this, rank here.
We asked them a whole range of questions. When people want support, they turn
to the
official site, live chat with CS, email. Online community forums actually think
it's a bit harsh,
because a lot of people when they get support in a community or forum, they don
't realize it's a
forum. And next, when they want to engage with brands, they turn to social
media channels.
Typical community forums do rank a bit better here. But clearly, the
preferences are beginning
to change. And that's what all of this means today, that the preferences are
beginning to change.
Where the needs of the audience are generally the same. The needs of the
audience 15 years ago
are relatively the same as today. But the preferences, the place where people
actually go,
they're beginning to change. We still have that need for belonging. We still
have that need for
learning. We still have that need for support and influence as well. But the
platforms we use
aren't the same in place. Online community is always going to have its place.
But it's not the only game in town anymore. And we have to begin adapting to
this situation.
Two is there's more competitions from third party platforms than ever. I
remember when I began,
if you wanted to launch an online community, you even needed to have the
expertise to launch an
online community and be the webmaster person, which you might remember, or you
needed to work for a
company that could hire someone to do that. You want your community to compete
with any of
your communities in minutes. And we're seeing that happening more and more.
Reddit, I don't know if
you've noticed, is an absolute monster today. And it's linked in page a while
back. When Reddit
went to the IPO thing back in March, April, sometime around then, I asked
people to predict what the
share price would be a year from now. So, anyone know what Reddit went to the
IPO? It's around $35
a share. And I predicted with all my expertise and experience in communities
that a year from now,
it would be around 28. It's now at 123. More subreddits for every topic than
ever before.
And even if Reddit didn't exist, there's Facebook groups, there's WhatsApp
groups,
there's just so many channels to compete with today. And this creates a
challenge that we're
seeing more and more. Do you want to compete with your own fans? If there's
already an existing
community there, do you need to create your own? Do you need to compete with
the audience?
Is this this huge over-reliance on search engines? One of the things we're
seeing is that it says
one thing that could break, that it immediately destroy a lot of the online
communities that are
out there, is if a search engine begins sending that traffic to somewhere else.
And a lot of the communities that we've worked with, search engines represent
around 80 to 90%
of the traffic, over-reliance from search engine traffic, and it is beginning
to change.
We've seen already that search engines are keeping more traffic for themselves.
You don't
notice it on a day-to-day situation, but you notice it over a period of time.
We're seeing it as well
with AI. What happens when a snippet is taken from your community and just put
on the search engine?
What happens to you more extreme? I saw some data just yesterday that stack
overflow is being
in decline for two years now. This is happening. This is happening today. This
is a situation many
of you might be familiar with already, which is you've got so many different
parts of, they're
talking to different audiences at different times, and it's an absolute mess.
This is another
challenge with the playbook we have today. And finally, it's a siloed
experience. If everyone can
launch a community in every part of the organization can, which is the playbook
that we'll be using
for so long, you end up with situations that often don't make sense, where it's
not always clear where
you would have a community and where not. So take SaaS for example. What you
have here is their website,
learn, support, partners, it's very clear what all this is for, and then you
have the community
way over here. But why would you go there? What is the immediate goal of that
community? It's not
clear. Or take the Sony online community here. So you see here, it looks like a
very normal online
community, right? Pretty standard. And you see here it's an audio, TVs, home
video, cameras,
home theater. And then you see the second community audio, you know, it's
pretty much the same. So this
is the first one, second one. First one, second one. Are you getting it yet?
They have two communities
doing exactly the same thing on different platforms. And this kind of stuff is
happening all the time.
Actually, we've got another 34 online communities. And some people say, well,
this one is for the USA,
this one is for Europe, but the reality is customers don't care. The products
are more or less the same.
And there's no point in having two communities to do the same thing. And this
isn't even
beginning to address the issue. This is another online community created by
Sony,
different platform again, and it's siloed and it's individual. And you see as
well, when you ask
people where they actually want to go to engage, and Facebook groups, about
Sony doesn't engage
there at all. You even have the subreddit for the Play for PlayStation, which
is absolutely huge,
which is the default place that a lot of people go today. And Sony just doesn't
engage there at all.
