Glue People Together to Create Incredible Things
Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
—Vincent van Gogh
A few months ago I was pacing the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. It was Monday, the day after I had run one of my conferences, the Community Leadership Summit. As I leaned against the side of a coffee shop sipping my overpriced convention-center brown muck, a familiar face wandered over and uttered, “Alright, mate!”
Adam (his name has been anonymized) was similar in age to me, and I met him when he was involved in a previous community I worked with. He gushed about how he learned and grew his skills, that other members of the community gave him great feedback, challenged his assumptions, and helped him to improve. He reminisced over the early days of meeting new friends and how many of those friends went to his wedding, have met his kids, and have spent long weekends at his holiday home with him. He summarized it with, “I wouldn’t be here today in this convention center if it wasn’t for the community.” It was that community’s predictable, positive, personal culture that had this impact on Adam.
Communities can be remarkably empowering, not just for public communities but also internal communities. I worked with two different banks, both struggling with teams that were not collaborating together and staying in their silos. I helped them each build a shared community space where they collaborated on projects, provided peer review, organized skills-development events, and shared insights. Their productivity didn’t just increase—their teams were also happier working together.
I did something similar with a large Chinese firm. We didn’t just provide a shared working environment; we also gamified it so employees would be both rewarded and recognized for their great work. We even had posters of notable employees dotting their campuses. Again, a collaborative culture was something their employees wanted, and the results demonstrated it.
Here’s the rub though. Cultures are hard to understand and build. They are formed from a set of norms that are repeated and become adopted by the broader group. As such, we want to build a set of cultural norms in your community but ensure that they are adopted, embraced, and evolved by your community, not merely shoved down their throats.
In this chapter we are going to delve into how to build a community culture and how to build growth and engagement while doing so.
BUILDING A CULTURE
To build an effective culture, you need to take a structured, strategic approach. We will do this by focusing on four areas:
1. Understand the Ten Culture Cores. Just as in music, writing, art, theatre, or other art forms, the tonality of how you do something is as important as the mechanics of doing it. As discussed earlier, your community should be predictable, positive, and personal. With this in mind, we need to ensure our tonality, voice, and approach are balanced. I have developed Ten Culture Cores you can use as a guide.
2. Build a Growth Strategy. You can’t build a community if there is no one around. We need to build a growth strategy that helps people understand why our community is interesting and why they should join us. This will get people through the door and onto our Community Participation Framework.
3. Build an Engagement Strategy. As our community forms, we need to engage with them, keep them motivated, and maintain their enthusiasm and interest. To do this we need to provide a regular stream of engagement that is personal and productive.
4. Observe, Hypothesize, Experiment. As you deliver your growth and engagement strategies, you should observe what is happening based on the visible results, develop new ideas to improve and refine, and experiment and test those ideas. This is how you not only tune your community but also build community strategy skills in yourself and your organization.
As we bundle our way through these four steps, we are going to use the different pieces you have already baked into your community strategy. This will include your Community Mission Statement, Community Value Proposition, our Audience Personas, and your Big Rocks. As we identify things we need to do, you can track it all in our Quarterly Delivery Plan.
UNDERSTAND THE TEN CULTURE CORES
Miles Davis, a legendary jazz musician, once said, “It is not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.”1 With communities and cultures, it is often the things you don’t say—the unwritten norms—that generate the biggest impact.
This is one of the hardest elements for me to train in organizations. There is a lot of subtlety wrapped up in the tonality and approach of how we engage. Subtlety is difficult to teach and requires practice.
These are ten rules (in no particular order) that I recommend you and your team follow. Read them, digest them, and practice them. Discuss them with your colleagues. They are your values: their fabric will help your community to be a kind, compassionate, and engaging place.
1. Be open. Always default to open where you can. Be open in your communication, decision making, how you evaluate choices, and how you reach conclusions that affect the community. Talk and write openly and freely, provide extra context, and overcommunicate. It will reduce anxiety, build relationships, and build trust. It will set the norms of how those who participate engage.
This is easier said than done, particularly for employees. Many companies new to communities will have reluctant staff who are worried about putting their foot in it and accidentally sharing confidential information. Provide training, mentoring, and assurances that your team won’t be punished as they learn this openness. Give them time to adjust, but require this kind of openness.
