Today marks my one-year anniversary as Head of Community.
The role and challenge for the organisation were new, build a community with the growing global membership and provide real value to their organisations through peer-to-peer engagement.
Having been in core marketing roles for over seventeen years, this was also new for me. Sure, the skills of building a strategy, proposition and identity, spreading a message, creating content and bringing people together are the same but when looked at through a ‘community’ perspective, there is a layer of responsibility and expectation attached to it.
I’ve been fortunate over my last few roles to create something new; a project or campaign that starts with the seed of an idea and my task is to bring it to life. Having the ability to question everything, explore multiple avenues and watch your ideas grow, fail, and evolve is what makes the journey so rewarding.
Interestingly, this time my new title generated lots of curious conversations, from within my network and amongst others online who I’d never met before. Questions revolved around the ‘science’ behind building a community and the engagement tactics to make it work. There is something about ‘community’ that seems so natural and logical to us, and yet seems to be this unreachable goal for many organisations, as they realise the immense value of having a community amongst their customers/members but don’t know how to get there.
In my constant endeavour to support others with my learnings, I thought it may be valuable to highlight the top five things I’ve experienced over the last 12 months in this position:
1. Community means something different to everyone
Even though the idea of a community is one of the oldest and most universal social models we all live in and understand, we all have a different idea of what a community is and therefore the expectations of what a community is are different. It didn’t take me long to realise this point; when I asked people ‘what does community mean to you?’ I got a different response every time. People shared that community for them is anything from where they live, their faith groups, the sports teams they support to the online social networks that they are part of. And each example seemed to have its own set of rules and expectations.
I started to see that a community may exist because of common interest but defined by how the people within that community interact, how they turn up to get something out of that interaction and as a result if you want to build a community then you need to define and spell out why your community exists and what it stands for on.
In all my exploration around structures, pillars, and stages that make a community successful, I found this one-page summary by Jeremy Connell-Waite, a great overview of all community components.
Click to expand
2. Time zones and languages matter
It’s great when organisations have multiple offices around the world to support the diverse spread of their customers but it’s tough to run a global programme from a central location. This was one of our main challenges; how can we be ‘truly global’ with a small team and limited budget, as well as making all our members feel equal heard?
The first thing we did was make sure that we ran any online events twice in the day. Being London based we ran a morning 8 am session to cater for the Asia Pacific region and then a 3 pm session for EMEA and the Americas. This covered about 85% of our members.
We also identified that to be ‘truly global’ you need to be not only accessible at the right time but also in the right language. Where possible, in larger events, we hire interpreters to translate the content in Spanish or Mandarin (via Zoom channels) and more recently have had our local teams re-present the content in their own languages.
There is a broad assumption that the business language across the world is English and people will get by, but we’ve seen that these small adjustments have a big impact on members feeling included and that’s important for a community.
3. Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come
I’ve had a few interesting conversations where peers have told me that they built a programme or a forum online and it has not succeeded, and the leadership team are baffled because they believed that just by investing and building a community alone means it runs itself.
Continual engagement is the key to building a community. Content is still king and when it comes to your community, we’ve found there are a plethora of ways you can get people to be involved:
Close communication: keep members aware of what’s coming up, what’s in it for them, what they need to prepare, where they can get key information, who they can contact etc.
Polls and surveys: tools like Slido enable great ‘moment-in-time’ feedback and discussion points and our regular surveys give members the place to tell us what they think. This gives you great data to build collateral from.
Opportunities to get involved: we ask members to tell us where their expertise is and where they would like to use them, e.g. ‘I’d like to speak on the topic of X’.
Input & feedback: Be open to allowing members to input into your strategy and plans, they’ll give you some great ideas. Once they have, make sure you feedback on the things you are going to do, aren’t going to do and by when.
Data points: at key points share your findings and analysis with not only your key stakeholders but back with the community, you’ll be surprised at how powerful these insights mean to them.
All of these different elements help in bringing people together, where they feel like they add and generate value and in turn, they come with you on your journey.
4. Be accountable - it’s a two-way relationship
In any organisation where you have large groups of members, it is easy to categorise them into stereotypes based on their location, industry, behaviours, size of business etc. It’s critical to do this to manage them, however in a community you can’t broad stroke participants.
Over time I’ve learnt that every member is different, and they have very real perspectives and bring something valuable to the community. Therefore, the goal, as the Airbnb founder Brian Chesky says ‘is to have 100 people who love me than 1,000,000 who ‘kinda’ like me’
You must build two-way relationships with members, hear what they have to say, their challenges and successes, and work together to meet both of your goals. As you would in any strong relationship, you need to be accountable for what you say you’re going to do and be open when things change.
We as a team have started to focus more on the richness and direct impact we are making than the reach and numbers that sound good, and what you’ll find is that because of this behaviour the numbers naturally increase good because you can showcase the value and others want to be part of that.
5. Community is the next wave of engagement - invest in it
I sometimes feel like I’m overstating the obvious when I talk about the power a community can have for any organisation, but if you’re a Simon Sinek fan like me, you’ll know that most organisations have gotten it wrong over the last thirty years because they are playing a finite game where they are answerable to their shareholders and not their customers.
The shift towards triple-bottom-line and purpose driven companies means the role of a community has a much bigger role to play. For huge brands, it’s easier (to some degree) because their loyalty and relationship are heavily linked to their consumer products. (I’ve just finished reading Shoe Dog by Nike founder Phil Knight – add it to your list - it’s fascinating). But for many other organisations, they’ll see the idea of having and building a community as nice-to-have.
In our short time running this programme we’ve seen our small but proactive community has evolved products and services, prioritised focuses for key business areas, has resolved critical member issues, has generated new business leads, created champions for our business and a platform for inclusion.
I now heavily advocate that community is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have and if you really want to benefit from a community programme you need to invest in it.
I’m really excited to continue this exploration on how to make a community as effective as possible, to finding more brilliant examples and having great conversations with peers trying to do something similar.
Always happy to connect and hear your thoughts, share ideas and discuss challenges. Just message me.