So my argument today is that it's a mess. The playbook we've been using for a
long, long time
doesn't work anywhere near as well as what it used to. And we need a new role,
a community
architect to sort out this mess. We need someone that's going to help each
department engage
directly in a community, but do it in the right way. But this role is going to
help each department
engage with the right people in the right way and optimize experience that
people have. So if we,
this is a simplified version, we've got success and support, product management
, sales and marketing,
it's clear who should be engaging with who. And the role of the architect is to
make sure this
experience is delivered in the best way for each audience. So we're not dupl
icating each other's
work. So we're not lying in different goals, different reasons. And it's about
the work of doing the
strategy, the governance of that community, engaging in these stakeholders
practices.
When I began consulting, I think around 12 years ago, a lot of the work used to
be to get online
communities off the ground. But more and more, what we're doing is this, which
is we're helping
organizations get the absolute most from their communities. But we have to do
it the right way.
And I think it's organizations today, especially the larger ones. And there's
three key parts of this
with the government and the technology. Two, improving how organizations engage
their communities.
And three, providing ongoing support. So what I'm going to go through is what
each one of these
steps look like and try and provide as many very tactical steps and ideas as I
possibly can.
And you'll see what this looks like at the Ocan is strategy. I remember back in
2017, I think,
we did a course on how to build a strategy for a community. I wanted to put the
questions we
asked before people took the course is how would you rate yourself on a scale
of zero to 10 as a
strategist, where would you rate yourself? Five was the average and from scale
one to 10.
Pretty much. And then we asked how many strategies have you implemented for an
organization?
And the average answer, I think, was 0.8. So most people think they're amazing
at strategy,
even if they've never done it before. Everyone thinks they're amazing at it.
But some people
just aren't. There's an average here and some people have to be below average.
And when we think
about this, that everyone thinks they're a great strategist. But we keep seeing
the same mistakes.
Time and time again, we keep seeing the exams. I mentioned this before. A while
back I recorded
some new courses and I had a film crew there, I wanted to do it in a very
professional level.
And I asked them at the end of the day, when you need support, where do you go?
Where do you turn
to for support? And I was expecting to... No. What they actually said is that
every product has a
Facebook group. And that's where they prefer to go. That's where they always go
. Their members
are multiple groups at once. And when you think about this, this is so the
opposite of the behavior
that we expect, right? It's so different because why don't they go to an
official online community?
So I load up the website, I show them that they're like, well, the Facebook
group is all about this
product here. That's what we want, a concentrated experience, not a community
that's like this.
And I'm saying this is true for every single brand, of course, Elizabeth. But
we have to start
recognizing that preferences are beginning to change. Another thing we do far
too often
is we compete against ourselves. And what I mean by that is so many times you
'll see a community
and it'll be a situation where you can ask a question in a community, or you
can ask a question
via customer support. Community or support? But it's never clear why you choose
one or the other.
They're just like, you can go here or here. It's up to you. But does that make
sense?
It's not clear what kind of questions you should ask in a community and what
kind you should
go to customer support for. It's not clear who should be using which. Should
customers that
pay more have a premium experience and everyone else should use a community? So
often this just
isn't clear. So we end up competing against ourselves. The other interesting
thing that happens here
is that if you give people all the options of where they can ask a question, do
you know what they
do? We're being studying this a lot. They ask a question every channel, copy
and paste every channel.
And the great thing about that is that if you're tracking call deflection, it
looks amazing
when the opposite is happening. You're giving yourself more work to do. And
this happens again
and again. What we try to do with clients is try and be more strategic about
this.
So in what situation would you use a help center? What situation would you
contact the
customer support lines and when? For example, should a community be the first
port of call?
Should that be where customers go to first to try and resolve most of the
questions they have?
Always a community that last resort to catch anything that can't be answered
through the
other channels. And what we found is that most organizations, they don't know.