Openness breeds authenticity, which has been a constant throughout this book. Your community and its members don’t just need authenticity, they respect it. This all needs to happen out in the open, but it can be difficult in challenging times.
Mike Shinoda is the cofounder of the music group Linkin Park, who have sold more than 70 million records and won two Grammy Awards. Mike has been a consistent architect of communities over the years and has been very open in how he approaches his work. He is also just a bloody nice guy.
In July 2017, this openness faced a critical moment. His friend and singer of Linkin Park, Chester Bennington, sadly passed away and was mourned by millions. Mike, who was grieving his close friend, faced a decision about how to approach the Linkin Park community and what his balance of openness would look like.
He shared with me his thought process:
In the big picture, you have to do things that feel right to you, that tell the truth, and that might be important or useful to people. To that end, when Chester passed away, it put everything in my career and personal life into turmoil. I didn’t know how much of my personal reactions and feelings I should share publicly. I found myself taking some time away from the public for a few months, focusing on making art—songs and paintings—in order to sort through my thoughts and emotions. Those songs and paintings ended up being a perfect way to communicate my perspective on everything, and I put them out as an album called ‘Post Traumatic.’ It felt like letting the whole world read my diary, which is a very exposed feeling.2
Mike handled it perfectly. He took the time he needed but never lost his connection to his community. He continues to inspire not just me but millions of others. Rest in peace, Chester.
2. Be pragmatic. Too many communities are all talk and no action. One local community I knew spent six months debating what platform their new website should run on. They obsessed over it instead of just making a decision and moving on.
Avoid unimportant, rambling, nonproductive discussions. Your community should be in the business of getting s#!t done (while having a great time). Trade in specific, actionable work with specific outcomes. Work toward measurable value, not obscure or irrelevant ideas.
3. Be personal. One of the major challenges that communities face as they grow is illustrated in figure 7.1:
Fig. 7.1: Community Personal Scaling Curve
Often as a community grows, there is a desire to automate more. Common tasks, workflow, and engagement are replaced with automated emails, forms, and other computer jiggery-pokery. This reduces the personal touch as the community grows.
People don’t join communities to talk to computers; they join communities to talk to people. Always focus on a personal level of service and interaction. Get to know people, their lives, their families, and their interests. Focus on quality not quantity. It will build better long-term health in your community.
I worked with a large company who struggled with this personal touch with their employees. To help rectify this, they encouraged employees to set up “interest communities.” Before long, groups focused on running, gaming, weight loss, leadership, music, and more sprung up. It required very little company resources, but it got employees mixing together around common interests and helped erode silos. Some of the strongest relationships were started in those interest groups.
4. Be positive. Part of the reason tonality is so important is that it rubs off on people. Highly positive environments generate positive engagement, and negative environments result in a bunch of Debbie Downers, who precisely no one wants to be around. Be positive, encourage your leaders to be positive, and it will rub off. This should be reflective in your writing, content, emails, and beyond. Having a bad day? Pull it together. Put on a bright smile and keep the positivity flowing. This will ensure a stable positive foundation.
5. Be collaborative. Communities are formed on a foundation of sharing and collaboration. When people avoid these cultural norms, they can be culturally criticized (and potentially ousted).
Try to avoid decisions being made in a silo. Involve people, gather their feedback, get a gut check, and validate your ideas. Coordinate community members. Invite feedback on planning documents. Again, people won’t judge you just on the decision but also how you made it. Involving and including people always reflects well.
If you do have to make decisions confidentially, try to set expectations in your community. Make it clear there is a dividing line, but provide the best context you can on how decisions were made. Try to keep the information flowing as much as you can (such as around release dates, new features, and policy changes).
6. Be a leader. Don’t be afraid of being a leader. Some new community managers are scared to lead for fear of alienating people. If you focus on our other Culture Cores, such as being open and collaborative, you don’t have to worry about this. Most people need good leaders. Be one.
Leadership will also involve making some tough choices. Don’t be afraid of unpopular decisions. You are not Dr. Evil. Do your best to ensure they are the right decisions, get a gut check from people you trust in the community, and be open about how you reached those tough choices. You will earn respect, even in the face of unpopular choices.
7. Be a role model. In the same way positivity or negativity rubs off, so does leadership. It is not just your decisions that leave marks but also how you reach them. Demonstrate objective, empathetic, authentic decision making and leadership. Be the person you want to be and you will be the leader other people want you to be.
