The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

Ben Winn of Catalyst Software joins the podcast to discuss his role as Community & Events Manager at the company. Ben recently joined the Catalyst team and we chatted further about his strategy to start making an impact at a new organization immediately, why you should separate growth and success when measuring the health of your community and how he is approaching event strategy during COVID-19.

Who is this episode great for?

Community new hires, Virtual event managers, In-person communities

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Ben shares his strategy of cozying up to the sales team when starting in a new community role. This allows you to have an org-wide impact on revenue which ultimately is what matters most while also learning how to adapt your strategy to meet your team’s needs. Ben also shares his theory on the importance of separating growth and success as community health metrics.

Valentina Ruffoni joins the podcast from Madrid. She is the Founder and Host of the CMX Connect Madrid chapter as well as the Founder of Eat Out Madrid, a 7000 member community of foodies. We talk about Valentina’s unique strategies for growing a team of community leaders, how to approach event sponsorships, along with how she has adapted her events during the pandemic. 

Who is this episode great for?

Community team builders, Virtual event managers, In-person communities

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Valentina elaborates on how she’s grown her chapter exponentially by putting in the time, dedication and hard work to individually connect with local industry leaders and invite them to attend her events. She also illustrates how important it is to continue to reinforce the benefits of the community to ensure members feel empowered to evangelize it themselves. 

Our next guest Scott Dodds is a Customer Enablement Leader and Community Strategist! He’s had a historic career in the community industry, starting off launching Khoros’ first community, the Lithosphere and then went on to build community and engagement at Zenefits, LivePerson and Box. In today’s episode, we will cover why SaaS is driving community growth, getting early adopters, measuring ROI and so much more!

Too Long; Didn’t Listen

• 3:04m - We had to first drop our preconceptions and listen to our community. We invited a range of currently active folks on the site and asked them what they liked, what they want more of and what they would change. And the biggest thing we learned was that customers didn’t see us as a community site or a support site or a knowledge base or training. We weren’t the sales team or customer success team or product team. We were all Box to them - one brand. So the first thing was to reimagine it as one experience that customers could engage with. And by giving customers one place to go, it also became easier to start integrating this one place into other parts of the experience, like our customer marketing campaigns, our product contextual help, our product news and updates, etc. This drove greater awareness, greater traffic, and greater engagement with the community.
• 8:13m - What you measure needs to either be the same metric your organization cares about the most. So you need to thoroughly understand your business and what numbers your boss, your VP and your CEO care about and why. For instance, deflection is important to support when they need to reduce costs and improve efficiency, but at a certain point your VP may stop caring about deflection because they are more worried about renewals than cost savings. So you need to find out how your community is impacting customers to renew, which means you need to understand what metrics in the customer lifecycle most impact renewals.
• 10:07m - If you are only meeting your community members online or in virtual spaces, you are missing out on so many opportunities to build greater connections and learn so much more deeply than you could otherwise. Would you limit your personal and professional contacts to online? Of course not. So much more valuable connection and communication occurs in person.

Tina Roth Eisenberg, the founder and CEO of CreativeMornings, joins us today. She currently oversees a worldwide chapter-based organization that brings creative professionals together monthly for community and learning. We talk about the challenges of adapting creative-based in-person events to a virtual platform, consistently maintaining connection and empathy with community members in a time of stress and how reaching new audiences is now possible.

Who is this episode great for?

Non-profits, Virtual event leaders, In-person Communities

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Tina illustrates that it’s not always as simple as transitioning an in-person event to a digital one exactly as is and expecting the same results, especially during a time of crisis and when your community members are likely experiencing extreme stress. Tina says community organizers need to take into consideration what their members are going through and find unique ways to keep engagement and empathy strong when producing digital events.

Todd Connor who is Founder and CEO at Bunker Labs. Bunker Labs is a chapter-based organization that helps military veterans start and grow businesses. In today’s interview with Todd, we will talk about the strategy behind different types of events, metrics for community growth and adapting your in-person events during COVID-19.

Who is this episode for?

Non-profit, Scaling, In-person communities

Key Takeaway

There are 3 schools of thought for organizations running C2C events in local cities all over. First school of thought is to wait it out, the second is to just switch to virtual and third is to take a step back and completely rethink the strategy. Instead of just putting your event on a zoom call can you change the activities and content of the event that works better remotely? For instance, you could have larger more interest-based events since anyone can join.

Our next guest is Mindy Day who is currently the Senior Community Manager at Patreon. She has worked as a community builder for over 7 years for brands like Imgur. Today we are going to talk about how to actually measure trust in a brand through community, the path of becoming an engaged member and so much more. Take a listen!

Too Long; Didn't Listen

• We kicked off by talking about how at Patreon they are measuring trust in a brand through communities. Mindy and her team spent six to eight months to measure this important metric through a trust survey that goes out every month to a random selection of creators in their communities. It asks the same question every month and calculates a trust score. Through this, they can find the creators that are active in their communities and forums against those that aren’t.
• Mindy also shares the interesting spectrum that they use for their Patreon creators which shows the stages of the commitment of patrons. At one end of this spectrum is pure altruism, meaning people support creators because they love their content and want more of it. And on the other end is pure transactional scale where people want value for their money. Mindy believes this spectrum also holds for communities as different members have different needs. Some come looking for an answer and never come back whereas some become active members and want to get involved, helping others and build better communities.
• Talking about people that go an extra mile in communities, Mindy talks about how important it is to encourage those that are most active in the community. She believes that giving them recognition for their work, like a badge or sticker or even a message that you love what they are doing can go a long way. It’s all about letting them know that you appreciate what they are doing and making sure they are not ignored.

Nicole Saunders is our guest in this episode, she is the Manager of Community Engagement at Zendesk. She oversees all of its community programs to help set strategy, define policy and promote their support communities to their users. Today, we’ll be discussing how to get support internally for your community, how she looks at growth and how she’s adjusting her strategy during COVID-19.

Who is this podcast for?

B2B, Scaling, Online & Offline Communities

Key Takeaway

Coming up with content ideas can become a major challenge for your local group leaders running events. As well as any content and events the HQ community team is creating. To help that and better serve the community, Nicole and the Zendesk community team analyze support tickets to see what customers want to know and  the language they are using. They take that data and turn into not only event topics but articles, newsletter and other types of content.

Adrian Cohn of Smartling stops by the podcast this week. As the Director of Brand Strategy and Communications at Smartling, a B2B language translation company, Adrian started as an Operations Analyst at Smartling almost 5 years ago. Now he oversees brand and creative for the whole company. We’re going to talk about community’s role in growing a brand, adjusting your community strategy with COVID-19 and much more.

Who is this episode great for?

B2B, Scaling, In-person Communities

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Adrian dives into how brand strategies as a whole need to adapt in order to survive and thrive in a post COVID-19 world. While in-person events are on the backburner a longer term strategy to build community should be put in place. While trying to weather the storm, Adrian believes that companies will make it out on the other side if they focus on planning more creative community strategy, relevant content, adjusted sales tactics and strong customer success teams.