Most organizations
haven't had this discussion. It's asked these questions and everyone else
should go here.
And we know for instance that if you've got questions that are common, then the
help center
and virtual agents are terrific. If you've got questions that require personal
information,
that's like a gap here and I'm really scared I'm going to trip. But if you have
questions that
require personal information, then a customer support agent helps. But then in
the middle,
you've got all the in between questions. Questions that are kind of niche,
they're difficult, where maybe the audience, but even with this, we have to go
very specific.
And we've found that most organizations don't. And that's why they're not doing
or not getting
the value they want from their community. They haven't decided what the
community has really
thought. It's just a place for everyone. Another thing that happens is people
would build or
design a community in a very siloed experience, which is if you go to customer
support, that's
one thing, if you go to virtual agents and situations where people will have a
problem with a product,
and they ask the question in a community, and they won't get a response and
that'll be it.
That's just the end of the journey. But is that the best experience that we can
give?
Is that the kind of experience we want our customers to have? Clearly, it's
always part of a bigger
experience. But why don't we have the right escalation processes in place? Also
, if you contact a
customer support agent and you've already given your information somewhere else
do you want to repeat that information? But this happens again and again, a
community
design in a completely isolated experience. And so it's no wonder we're not
delivering as much value
as what we absolutely should. Another thing, we keep launching communities that
are just
misaligned with trends. So a couple of years ago, a flatter launched a
community called
Athletic Well. Women could come to discuss mental health issues and well-being.
Now, I think we
can all agree that the idea of a community is a really good idea. Would you
want to discuss your
mental health and well-being in a community owned by the gap? I think the
answer is no. Do you want
to have those discussions in a forum? Is that where you want to have these
kinds of engagements?
And so it wasn't a surprise when the community closed. They threw absolutely
everything at this
community. They had Simone Biles participating in this community and they still
couldn't make it work.
If this were me, I would have said, you don't need to launch a forum platform
for this. This
isn't where people go to have these kinds of interactions. They want more of a
chat-style
discussion. So what you might want to do is find the groups that already exist
and see if you could
be involved with them. What you might want to do is find an influencer that's
trusted by a lot of
people and see if you can build a community around them. There's so many
options that we have to
explore here. And I think time and time again, we default to this really old-
fashioned way that
it has to be a central platform that we control that's based around the forum.
So these are the problems. What are the solutions? What would a community
architect do
in a different way? One is to get the basics right. And what I mean by this is
that when we
launch a community, we often ask people, what are the goals of the community?
Even just before
this, I was chatting to someone, it's like, yeah, we launched the community. We
didn't have goals.
And don't be rude because they're in the room. But what I mean is it's such a
common thing to do.
People launch a community because it's a nice thing to have. But they don't
think very deeply
about how it's supposed to work. And so the very first thing you should be
doing is deciding
what are the goals? Is it advocacy, conversion, whatever it is, then what is
the behavior
that you need your members to perform to achieve those goals? So for example,
if you're trying to
increase the conversion rate, there's a very specific behavior like showing
testimonials and
participating in case that doesn't make sense. If you're trying to reduce
support costs,
if you're all you're in the need members to ask questions in the community
instead of support
channels. But when you get very specific about what behavior you actually need,
then you can start realizing, okay, these are the messages that we need to send
. These are how,
these are the emotional appeals that we're going to use. What we do after this
is that we rank the
goals by the order of importance, and then the feasibility of the behavior that
we want.
And then we select the one that appears at the top right. And if they do that
well,
then we can do more goals after that. But just this one thing can improve the
results of so many
communities. It can stop you launching communities that end up as ghost towns.
If you're working
for an organization, a different department wants to launch a community or
engage in a community,
this is the process I recommend that we go through.
Next, focus on members' needs when deciding where to engage. The problem with
the playbook
dimension that the beginning is that it assumes that nothing else exists. It
assumes that you launch
your community into this big void where nothing has existed before. And today,
that's never the case.