8. Be empathetic. Communities are a melting pot of people from different backgrounds, experiences, and levels of expertise. We need to be mindful of these differences and demonstrate empathy to their experiences. We have done this previously when we put our brains in private browsing mode: we looked at things from their perspective.
If people disagree with you, struggle, have problems, or don’t understand you, be empathetic. Look at it from their perspective, and demonstrate this to them. Be intentional: don’t just be empathetic in the privacy of your own mind. Say it, demonstrate it visibly. This all builds trust. Empathy is a powerful driver for building inclusion, which is a powerful driver for innovation.
I first met Ali Velshi, a thunderingly sharp and affable news anchor for MSNBC, at an event we ran while I was at XPRIZE. He spends his world knee-deep in our political discourse and sees the importance of empathy and inclusion in communities both broad and narrow. “Communities allow for inclusive conversations that don’t deny our inherent individuality, but allow platforms for discourse that permit us to explore our commonalities.”3
He underlines this potential, though, with an apt caveat, “Belonging is crucial to us as individuals, but civility is crucial to us as a society.” Ensure you don’t just show empathy yourself, but develop a culture of empathy across your members too.
9. Be down-to-earth. People always identify with and like others who they feel are “on the same level” as them. This means identifying with other people, leaving your ego at the door, and always demonstrating humility. Let other people sing your praises; it is for them to decide, not you.
Focus on building relationships, being interested in other people and their lives, and how you can support their success. Don’t just focus on the people you can get something out of. Don’t just focus on “important” people. Humility to those at every level of your community builds mounds of trust and results in shared stories of those positive experiences.
10. Be imperfect. You and I are both imperfect. We screw up. We make mistakes. First, acknowledge this, get used to it, and embrace it. Second, talk about your imperfections, seek counsel from others in how to improve, and share your learnings from failure.
The worst thing you can do is to present yourself as having all the answers. You don’t, and people will respect you more if you are open to the fact that we are all learning. Treat the community as an experience you are shaping together with them, complete with all the successes and failures therein. It will build fantastic commitment.
Review these Culture Cores again. Review them with your team. Discuss them, understand them, and debate them. Make them the foundation of how you operate; it will help you shape a more human and humane community.
BUILD A GROWTH STRATEGY
Back in chapter 2 we talked about the referral halo. If you walk past a restaurant that is empty, you are likely to keep on walking. If you see a bustling restaurant with a free table where people seem to be having a blast, you are more likely to go in. Validation by other people provides this referral halo, which encourages us to make similar decisions, such as getting killer pizza.
Momentum made this happen. Psychologically, you observed numerous other people seemingly having a positive experience, and it validated the premise of it for yourself. This is why we read reviews on online shopping websites, why pop musicians continue to grow in popularity as they become more successful, and why Internet memes develop. If you are able to build momentum, you are able to more easily build growth.
Let’s explore how to first launch your community and then build growth.
Plan a Kick-Ass Launch
The first step in building growth is to launch your community. Sadly, far too many organizations silently launch their communities into the world. There is no fanfare, no excitement, and no launch. This is a grave mistake.
For the majority of launches, I recommend five key components. As you build these out, be sure to add them to your Quarterly Delivery Plan.
1. Infrastructure and Content Finalized. Ensure all your community infrastructure, services, and sites are up and running. Also, make sure any promotional content (such as blog posts, press releases, videos, etc.) is ready to go. If it is not ready, be sure that you have a clear content plan with authors assigned to produce that content at prescribed dates.
2. Early Adopter Program. Always run an Early Adopter program first. This is where you first invite ten to twenty people who you know and trust to the community to have private access and provide feedback before you fully launch. Carefully consider who these people are: they will likely become leaders in your community.
I did this at XPRIZE when we launched the Global Learning XPRIZE community. We invited around sixty Early Adopters, and they didn’t just help us to refine the community but also played a critical role when we ran a $500,000 crowdfunding campaign and ultimately raised $942,000.4 They produced content, provided feedback, performed advocacy, and more.
Your Early Adopters should be people who are passionate about your success and motivated to be in your community. They are typically passionate existing customers, users, associates, and friends.
Inviting these people serves a few important purposes. First, they can test out your community, find any problems, and report back to you what needs fixing before you launch. Second, it provides a great opportunity to include them in the design and optimization of your community. Get their feedback, ask them questions, ask them to help with promotion. Third, when you take the wraps off the community, you will already have some momentum formed (by these Early Adopters) so your new community doesn’t look like a ghost town.
