The world needs new leadership, but the new leadership is about working together.
—Jack Ma
“Hello, Jono. How was your weekend?” asked Don, an affable and always-eager member of a community I used to run. (For the sake of this story, Don has been anonymized; he definitely looks more like a “Dave.”)
“Good, thanks!” I said. “How was the event you organized this weekend? Did you get a good turnout?”
There was an audible lump in Don’s throat. “Er, not great. No one showed up.”
I nervously giggled. Don, somewhat awkwardly, didn’t repay the favor.
He wasn’t lying. He organized an event, booked the room, coordinated the content, organized the coffee and snacks, and no one came. Not a sausage. He built it and they didn’t actually come. Heck, it almost seemed they avoided the damn place.
While Don could laugh it off, there is a lesson in all of this. The reason people didn’t attend was because it wasn’t clear what value the event offered to them. Don didn’t connect his scheduled content and networking to the benefits attendees could receive from the overall experience (e.g., knowledge and relationships).
It doesn’t matter if he put together the venue, coffee, seating, and advertising. Knowing and mixing in these ingredients is simply not enough. They are a baseline.
This is where many companies new to community strategy get stuck. They hire a community manager, and that person starts mixing in the different ingredients we expect to see such as social media, blogging, events, and marketing. There is a risk here though: if you are not clear in what value your audience wants and how you can deliver it quickly and reliably for them, you risk a lot of work and a lot of failure.
UNPICKING VALUE
Value is simply defined as something of “relative worth, utility, or importance.”1 It comes in two great-tasting flavors.
Tangible value refers to measurable, physical goods and services you can see, touch, and feel. It is the salary you get at work, the free travel you get with your airline rewards program, the complimentary coffee you get when your tenth stamp is added to your coffee rewards card.
Intangible value are the benefits you experience and feel. It is being Employee of the Month, the thrill of working with smart people, being appreciated for your work, seeing your work being used and valued by others, and feeling part of a team you care about.
Psychologically, we humans are wired up to be quite willing to invest our time and effort if there is an outcome we consider valuable. This is why we have jobs, take part in competitions, and work our socks off to get into new professional positions, desired colleges, and other things we want. If we can (a) clearly see how we can contribute value, and (b) clearly see how we can receive value, we have the foundation for a great community.
This gives us our next step: to crisply understand what tangible and intangible value we should generate in our communities. This gets us thinking in the right way and also provides guardrails to ensure the nitty-gritty strategic and tactical details we craft later always have a dotted line to the most important focus of our work: driving value.
Danger, Will Robinson! The mistake many organizations make when thinking about value is to become naval-gazing, selfish teenagers. What can my organization get out of the community? What can these community members do for us? How can it help our business? This is a fast track to a boring community.
Successful relationships, whether they are marriages, partnerships, friendships, etc., are all about understanding what makes the other person tick, and how you can make them happy. The role of empathy and selflessness has proven time and time again to both build relationships and repair them. It is the bedrock of great leadership throughout the ages.
If we can understand and articulate the value we can generate for both our future community members and ourselves, we can build a community that is exciting for them and worthwhile for us. Let’s get started.
CREATE A VALUE STATEMENT
Grab a piece of paper and a pencil. We are going into brainstorming mode. Divide the paper in half and start jotting down what kind of value you see for your organization and for your members, just like in figure 3.1.
Fig. 3.1: Community Value Statement
What you choose to focus on here will be largely based on your Community Mission Statement (from chapter 2) and which Community Engagement Model(s) you have chosen.
Value for the Community Member
Here is rule number one for how to build great communities: put the success and value of your prospective members first. If you get that right, success for your organization will naturally flow.
Sketch out the value for your community members first. Not only will this give you a clear idea of how to produce a genuinely valuable and interesting community, it will also calibrate your expectations for how much you can realistically commit to shaping this value for your members.
Put yourself in the shoes of prospective members. You are potentially interested in joining the community, but you have little time and a million other distractions to take your attention away. What are the things you care about most? What are the most immediate problems you want to solve? What would be the ideal experience that delivers personal value to you?
We all evaluate new things first as window shoppers. Before you buy that new tool for your business, you search online to understand what it can do. Before you buy a product, you read the reviews. Before you fix your bathroom sink pipe, you browse online for how to do it.