No major brand is going to have no group or subreddit or WhatsApp channel or
something
about which is we build out a map. We map where people go today. So we list.
Who are the people that we want to engage? What are the needs that they have?
How important is that
need? And we find this alone is absolutely illuminating. And what it does, it
tells you
where you can engage in a strategic way. Where does it make sense to engage and
where does it not
make sense to engage? And as a consultant, we do this with clients often
because it helps them
avoid so many mistakes. So when I look at this, I'm like, okay, it's very clear
that some areas
we don't need to be involved in. They're good. But then there's these areas
here. Clearly, for
the users that we have, the need is really, really high and they're not
satisfied with the channels
at the moment. If a hosted community didn't exist for them, we'd need this
because it's not working
as well as it should. But for developers, we don't need to be involved in that.
They're good. They're
happy. They're engaging with each other. We don't need to incur all the time
and cost and energy to
create something for them. For the partners that we have, yeah, they're kind of
okay. It's a very
high need and they're not really happy. Is it events? Is it a better contact
that they can turn to?
But when you map out everything like this, it becomes so much easier to see
where you should
engage to have the biggest impact that you possibly can. One of the brands that
does this
incredibly well is Notion. And what's amazing about them is that their
community is the most
disparate group of communities I've ever seen. There's not really that central
place that you
find everywhere else. What they do is that if you want to get started, learn
and share,
let's get involved, let's support teams, that will make sense. But then they do
this. They link to
all of the other groups and activities and channels that are out there today.
And there are so
many places you can go to. And you know what this does? This drives a lot of
people and traffic to
people where they can connect with people who like themselves. Think of how
much time and money they
say by doing this. If they need to host a central community, they will. If
there's an empty gap in
that jar I showed. But if they don't have to, why not just link to what already
exists? And what this
also does when you have opportunities that are like this is that it encourages
more people to
start their own groups. You give them more autonomy, a place where they can
engage. And when you
have an architect that can guide brands to do collecting all the resources from
the community
into a central place. And if you want to get involved, you can. It's very easy
to get involved,
to become an ambassador. And I think when we think about what the future of
community is going to
look like, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Okay. Third, ensure
communities are properly
positioned. How many of you in your community in the top banner you have will
have joined the
conversation? Just you? Not going to be good for you. Okay. So many of you, I
think it's just you.
What tends to happen is that people will launch a community and then they'll
have a banner at the
top of the page and they'll waste it. We've joined the conversation, I'm so
sorry. We've joined the
conversation or get involved or something that's very generic, that's like that
. And this is waste.
It's just a waste of time. If you were an, if you were an ad, an, an advertiser
, you wouldn't have
anything like this. Like this is such a premium real estate in your community
to communicate what
the community is about. And we waste it so often. This is an example of a
client we worked with
I think six years ago, seven years ago, I've been using this for a long time.
But they had a
message out like this. Community is an exclusive group dedicated to empowering
leaders by showing
well-class expertise, exchanging insights and revamping industry best practices
. What do you
think of this? Is this a community that you want to join? I mean, it's not bad,
but it's kind of
generic. It's kind of what you see in every kind of community that's out there.
So we changed it
to this. A private place where you solve your toughest problems. Now you know
when to visit this
community. In your mind, it's very clear the positioning that is going to have.
And we need to
get sharper with our messaging to really reflect what the value of that
community is. Because often
we end up with too many situations that are like this. And a lot of this is, it
's, it's related to
this. What's known as the argument, dilution effect. And the idea is this,
which is, so you have one
message. The community where top experts share their best advice. Yeah, that's
okay. And then you
have another. This community is where the top experts share their best advice,
connect with
people like themselves, and participate in exclusive conference calls. How many
of you think the
first message is stronger than the second? Quick show of hands. How many of you
think the second
message is stronger than the first? Interesting. So the first one is stronger
than, than, than, than
the second. Then you can test this. Because what happens when you combine
weaker benefits with
stronger ones, it dilutes the power of the stronger ones. And the problem very
often when you launch
your community on behalf of a brand is everyone wants to have their say. And it
has to be a community
for everyone to do everything. But that's a mistake. You have to be strong,
stronger about this.