When I do this I usually invite them a few months before launch and emphasize that we want them to play a critical role in helping us to shape the community. When you invite them, ask them to join a kickoff event or webinar a month before your public launch.
At this event/webinar you can get them motivated about the community, share your goals, and get their feedback. Be clear in what you expect from them, how you want them to participate, and what kind of guidance you need from them. Also, at the same event/webinar give them access to the community and provide a demo for how they can get started.
3. Teasers Launched. A month before launch start posting public teasers to keep people guessing.
Get creative. Garmin launched a mysterious countdown clock.5 Virgin Red released a mysterious blurry video of Richard Branson on Twitter (complete with a hashtag for people to discuss it).6 There are lots of ways to get people excited.
4. Announce a Launch Event. A few weeks before launch announce the launch event. This event should be no longer than an hour and provide an overview of the community, some key content/demos, interviews, and an open Q&A for viewers. Announce the event and what will be covered.
5. Launch Day. Run the launch event and coordinate any press to be launched on the same day.
Here is a broad timeline I recommend you work from:
Timeline |
Item |
T-Minus: Six Months |
Full launch strategy complete, with KPIs, owners, and delivery dates. |
T-Minus: Three Months |
Early Adopters identified (ten to thirty recommended). Target press identified. |
T-Minus: Two Months |
Contact Early Adopters and invite them to private kickoff event/webinar. All community infrastructure is ready for launch. |
T-Minus: One Month |
Early Adopter event/webinar. Invite Early Adopters to the community. Gather feedback and input. Make improvements and changes. Start public teasers. |
T-Minus: Two Weeks |
Announce launch event. |
Launch Day |
Launch event/webinar featuring overview, interviews, and how to get involved. Press interviews and momentum. Kick off your Growth Plan (see below). |
Launch + Two Weeks |
Reward Early Adopters who have provided outstanding service (send them swag, gifts, etc.). Highlight notable early members of the community. |
Table 7.1: Community Launch Timeline Template
Create a Growth Plan
A launch is designed to generate an intensive burst of awareness and energy. With momentum as your core focus, you need to follow this launch with clear, consistent amplification that results in growth. If you take your eye off the ball after the launch, everything will fall flat.
There is no single growth strategy. Building growth requires a multimedia approach. Growth brings people in, but engagement makes them stick around. Let’s explore effective growth strategies. These individual activities should be tracked in your Quarterly Delivery Plan.
Content and Editorial: Content is a fantastic way of building growth. New communities typically face an awareness gap (people learning what your product/community is), and a skills gap (how to get involved). Content can close these gaps and bring people to your community.
You have to be organized, though. I once worked with an educational platform client who said, “Let’s set up our blog, social, and other resources, and just write content as we go.”
Don’t do this.
Life got in the way, and they went weeks without material. You need a constant drip-feed of material to bring people into your community. Plan this work in an Editorial Calendar that maps out the next twelve weeks (three months). This calendar should provide a place to track when the content should be delivered, when it is published, and who is assigned to produce it, as shown in figure 7.2:
Fig. 7.2: Editorial Calendar
As with our Quarterly Delivery Plan, track the delivery of this work in your calendar via the Status column.
Sit down and brainstorm enough content ideas that you can deliver the following minimums:
• Original blog content: One per week (material you produce about your product/community).
• Original social media content: Three per week (social media you produce about your product/community).
• Blog content promoting other material/content: One per month (material that promotes interviews, articles, podcasts, and other things you participate in).
• Social media promoting other material/content: Two per week (social media that promotes interviews, articles, podcasts, and other things you participate in).
• Themed campaign: One per quarter (competitions, campaigns, content series, and other initiatives).
• Online event: One per quarter (webinars, demos, Q&A sessions, and more).
Ideally you should have all content for your prelaunch, launch, and postlaunch brainstormed, approved, and complete with assigned authors at least three weeks before your prelaunch. This material doesn’t have to be complete, but it should be in a plan.