We do the same with communities. If a community is open to browse (such as a public forum), many prospective community members may never sign up for your community but will actively consume the fruits of it. For example, I have been learning about music production for years from the HomeRecording.com community. I can read it openly, but I have barely contributed.
Of course, many people do want to dig deeper. They need information, guidance, and answers to their specific questions. They want to work with others on a shared project. They want to contribute new content. These are all opportunities for the community to work together to produce value for themselves and others.
Now, be realistic. Don’t assume a community member’s primary or even secondary priority is that you and your organization are successful. Don’t assume they have bags of time. What value can they consume that is objectively good for them and them only? Let’s look at some common areas of value we see in different communities.
1. Meeting Other (Awesome) People. Don’t underestimate the value of simply meeting other people like you. Discussing a shared interest, sharing ideas, having debates, and making new friends can be hugely rewarding.
2. Interesting Content That Enriches Their Experience. Communities can be a powerful engine for content. Great content can be videos, articles, podcasts, live events, images, source material (e.g., editable 3D objects), items inside digital environments (such as objects and buildings), and more.
This value should be two-fold: consuming all this great content but also producing content and enjoying other people enjoying it for themselves.
3. High-Quality Education and Getting Help. A common first entry-point for new community members is finding help to solve their problems, particularly when picking up a new product or service. This typically comes in two forms: educational material such as guides and tutorials that provide guidance for solving problems, and answers from human beings available to troubleshoot with. This is a major area of value and consistently successful in communities.
4. Skills Development. Communities are a fantastic way for people to “cut their teeth” and refine their skills. They provide an environment where you can produce something, such as writing, design, or software, and then others can provide feedback and help you refine your skills. This is often done in an open setting, which also builds confidence and capabilities.
5. Mentoring and Coaching. Across the world there are millions of kind souls who provide guidance, mentoring, and advice to their fellow community members. This can offer significant value. Think about it: you can join a community, have access to smart, talented people who can provide invaluable mentoring, and it doesn’t cost the community member a dime. Make this a key selling point.
6. Career Experience and Expertise. If your community is professional in nature, such as an internal community in your company or a community focused on professional products and services, this is an important consideration. Communities can provide a great way to build experience and even start putting together additions to a résumé. I wouldn’t be writing this book if it were not for the experiences, people, and opportunities that I gleaned from participating in communities.
Updating Your Community Value Statement
As you consider these different areas of value for your members, remember we are not merely building a vending machine where you put effort in and get value out. We want to make the experience personal and drive intangible human value too.
This is a community. Our members should be able to create lasting relationships, be appreciated and validated for their contributions, feel a part of the broader success of the community, and develop an authentic sense of belonging. People are initially attracted to communities for the tangible value, but the intangible value keeps them coming back for more.
Here are some examples of items for your Community Value Statement:
• I want community members to be able to ask questions and get knowledgeable, reliable answers within twenty-four hours.
• I want community members to be able to produce and share best practice, guidance, and documentation, and enjoy it being used by others.
• I want community members to produce applications and services that support the broader success of our community.
• I want community members to be able to contribute features to our software and see their features used and appreciated.
• I want community members to be able to have free, open access to our product.
• I want community members to learn new skills and develop valuable experience for their career.
• I want community members to have fun and enjoy their time in the community.
That last one is critical. Communities need to be fun! Your members want to have a good time. They want to do interesting work, have fun and engaging discussions, and build relationships. They don’t want a dry, boring, mechanical, overly formal experience. If you are unsure what fun means to your prospective members, look at similar successful communities for how they make it fun and engaging.
Value for Your Organization
As I have already mentioned, communities are no walk in the park for organizations to set up. They require investment, time, and consistent nurturing. While they offer tremendous opportunities, you should be clear in what you want to accomplish.
This is particularly important in building buy-in. The vast majority of my clients kick off their community strategy with a group of enthusiastic, energetic, stakeholders and sponsors. They then need to sell their vision to other teams to get them onboard to play a role in making it actually happen. Unless the value of this work is clear and unambiguous, other teams will find reasons to pass the buck, ignore it, or roll their eyes when the topic of work assignments pops up. We don’t just want their buy-in; we want their enthusiasm, passion, and expertise.