We worked with Microsoft for a couple of years down on their, their, their
community. So the
design, it's, it's Microsoft. So give some space here. Wouldn't, are we
recording this?
But what you noticed here is, okay, they had the, the, the, welcome to the
community,
it tried rather not have. But then look at this. The messaging is really,
really clean.
Get answers from our community of experts. This is what people want in a
community.
Didn't find an answer? Ask a question. Your response time is two hours. This is
the kind of
messaging that's really sharp for the use case that Microsoft has. This isn't
going to be the
same case for every kind of all organizations out there. You welcome to
Microsoft with the
get answers from our community of experts, but my power over Microsoft isn't a
strong
governance is next. One of the things to have is very often is that we don't
have a standard
definition of what a community is or is it? Like the role of an architect, I
think, is to define
what community means to each organization. And that can change. Like many
organizations will
decide it. It's based on the interests they have or how they engage with each
other,
what kind of relationship they have, what purpose. I don't care. I do care
about,
there's a definition that works internally that everyone is aligned on.
Because then you could have real discussion about what a community is and what
it isn't,
and how you're going to write part for another client, for example. They've got
so many things
they're doing. They're doing events, they're doing resources and discussions,
they've got
MVP programs. What is there isn't a community? Once you have a definition and
you clear about
what it is, they only have a lot more conversations about how you're going to
engage it, support it,
and what its goals are. Another thing that comes up time and time again and
drives me absolutely
nuts is how often we will spend huge amounts of time and resources to launch a
community,
then hand the keys over to someone that's never done that work before. This
happens so often,
and I think we need to change how we do this. One is at the very least, getting
processes in place.
So even people that have had no training whatsoever have some basic guidelines
that they can follow
of how they're going to engage in a community, what happens when there's an
issue, how they're
going to respond to those issues. Just having a basic framework in place really
, really helps.
So I recommend you have something like this for you. Also, what happens when
something goes wrong?
People are taking photos, I can pose. So what happens when something goes wrong
? What is the
escalation process in place? A lot of the clients we've worked with don't have
this,
which blows my mind if you're launching what they want, so not have anything
like this in place.
Next technology. You know that chart I showed you before of these spaghetti?
That was a junior version
of what it looks like. And even this is what the full chart looks like. And in
so many organizations,
you've got different functions using different platforms, different people at
different times,
and it's an absolute mess. And we need community architects to sort this out,
because it really is a mess. And so one thing you can do here,
ones we use for each use case, what's approved so you don't have people that
are using two platforms
at the same time. Two is having a consistent design principle in place. This is
key because
so many communities work with. Like who are the implementation partners that
you trust?
We're working with a client recently where they had an implementation partner
that they didn't like,
but that another department had had someone that they did like, and it makes no
sense,
they're not talking to each other. And finally, the really boring stuff that
matters a lot,
consistent principles of how you're going to manage the data of that community.
Because I don't know about you, but there's so many times where I've been
looking at the data
of a community and we're trying to decide where most people are from, and
people from Germany,
and the nationalities you see are Germany, German, Deutsch, and it's like, it's
an absolute mess.