As you brainstorm this material, cover the key topics that your target audience personas will find valuable. Put each idea into your editorial calendar, find someone to produce the content, and set target delivery and publication dates. Ensure those people have a calendar invite to know when their material should be delivered: everyone needs to stay on track or the overall plan is at risk. An editorial calendar is a powerful tool. Get creative with how you generate content:
• Produce fun and interesting demos (e.g., a client of mine showed how their product could be used to automate a morning ritual, such as brewing coffee, powering on a microwave, and playing music).
• Invite yourself on other people’s podcasts and video shows, write guest articles, and speak at other people’s events (this provides a way to reach out to their audiences).
• Do interesting and thought-provoking talks at conferences and in online webinars.
• Run competitions and contests that get people submitting content (e.g., writing, apps, videos). For example, HackerOne had an online hacking competition with prizes to attract new security researchers.7
• People love building interesting things. Post tutorials to show how people can do interesting things in your community or with your product/service. The Make: community does this, such as their article for how to make LED earrings.8
• Make short documentaries, how-tos, video interviews with your community, or other fun and engaging snippets.
• Brainstorm and track it all in your editorial calendar. Remember, content drives momentum!
Need Creative Inspiration?
No problem! For more ideas and examples of interesting content, head to https://www.jonobacon.com and select Resources.
In-Person Events: Meetups, conferences, hackathons, and other in-person events are a fabulous way to raise awareness and build growth.
As we cover in-depth in chapter 9, events can also be a money pit. One mistake I see many communities making is hiring a community manager and flying them around the world hitting up every conference possible. This is expensive, time-consuming, and makes your community manager less available and more jet-lagged.
Be judicious, target your events carefully, and squeeze the maximum amount of value out of them. We will cover this more in chapter 9.
Advertising: While rarely used for communities, advertising can be a useful tool for raising awareness. Focus it on promoting specific pieces of content and events and ensure there is a clear connection from that content to the beginning of your on-ramp.
Review where your audience personas consume information (you put this together back in chapter 4). Do a limited test-spend on some of those resources (e.g., spend $100 to promote a specific article on a specific social network). Evaluate the results and identify which material and approach works better. Now do another test-spend and try to get the performance up. When you feel you are getting decent performance, put in place a broader investment.
Incentives and Rewards: Clear incentives and associated rewards are a fantastic way to bring people in. Hold your horses—we will cover this in detail in chapter 8.
BUILD AN ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY
Back in chapter 5 I introduced you to my Community Participation Framework:
As we discussed, the community journey is broken into three key phases: Casual, Regulars, and Core. I once worked with a client who built a community around their business management platform. We had a guy called Siddharth proceed up the on-ramp and answer his first few questions in the community forum. He became a Casual member and helped provide guidance from time to time. He was great. Gradually, he started to become a Regular, appearing on the forum most days and also writing help documentation, organizing local events, and other activities. Before long he became a Core member, helping to optimize our on-ramps, incentivize members, provide mentoring, and more.
Just like Siddharth, our goal is to keep community members moving forward, progressing from Casual members to Regulars, and then on to being Core members of our community. There are two primary ways to keep this forward progress.
First, produce a series of incentives that keep the journey interesting and rewarding. We will discuss this extensively in the next chapter.
Second, engage with them, interact with them, get to know them, build relationships, and support their broader success. Engagement is not about any specific task. It is about providing the right cocktail of encouragement, support, and guidance. Engagement differentiates the communities that merely work and the communities that thrive.
The Journey from Casual, to Regular, to Core
Our Casual, Regular, and Core phases provide a way for us to understand the nuances of the community member’s psychology and needs at the different points in their community journey.
These phases apply to pretty much all communities. For example, both a hardcore technical community and a knitting community will have Regular members. They will both have similar traits for a Regular member (e.g., significant and sustained participation), but with obviously different subject matter.
Let’s take a look at these phases and how you can engage with them:
Casual: Our number one goal with Casual members is to make them feel at home and help them be successful. There are four key ways to do this:
1. Be responsive and help solve their problems. First and most critical, be ultraresponsive. Whenever a casual member posts anything, keep the conversation going. If they ask a question, provide an answer. If they ask for an opinion, share one. If the conversation dries up, keep it moving.
In the early stages of a community, building momentum is absolutely critical. To be blunt, this requires awkward small talk as you generate discussion and engagement. I coached a new start-up through this a while back. I asked them to ask their new community members for feedback and suggestions, and what they would like to accomplish in the community. I encouraged them to brainstorm, get excited about an idea, and pursue it. Within six months the start-up saw their community jumpstarting a new marketing initiative and website.