Let’s look at some common areas of value many organizations are looking for when they build out their community programs. These should sell both the passionate and dispassionate on why this community will be worth the time and effort.
1. Customer and User Growth. Potential customers often use a community to evaluate a product by seeing how other people use it, asking questions about how it could work for them, and knowing they have a place they can get help. Communities can also play an enormous role in advocating your product or service with others.
2. Better Support for Customers and/or Users. On the other side of the equation, communities can provide fantastic free support for your product. They can answer questions, troubleshoot problems, and provide guidance for how they can get the most value out of using it.
3. Improved Marketing and Brand Recognition. Communities can be an army for brand builders. They can raise awareness, produce content, share material on social media, speak at conferences, organize user groups, advocate for you in their businesses, and more.
4. Technology/Product Production and Enhancement. Many communities, particularly those using the Collaborator Community Participation Model, can generate hugely valuable technology contributions.
For Inner Collaborator communities this can be producing new features, fixing bugs and security issues, improving translations, and improving infrastructure. For Outer Collaborator communities this can be building applications, integrations, services, and more. All of this makes your platform or product more powerful.
5. Recruiting and Services. When you have a passionate, enthusiastic community wrapped around your product or service, they can be a good source of potential hires for your company. It makes sense: they have the domain experience and expertise, and they can be a set of highly qualified leads to fill various roles.
Also, you can transform this expertise into consulting and partner relationships where you can have key community members provide training, support, and other services. This all broadens out the ecosystem.
As you think about the value you want to build for your organization, you have to be realistic with what resources you have available and how much you can do, but also what makes sense for you strategically. Communities with a commercial backer or stakeholder need a careful balance, or disaster can rear its ugly head. You need to focus on value that is compatible with the interests of your community members. Otherwise you will create a community that people couldn’t care less about.
For example, most members would be happy to produce content, material, or technology that adds value to the broader community (e.g., help for other users), but they are unlikely to produce material that is only going to benefit you and your business (e.g., providing support as part of your paid support service). This is a consistent pattern I see: community members want to serve the community, of which your organization is one cog in the machine.
Similarly, the value you drive shouldn’t be “cheap.” I have worked with many SVPs of Sales and Marketing who initially cackle in excitement thinking of this pool of people to spam with sales material.
Don’t do this.
Think of your community as a trusted partner; would you spam a trusted partner? No. Would you want to harness that partner for your organization in a way they are comfortable with? Sure.
Updating Your Community Value Statement
Here are some examples of potential additions to your Community Value Statement for your organization:
• We want this community to raise awareness, brand recognition, and understanding of our product or service.
• We want this community to broaden support of our product while limiting our support costs.
• We want this community to give us better insight into what our customers want and how we can serve them.
• We want this community to build a closer relationship between our customers and the company.
• We want this community to produce a pool of potential candidates to hire.
These value statements should be complementary. It should be clear how the company can drive value for your community members and vice versa. Make sure this value statement is crisp, clear, and well understood by your team. It needs to get everyone’s blood pumping with excitement.
PRODUCE YOUR BIG ROCKS
Communities are unusual, intangible entities that are difficult for most people to understand. While you and your team may see the opportunity baked into your value statement, this can seem wildly unintuitive for others (and generate a fear of the risks involved).
What complicates building a strategy is that communities are cross-functional in nature. You will need your marketing department to help with promotion and awareness. Your infrastructure team will need to spin up tools and technology the community can use. Your product team will need to interface and integrate the community into your products and services. When projects span multiple departments, it increases the risk of misunderstanding and miscommunication.
As such, gaining alignment and communication across different layers can be a struggle. You need to balance executive needs with practical guidance for the folks on the ground delivering this work. The execs don’t want all the detail, but the execution staff needs a clear understanding of what delivery looks like. We need both to be successful.
The solution here is a clear set of high-level objectives, called our Big Rocks, with crisply defined owners and success criteria. This gets everyone on the same page. Later in the book we will also craft a more detailed Quarterly Delivery Plan for the team delivering the work and for tracking progress.
HOW IT WORKS
Start by brainstorming five to seven key objectives for your community strategy that should be delivered over the next calendar year. If you don’t want to commit to a year (which is my recommended time frame), focus on a six-month period. Anything shorter runs the risk of not being broad enough in terms of goals.