Or the UK, how many here are Brits? Is it annoying if you can't tell if you're
English, British,
great British, UK? These are the challenges we have, but it's also in how
different databases
will input the data. Next, best practices. There are definitely some best
practices for launching
and engaging communities, and one of the most important things is to be
absolutely clear
about what kind of community it is. Because the principles that work in one
type of community
completely don't work in another. And a lot of the discussions that we have
when we're building
communities where we argue with each other are not whether a technique works,
but what kind of
community actually is. And once you have a discussion with your team and your
organization,
whichever department wants to build or engage with a community about what the
actual type is,
everything comes a lot easier. Because how you'd build a support online
community
is different from how you build a community for success. The technologies are
different,
the challenges are different. The value to members, what you should be telling
your audience is
different. If you're building a user group that's different from a peer group,
and so getting this
right is absolutely key. Yes, it's a more complex slide about what to use,
which platform,
but I'm going to skip it for now. And then how do you help brands offer the
maximum value when
they do engage? Whether you're hosting your own or you're engaging in existing
platforms out there
today, many organizations when they do this, they do it in the most clumsy
patronizing way that
you can possibly imagine. And it's very painful when you see an organization
that has good intentions,
go to a subreddit and look like idiots. And I think we have to stop that
because there's got
to be better ways of engaging. And we've got to engage in this anyway. And that
can be by
verifying the information that does exist. We're offering expertise by
answering the questions
that otherwise wouldn't get answers. By giving feedback from the brand, by
providing some
exclusive insights to information or providing resources or helping them grow
their groups.
If we just do this, I think all the channels we engage in will be a lot, lot
better. I think
there's clear value that only a brand can offer. And when we engage in these
external channels,
this is what we should be doing. Next, travel dev time, training.
I think that when people say that their engineers are 10X the average engineer,
they are community people that I know that are 10X the average. And I think
community
skills are grossly, grossly undervalued because most people don't know what
they are.
So here's an example from a client that we've worked with.
So this was from a community, a HR based online community where they wanted to
initiate some
discussions and debates. The way they were going to do this was this. Selecting
a new story and
asking people what the core employees after hours, failure to comply could
result in government
fines. This new ruling is similar to a law passed in France, blah, blah, blah.
What do you think?
Do you think there should be compliance measures regarding whether a job can
contact someone
after hours? When you tell people to initiate a discussion in a community, this
is what they
typically do. When we try this many times, this is very often what they do.
They create a discussion
that's exactly like this. But these, what do you think style of discussions don
't really get a
good response because they just seem a bit fake. They don't seem quite right.
It's like chat TPT
came to the party and tried to create a discussion. So with some training, some
training upgrades to
this. Has any logical banning management from calling employees? If so, what
did you change?
Can you share any part of it? My director has asked me to update. I mean, has
nothing out there.
What do you notice about this? It's more authentic. It's asking people for what
they've
actually done, not what do they think. It's asking people to share resources.
It's going to help
the next person that comes across this discussion. This is the level that we
have to be at.
And in fact, you could even go beyond this, which is almost exactly the same.
But it tags into the
while back your company and their implemented a policy like this last year. How
's that been
working out for you, your team? So you're asking specific people to ask to try
them in specific
ways. And what we found when you ask discussions like this, this will get one
or two responses if
it's your lucky. This will get at least six or seven, applying that day by day,
discussion by
discussion. You can see a huge difference in how engaged and active these
communities are going
to be. And when I say there's some community professionals that are just better
, this is what
we mean. Training and expertise really, really helps. And I think a community
architect can provide
this. Another example was getting a community of consultants. And they wanted
to get the
consultant to share their resources. So what we encountered first were examples
like this.
Don't forget to share any useful resources you have for creating client
presentations.
We need more content to help new members. Please upload anything you think
might be useful.
Another one was we need more resources for creating client presentations
because someone
please share some templates or tips. Example three, we're running out of time
to gather resources
for creating client presentations. If you have any templates resources, please
share them.
This is again what most people do. But when you know people that really meet
people that really
know their stuff or being trained and have the expertise, they get to a level
that's like this,
which is what is the one resource that has significantly improved your client
presentations.
Could be a template, a design tool, a research method, even a piece of advice.
We're aiming to build a deep repository of resources for creating presentations
. I'd love to include
your and then some examples of what that might be. Do you see the difference?
The language matters.
And too many organizations don't understand this. They genuinely don't
understand the
difference that there's levels to this. And the higher up the level you go, the
better and more
engaged your community is going to be. Imagine spending all this time and money
and resources
to create a community. They're giving the keys to someone with no training
whatsoever.