In the beginning most of this engagement will come from you and your team. As momentum builds, members will talk to each other and you can take your foot off the gas a little (but you still need to stay focused on members).
2. Validate and celebrate their efforts. When they contribute to the community in some way, validate and celebrate great work. Be effusive in how their work has helped the community, how they are making a difference, and how you appreciate them. This validation will significantly increase the chances of them continuing to participate. If their work is subpar, give them positive but constructive feedback to help them improve.
3. Break the ice and build a relationship. Where appropriate, break the ice and get to know them. This isn’t all business; if you detect a shared interest, discuss it. Ask them what their broader goals are in the community and help them get started. Always emphasize that you are there to help. It is this personal touch that builds trust and then momentum.
4. Help them find opportunities to make an impact. Many Casual members want to make a difference but they don’t know how to get started. Don’t hesitate in suggesting things that you think they can do. In 80 percent of cases, when I ask someone to do something (that is a good use of their time and skills), they are happy to do it. This builds their sense of validation and belonging.
As an example, I used to run a community around an audio application called Jokosher. We had three new members join, and I asked them to work on specific documentation. In another project I asked community members to contribute a set of tests for assuring the quality of some mobile applications. In each of these cases these members did great work and were happy to be asked to be involved.
Regular: The key with Regulars is to remove any and all frustration and bureaucracy from their participation. Keep them focused on efficiently consuming and creating value. Think of your community like a workplace. The workplaces we love are ones that are simple, collaborative, and efficient. The workplaces we detest have layers upon layers of complexity, approvals, reviews, and other bureaucracy.
There are five things to focus on when engaging with Regulars:
1. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize. Always observe how your Regulars are engaging and find ways to make it easier, more efficient, and more fun. Watch how they work, try to spot problems, and understand the problem spots. How can your guidelines be simplified? How can your tools be easier to use? How can you help their work be more rewarding? Always strive to refine these areas.
2. Regularly gather their feedback. Build a close relationship with your Regulars and ask them which elements of the community could be improved. Gather their feedback, make changes, and thank them for helping to improve the overall experience for everyone. Think of your Regulars as being on your team: they can provide insight into your blind spots.
3. Promote their successes. Your Regulars provide a backbone of contributions in your community. Celebrate them in your content plan, social media, events, and beyond. Make them into mini celebrities that everyone knows and respects. This validation will keep them coming back to participate and encourage others to do the same.
4. Provide opportunities. Always be on the lookout for opportunities you can offer to your Regulars. Are they looking for a new job? See if you can connect them to career opportunities you are aware of. Can you invite them to your organization’s events or meetings? Can you send them to a conference to represent the community? The more opportunities you open for your Regulars, the better. It will help them to feel part of the team.
5. Put them in positions of trust and authority. Many of your Regulars will be people you can trust. Put these people in positions of authority in the community. Make them moderators on your communication channels, have them in positions of reviewing and publishing content, invite them to manage infrastructure or run events. If they are dependable, start to depend on them. It will spread the load on your team and give these Regulars a renewed sense of belonging.
Core: These folks don’t just care about their own community experience; they care about the broader health and success of the community itself. They care about your on-ramps, how you incentivize people, how your community communicates and engages with each other and more. They are the kind of people organizations would (and do) hire in a heartbeat.
There are five key things you should do with all your Core members:
1. Have a regular engagement with them. These are the people you engage with on a weekly basis. Schedule a regular call. Build personal friendships. Regularly ask them for guidance and celebrate the great work they do.
2. Reward them comprehensively. Invite them to invitation-only dinners with you, the leadership team, and others. Send them gifts and swag as a token of appreciation. Send them personalized mementos such as plaques, trophies, and challenge coins. Provide recognition of their work in your community and beyond. All of this helps to reaffirm your appreciation for their participation and devotion.
3. Include them at a strategic level. Your Core members have tremendous insight. Bring them into company meetings about existing and new initiatives (under the understanding that they keep the discussions in confidence). Get their feedback, ask them to suggest blind spots and flaws, and invite them to help you improve and refine the overall community experience. Again, consider them extended members of your team.
4. Understand and serve their broader goals. Try to understand what their broader ambitions and goals are, and serve them as best you can. This could include making introductions, writing testimonials for them, and suggesting them for speaking gigs at events. Again, your servitude to their goals furthers their trust and participation.