Right now I want to ensure you are clear on the format for the Big Rocks and what should go in them. This format is how you will document your strategy as it evolves. As with all strategic development, you are unlikely to have all the answers right now, and that is fine. Our primary goal is to be clear on this format, and ensure your team is clear on it too. This will ensure that everyone is speaking the same strategic language; a language that will ease how people feed into these Big Rocks, get their skin in the game, and align everyone with a common set of goals.
Each Big Rock should be . . . well, big. We are not looking for small improvements here, but meaty, juicy, no-screwing-around, ambitious goals. These Big Rocks should move the needle and elicit a breathy “wow” when you show them to people. Importantly, your Big Rocks should have a clear connection to generating the value in your Community Value Statement.
They should be realistic and doable. You are not going to have a 100 percent success rate, and you are unlikely to get 2 million people signed up in your first month. Think about where you are, where you want to get to, and what resources you have available to deliver it. Then add 30 percent to your goal. That’ll do it.
Create a document and use the following format for each Big Rock:
• A Single Line Summary of the Objective:
A paragraph or two that provides an overview of the objective and the primary value it will bring to the community and organization.
• Key Initiatives (over the next year):
A bullet point list of significant pieces of work that should be performed to accomplish this objective.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) (over the next year):
A measurable set of metrics that you can use to tangibly assess if this objective was accomplished.
• Owner: The person who owns the delivery of this objective.
This format should be fairly self-explanatory, but I want to highlight two key components.
Your KPIs indicate the metric(s) we are using to determine success in each Big Rock.
Every piece of work in your community strategy should have target metrics attached to it, both at this larger objective level and later when we build out specific tasks in our Quarterly Delivery Plan. These metrics will keep your team on track and should be unambiguously measurable.
You want to be in a position in a year where we can ask “did that happen?” and be able to answer with a clear yes or no. “Maybes” are not in our dictionary. I will often break these annual KPIs down into quarterly targets to ensure the team is tracking progress actively. I have noticed consistently with clients that their teams perform better with clear KPIs (and the accountability for accomplishing them).
Speaking of which, the Owner is the person where the buck stops. It doesn’t mean they do all the work, but they are ultimately responsible for corralling and cajoling people to get the work done. If the objective fails, they are the person who will have some answering to do.
Your goal here is concise readability. Let’s be honest, we are all sick of reading dense, boring, strategic objectives. We don’t need to know the origin of these goals. Get in, say what you are going to do, how it will be measured, and get out. All of your Big Rocks should cover four to six pages max.
Here are a few examples from some clients I have worked with (confidential details and names are anonymized):
Example One: User Community Growth on the Forum
Build growth of participation in our existing community forum. This is judged by both sign-ups as well as active, holistic participation based on various metrics.
Key Initiatives (over the next year):
• Full forum content plan delivered and executed.
• New product updates and key news delivered to the forum.
• Mentoring program delivered to support new members and develop their skills.
• Social media advertising campaign to point people at notable content.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) (over the next year):
• One thousand users signed up to the forum (assessed by both registration and confirming their account).
• Fifty percent of signed-up users (per prior KPI) post at least five topics, read at least thirty posts, and spend a total of one hour reading posts.
• Ten percent of all signed-up users (per prior KPI) visit for 50 percent of the days, have replied to at least twenty topics, and have received thirty likes and given forty likes.
Owner: Adam Hoffert
Example Two: Build an Active Support Community
Build a high-quality, reliable, community-driven support resource for other customers to get help quickly and easily from other knowledgeable customers.
Key Initiatives (over the next year):
• Design and deliver incentives and reward plan to encourage support participation.
• Notable Q&As are publicized as part of the quarterly content plan and monthly social calendar.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) (over the next year):
• At least 75 percent of all questions submitted receive a response (either an answer, marked as a duplicate, or marked as spam).
• Seventy percent of all questions that receive an answer have the answer approved by the submitter.
• At least three hundred customers provide at least one answer to a question.
Owner: Sarah Lewis
Example Three: Build an Engaged Developer Community
Build an engaged community of developers who are building applications on top of our platform. The success of this goal is judged by (a) how many developers we attract, (b) how many apps they produce, and (c) how well our community supports their success.