This happens again and again. The great level is more or less the same, but it
's more personalized
to the individual. And there's so many examples that we can use this, but it's
really important
we understand that there's levels to this. Great community professionals are
worth so much time
and money. If you want to sustain a discussion, so if you want to apply
discussion, the same clients
before, I'm in the process of preparing my presentation by first client,
finding myself
struggling to put something together. I was hoping to learn from you guys what
your workflow is
when creating any kind of presentation for your client to execs. This was the
okay response. We're
just using the chat, the chat G-G-G-G-G-P-T response here, because that's down
the new layer I think.
That's like the benchmark that all of us have to be engaging beyond. And they
just provided a
workflow, pretty much what they asked for. It's okay. Like, I don't hate it,
don't love it. That's okay.
Good level is like this, which is, "Hi, name. Good question. Trust me, you're
not alone. I know many
of our members have found themselves in your situation where they were first
starting out.
Congrats on getting your first client to. You can find a basic workflow here,
but most of
it adapted to their situation, and then some advice. When is your presentation
due? Let me know how it
goes. Do you notice how the level of engagement is going to be different based
on the response that
people get? It's going to be completely different. And at the great level, it's
almost exactly the
same, but there's so many levels to this. And the difference is absolutely huge
. Many years ago,
we worked with a lady named Colleen Young at the Mayo Clinic, who I think is
probably the most
natural community professional we've ever seen. And we trained her, and this
was a result.
That actually gives us like this, like, "Hi, miracle man. I don't get to choose
the names."
Welcome to Mayo Click, Click, Click, Click, Click, Click, Connect. I commend
you for looking for
ways that you live well, so it's personal to them. Then she tags in specific
fees on this,
and then she asks a question to get them to engage again and build a habit of
participating.
And just from this, the level of engagement has risen dramatically every single
year.
There was a chart that didn't actually transfer when we changed 10x in a couple
of years,
not by changing the technology, but just by changing this. And do you know how
common it is
for an organization? If their community is not doing well, to change the
technology, to today
promote the community, and do absolutely everything they possibly can, except
train the community
professional to be better. And that happens so many times. Finally, measurement
. So measurement,
what we have in methods are kind of bunk, and so the process we're using doesn
't work.
What does make sense is to sit down with your organization and take them
through the process.
Take them through the process of what kind of outcome do you need? Do you need
a precise metric
or not? And then based on this, you can go very specific to the kind of metrics
that make sense.
And every community and engagement activity is different, but there's so many
things that you
can do here. But what I believe is like we need a universal metric that applies
across every
compliance for a couple of years now, is what we call the community-driven
impact score,
which is almost exactly like the net promoter score, but it asks a question
that attributes
the causation to the community, which is this. On a scale of 0 to 10, how's the
community
influence your likelihood of renewing your subscription? And that can be
anything. That
end of the question can be anything. It can be using a particular product or
recommending to
a friend, whatever makes sense to you. But now people can tell you whether the
community is having
an impact or not. And this is a universal metric that's really easy to apply,
because all your community engagement activities. So if you don't need a
precise
value for your community, this is the kind of score that I think makes a lot
more sense.
Another thing we should be doing is making forecast for performance as well.
As a moment, we just don't do it. We say the goal should be 10% or 20% higher
than what it is today.
That doesn't make sense. We have to be more. This is what we think is an
acceptable
balance for success in the future. Okay. Let's skip in the summary slide,
because I know we're
showing a time. What I would say is that we've got a free book and courses and
everything. All
you have to do is scan the QR code. There's so much more information than that.
And I'll send out
the resource as well. And finally, I'd also say thank you so, so much for
listening for that.
Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Richards.
Thank you so much, Richard. That was a really insightful, amazing content and
really,
yeah, making us rethink community strategies in 2024. So, as Richard mentioned,
slides and
recording will be shared with you after this, so that people who are sitting in
the back don't
worry too much. But, yeah, we'll have a 15-minute break now. So go check out
the GainSight booth,
get some refreshments. But once again, give it up for Richard, founder of Phoeb
a Booth.
Thank you.