5. Invite blunt feedback. Finally, no matter how much you invite feedback from your community, some people just won’t be comfortable being blunt or critical. The most likely people to provide this feedback are your Core members. They will feel comfortable enough in their community standing that they believe blunt feedback won’t limit them and will be welcomed. Be direct in specifically requesting critical feedback to help you improve the overall community experience.
The Power of Mentoring
One morning, after a rough night’s sleep thanks to the jet lag that kept on giving, I walked over to the head office of a large electronics manufacturer based in Tokyo. We started a week of community strategy meetings.
This company had ambitious ideas. They wanted a volunteer community of five thousand engineers in the next few years, but they had only a small tiger-team of five staff working on the project. With a goal of five thousand members, how on earth would five people be able to manage and engage them? Was I really expecting each staff member to manage one thousand people?
Yes.
Just kidding. Of course not; that would be nuts. The solution to this problem was to build a foundation of clear mentoring and peer-to-peer support. One of the benefits of the segmentation in the Community Participation Framework is that we can build predictable relationships between each phase.
Grabbing my marker to scribble some arrows down, I showed them that this is our goal:
Fig. 7.3: Mentoring in the Community Participation Framework
The only way you can build a community that scales up is to help your community to help each other. You do this by encouraging members further along their community journey to provide mentoring and peer support to newer members.
Imagine someone is progressing up the on-ramp for the first time. You don’t just want Casual members to help them, but also Regulars, and Core members. When Casual members are just getting going, you want Regulars and Core members to help them too. Similarly, when Regulars are facing some tricky challenges, you want Core members to help unstick them. Mentoring builds a culture that “pays it forward.”
There are three approaches to mentoring, all which can add incredible value.
1. Peer-Based Review. Peer-based review is when community members review and provide feedback on the work of other members. Peer review is one of the most powerful ways of scaling out how your members provide actionable feedback to other members. A good example of this is how code is often reviewed in open-source projects.
Without delving too deep into nerd land, engineering communities typically collaborate around code when a community member submits a pull request to a project. This is a chunk of code that can be applied to an existing set of code in different places. It is like a Band-Aid that adds additional functionality.
In open-source communities such as Kubernetes, Drupal, and jQuery, pull requests are typically submitted publicly. Then other developers go in and review that pull request and provide feedback, also out in the open. They may request it to be modified or improved, or they may say that it looks great! When the pull request is considered approved, one or more developers will mark it as approved and then it will be merged into the main codebase.
This is powerful for a number of reasons. First, anyone and everyone is welcome to submit a pull request. This provides a great opportunity for new developers, students, teenagers, and others to cut their teeth getting involved in a community. Second, this feedback is an essential part of the learning process for community members and always improves the overall quality of the code. Third, because this happens out in the open, everyone can benefit from seeing the feedback, even if they are simply an observer, thus building a history of how the project was built. Finally, it provides a way to allow hundreds of contributions to be reviewed without bogging down a small set of approvers.
Take a look at your audience personas and see how this can be applied to the methods of collaboration you may be focused on. Can you have people peer-review documentation, videos, support material, advocacy materials, or other types of content that your community produces? In many cases the answer to this question is yes. You just need a simple workflow for doing so, and it provides a great way of providing solid mentoring.
2. Coaching: Another method of mentoring is for a member to provide broader coaching to another member based on their goals. This is typically much more involved than peer-based review.
I usually recommend this in handpicked scenarios. When I have done this before, at any one time I would identify three to five people who I thought showed notable potential in the community. For example, they may be Regulars who could potentially become Core members.
I then identify members who I know can provide high-quality coaching (preferably with prior experience teaching/training) and ask them if they would be open to mentoring those members. If they agree, I connect them and encourage them to:
• Put in place a clear set of short-term goals (e.g., specific pieces of work).
• Provide recommendations for further skills development and training. This could be hands-on training or pointing them to other resources.
• Have weekly calls to help the mentee accomplish those goals, solve problems, and build their confidence and capabilities.
The tricky thing with coaching is that there are always significantly more people who need coaching than mentors available. As such, apply these coaches carefully and to the folks with the most potential. For many people, mentoring others is fun and rewarding. If you think someone could be a good mentor, whether a staff member or community volunteer, ask them. You may be surprised just how many people are happy to help.
