The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

Team RWB knew tracking impact was critical so they created a metric for “enrichment”. This is a 40-question survey used to measure physical health, mental health, supportive relationships, sense of purpose and other valuable information. Team RWB has learned that engagement is the best way to bring people up on the enrichment scale, and it allows them to identify points in the member journey where events would be impactful for the community."

Who is this episode great for?

Non-profit, Scaling, In-person Communities

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Dan knew tracking success was important so he created a metric for “enrichment”. This is a 40-question survey is used to measure physical health, mental health, supportive relationships, sense of purpose and other valuable information. Dan learned that events is the best way to bring people up on the enrichment scale and tries to find points in the member journey where events would be useful for the community.

The future of education is becoming more and more remote. Few know that more than our next guest, Kelly Neilson who is a Community Growth Manager at Lambda School. Lambda School teaches people the tech skills they need to launch a new career in just 9 months. The whole program is completely remote. We will talk with Kelly about how she grew their C2C community to over 50 chapters and why bringing your customers together is so important with remote learning. Take a listen!

Who is this episode great for?

B2C and/or Educational Institution, Scaling, In-person Communities

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Knowing what to focus on is extremely important with building C2C communities, there are many areas you could focus on and spread yourself thin. Kelly's answer to this was a) to focus on attendee growth which tripled year-over-year and b) testing events by "group type". Using Bevy, she set different types of groups and is now comparing the performance to see which ones the Lambda community loves the most so she can double down on those. 

Former VP of Community at Salesforce Erica Kuhl joins us on this episode, Erica started the Trailblazer at Salesforce which has become the gold standard of both online and offline community. This is one of those episodes that you need to relisten to with a notepad because there are that many strategies we covered. We will talk about the key to growing an in-person community, building a community team, the best metrics for community and so much more. Take a listen!

Instructions on how you can follow, rate and review The Community Corner are here: https://www.fame.so/follow-rate-review

Welcome to our 50th episode! Since this is our 50th episode we wanted to do something special, this interview from Startup Grind Global 2020 is with the cofounder and CEO of Reddit Steven Huffman. We dove into some really unique perspectives we haven’t talked about before like what is the soul of community, and trying to figure out what a “healthy” community is beyond basic metrics and of course how the largest online community looks at building C2C communities.

Too Long; Didn’t Listen

2:28m- The way Steve looks at community today is a group of people with a soul. Instead of approaching it with the view of a product builder he approaches it as an anthropologist and trying to understand the people that make up that community rather than optimize for vanity metrics.

8:24m- Reddit now has 100,000 active communities and Steve talks about what other metrics are actually meaningful for a healthy community. He has looked at time on site, votes, comments, length of comments but they are constantly evaluating what a “healthy, interesting community” is internally so they aren’t just chasing a number and can actually achieve that. 

21:10m- When he watched other platforms that are also roughly “community” based in being social networks blow past Reddit, he realized they are based on different values. Whereas instagram is looking at monthly active users through vehicles like influencers, Reddit is based around quality discussion which inherently lends itself to less growth. So focus on their on values not growing as fast made sense and that focus also kept users happy.

In this episode, Derek is talking to Elizabeth Kinsey who is the Developer Marketing Manager at Slack. Elizabeth knows how to create communities. She first created the Mobile Growth community at Branch Metrics which became the premier community for app developers and marketers. But her streak didn’t stop there,  when she joined Slack she helped create the Slack Developer Communities from scratch, which has been a huge success.

Too Long; Didn't Listen

Elizabeth will share with us how two things are most crucial to creating a successful community: tools, and resources. Tools that allow you to monitor your community leaders, help answer their queries and manage your community. And with resources, she refers to the “how-to” guides that have all the information that helps in fostering communities.

Elizabeth will talk about the biggest mistake people make: assuming they will be able to measure ROI as soon as they start the community.. It’s better, in her opinion, that community managers focus on impacting one area of the business first and then move to the next area of impact and so on.

An interesting part of the episode will be around the choosing chapter leaders, who are integral to spread the community. We learn how at Slack she is recruiting new leaders and what characteristics appeal to her most when selecting new ones. Enjoy!

Coronavirus is now a pandemic, how should community professionals respond? If I'm running events for my community what steps can I take? Today's episode is here to try to answer those questions, we sat down with David Spinks, Founder of CMX & VP of Community at Bevy. Even with all the downsides, Derek and David talk about the tangible things we can do around taking events virtual, collaboration with other community professionals and more.

Greg Goomishian is a Lead Community Manager at Reddit.com. He’s currently running “Team IRL” and focusing on offline user engagement. He also runs Redditgifts.com, the world's largest online gift exchange community. In our conversation, we are going to dive into what it means to bring your community from online to  IRL.

Too Long; Didn't Listen

6:39m - Greg describes what he thinks community builders should focus on; allowing creativity and flexibility is key

8:01m- How to go about getting internal financial support for community programs when there might not be much funding

9:27m- Advice on using Reddit as a medium to build out your community

You can find the podcast on Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Our guest Erin Wayne is Director of Community and Creator Marketing at Twitch. She has worked at Twitch for over 6 years, she started off managing their partnership with Minecraft and is now Head of Community. We explore how a company with such an extremely active and passionate online community was able to bring that to real life with their C2C program!

Too Long; Didn't Listen

2:53m- The interesting organic growth of Twitch meetups prior to any formal program

7:39m - Erin discusses the inherent beauty of meetups and how they connect people that share similar interests

12:33m - How to go about empowering their current communities and also collect behavioral data to further empower communities in the future

14:39m - Erin brings up a fun fact about her that has helped tremendously with her career at Twitch

You can find the podcast on Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Jono Bacon is one of the most notable figures in the community space. He’s helped some of the tech world’s best brands like IBM, Intel, SAP, Mozilla, and others build their community. He also wrote the book The Art of Community and recently published People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams by HarperCollins. We cover community models, why C2C marketing is important in 2020, governing open source communities and more!

Too Long; Didn't Listen

5:33m - Jono discusses the three different community models and how they further subdivide into two categories

8:26m - Provides insight on how he approaches and maps out achieving objectives

10:14m - Explains how the relationship between brands and consumers has changed; from online interactions to in person activations

17:52m - Speaks about two communities that have caught his attention

You can find the podcast on Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Celina’s job is all about building communities. She manages and supports Atlassian in-person communities within the Americas by working with community leaders, offering support and steer them. Her work involves engaging the online community by creating avenues for customers to easily connect with others like them.

With Celina onboard with us, we are going to learn how Atlassian built an online community where developers, content managers, project managers and others came together where they collaborate, connect and share valuable insights with each other.

It’s not easy to explain the value of having a community and Celina understands this all too well since she saw how everyone was apprehensive towards the idea of having them.

But today, Atlassian product teams see great value in these communities where they get to enjoy actual face time with users, learn about their problems, offers them real time feedback and hear customer stories.

We will also be inquiring about the metrics they are using at Atlassian to gauge the effectiveness of these community events.

Also, Celina shared with us how they are scaling their communities by building everything with heart and balance. They do this by focusing on where their customer is in terms of the platform they are using and how they are using it.