Key Initiatives (over the next year):
• New developer on-ramp designed and delivered.
• Software Development Kit (SDK) (and community integration) delivered to developers.
• Developer-focused content plan designed and delivered (including tutorials, workshops, webinars, and more).
• Best of Breed program delivered, which highlights notable apps produced.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) (over the next year):
• Developer on-ramp delivered.
• Version 1.0 of our SDK is delivered.
• Three hundred developers joined by the end of the year (based on registered accounts and at least one engagement with the community).
• One hundred apps submitted and approved into our app store (based on submission and availability to users).
• A 30 percent growth in traffic to our developer documentation and a 40 percent growth in traffic to our support forum.
Owner: Danielle Brescia
Rocking Out
Not sure where to start with your Big Rocks? Head to http://www.jonobacon.com and select Resources for examples. They should give you a good idea of how to build your own Big Rocks.
Notice how concise and clear these goals are. Notice that the KPIs are clear and measurable and that the owner is preferably a specific individual and not a group or department (to avoid any passing of the buck). These KPIs are not just important to ensure we set expectations and make progress, but also to ensure that our Big Rocks are delivering value.
When you have the first cut of your five to seven Big Rocks, send it out for feedback. Select a handful of key colleagues from every layer of the organization (e.g., product, marketing, engineering, support) and ask them to be blunt and comprehensive. Invite them to be critical; don’t rely on them having the confidence to nitpick. Ask them if you are ambitious enough. Ask them if you are realistic enough.
Then . . . lock it in. This is a sacred document. It will be the record of what you are going to do for the next year. You invested the time in producing it, now commit to delivering it. Don’t worry, we will review it periodically to ensure it is still the right plan and refine it as needed. We will cover how to do this later in the book. For now, consider this your plan of record: stick to it and make it happen.
KEEP YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND
There are many people who effusively gush about moonshot thinking and that we should break the barriers of our thinking and expectations. The ethos of this is great: we should be ambitious, but we also need to make sure we are realistic.
Your team will have limited time. You will have limited time. You have limited resources available. You have limited experience in community strategy (presumably this is why you are reading this book). People get sick. People quit companies. People quit communities.
This is the human condition and we need to not be blind to it. As you design your Big Rocks, bear in mind these three key realities.
1. Value costs money and time to create. Oh, and it will cost more and take longer than you think. Your Big Rocks are all in service of producing this value, but when you are knee-deep in the details and execution, expect things to take longer and cost more.
You and your team are new at this, and just like learning anything new, there is a “newcomers tax.” There is a cost in time and money as you and your team spin up, make mistakes, resolve those mistakes, and build skills and organizational capabilities.
2. There will be roadblocks. Similarly, people and things will get in the way. Key staff will quit, your various community services may not perform as well as expected, other projects will suck away resources, competitors may up their game in their own communities, and other shenanigans will manifest.
When you are planning the delivery of your strategy, factor in some buffer time to take this into account. If you have a year to do something, plan for around ten months of work.
3. Whatever you think will happen, it will pan out differently. Your Big Rocks put in place a firm strategy for what you want to accomplish, but as with any new strategy, the actual delivery of those Big Rocks will pan out a little differently than you anticipate. Some tasks will take longer than expected, some will be more difficult to deliver, and there may be budget/resourcing snafus.
Stick to your Big Rocks and navigate the curveballs as best you can. Try to keep the frustration at bay and instead focus on spotting lessons you can learn to avoid these curveballs in future strategies. These lessons are what build organizational capabilities and muscle: they are a good thing and they make us better.
START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON
As you continue through this book, there are going to be a lot of new concepts, frameworks, maturity models, and other details. One of the risks of soaking up this information is that your Community Value Statement becomes a distant memory.
Avoid this at all costs.
Your Community Value Statement is the acorn from which everything else grows. Everything you do needs to have a dotted line to the value you want to produce. Sadly, many organizations get so wrapped up in the day-to-day tactics that they forget the bigger picture. Don’t suffer the same fate.
Just like your company values, your Community Value Statement should be something you think about every week. It should be injected into the way in which you work and how you evaluate your success. You need to build a culture that repeatedly asks the question, “Is this going to help us shape the value we want?” If it doesn’t, change it.
If you keep this value front and center, everything else falls into line.