3. Training: The third and final type of mentoring is more general in nature: training.
Training is useful to train groups of people in developing specific sets of skills and experience. This provides a great way to impact lots of people, but it lacks the personal touch of the previous two types of mentoring.
As a general rule, you should run one or two training sessions a quarter that cover the most critical knowledge gaps in your community. These can be run as online webinars and usually are not longer than an hour in length. We will cover how to do this in more depth in chapter 9.
Look at the areas where you strategically want to build skills and capabilities and where there is interest. Now produce those training sessions and encourage people to join. Make them hands-on and dynamic, not just a boring slide deck. Make them interactive. Allow people to ask questions and request certain things to be demoed to answer their queries. This can be hugely valuable in increasing your communities’ capabilities.
OBSERVE, HYPOTHESIZE, EXPERIMENT
As you put the recommendations in this book into action, you should monitor how well they perform. Capture data, review it, and look for patterns. These patterns will not just help you optimize that specific activity but also build skills in your organization for always refining and optimizing your strategy. This is how you build competence.
You can do this by following five steps, illustrated with an example that is threaded through each:
Step 1. Observe the data and look for patterns. As with everything you do, measure the performance of that work, evaluate it, and try to spot patterns that either point to problems or potential.
Example: Imagine you have published your content plan for a few months (focused on an Engineering persona), and you have noticed that shorter blog posts seem to get a higher rate of hits as well as a better bounce rate.
Step 2. Develop a hypothesis. When you spot a pattern, develop a hypothesis that you would like to test. For example, if you notice an increase in traffic given certain conditions, is it worth testing those conditions? Are there types of content, engagement, or events that seem to perform better and are worth testing?
Example: Based on the data, we suspect shorter blog posts are performing better than longer ones. We want to (a) see if this hypothesis is true, and (b) see what impact the length of an article has on readership.
Step 3. Devise an experiment. Based on your hypothesis, develop a simple, cheap experiment you can run to test it. This should run for a short period of time and generate enough data to prove or disprove your hypothesis.
As a general rule, every experiment you design should include (a) your hypothesis, (b) how you will test it, (c) the duration of the experiment, and—importantly—(d) which changes you will make if the hypothesis is either proven or disproven. Never run an experiment that you can’t map to actionable changes in your community.
Example: To test the short-blog-post hypothesis, we will distribute six blog posts over the coming weeks, all technical in nature (so for the same Engineering persona). Two of these posts will be 150 words long, two will be 300 words long, and two will be 1000 words long. We will promote these equally and track the number of hits, the bounce rate, and the reader rating for each post after it has been live for two weeks.
Step 4. Review the results. Review the data from your experiment. Did it provide any insight into whether your hypothesis was correct (or even had the opposite effect)? In some cases the data may be so jumbled that it does not provide concrete data either way. If so, it might be worth trying a different experiment to test the same hypothesis.
Example: When we look at the data from our blog-post-length experiment, we find that the shorter posts get on average 30 percent more reads and a 10 percent improvement in bounce rate. The longer posts performed the worst. This proves our hypothesis was true.
Step 5. Determine next steps. Based on the results of the experiment, review and amend your strategy. Again, never test a hypothesis and then fail to make any strategic adjustments based on it. Otherwise, all of this work is a waste of time.
Example: In this case, we will optimize our future content to be shorter in overall length. We will adjust our guidelines for authors who are producing content as part of our Editorial Calendar to revise the size of their articles. We will also track the performance of these posts over a longer period of time to ensure our hypothesis sticks.
STAY LASER FOCUSED ON CREATIVITY AND MOMENTUM
Creativity is a loaded, ambiguous notion. One person’s creativity is another person’s snooze-fest, but you are going to need a mountain of it to successfully tap into and build momentum in your target audience.
The world is fighting more than ever before for our attention. You understand the value you want to create. You know your audience. You know ways to build growth and engage with your audience. Now you need to come up with ideas that will both surprise and intrigue them.
Without wishing to sound like a raging cliché, think outside the box. The Firefox community made crop circles as part of their advocacy. They solicited donations from their fifty-thousand-strong community and put an ad in the New York Times where the logo was comprised of the names of the donors.9 They thought bigger, and it grabbed people’s attention.
The best ideas come from different brains, so get more brains involved in the process. You never know: you just might touch on something that electrifies your audience with excitement.