The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre

Udemy has over 24 million students and over 100,000 courses, James Dunbar who is the Senior Manager of Community Programs & Strategy at Udemy shared with us how they look at community and support their huge base of online instructors.

The instructors on Udemy are key to the company’s success, without incredible courses in areas where students want to learn students won’t use Udemy. That’s why they have focused a lot of their community efforts to support the instructors, that’s where James focuses his efforts.

What we’ve seen over all the episodes of The C2C Podcast is the most successful (and most funded) community programs do a great job of tying back to business goals. James shared a way of accomplishing this that we hadn’t heard of before which seemed like it could really be powerful. Most will find a way to tie back metrics like revenue, churn, customer support requests in whatever software is used to track those metrics. Of course, there are many variables that go into making those metrics improve so the needs of the sales, support and other departments aren’t always the same. James will get coffee with key people in those departments and ask them “What are some problems you are running into right now?” and see if the community can help.

He figured out after talking with the person who is running social that she needed help creating more content, James knew the community could help. He turned to the community to help create user-generated content and it was a huge success. This method is pretty manual but the brilliant part about it is it allows you to change your focus if a larger area of opportunity arises for the community to impact the company.

Another tactic that we talked about that we don’t normally cover is appointment content. This is anything that is scheduled like a live webinar or Q&A that is a great way to constantly activate the community. If it was just a video or helpful piece of content there is no urgency, the fact that it’s scheduled makes the community activate. James is someone who has worked at a 2 person startup and a 500 person company, community helps at every stage.

So many successful companies found their success through their community like eBay, Airbnb and many more. Plato also relies on their community, Plato helps developing tech managers become better leaders, they do that through connecting members to mentors and providing continuous calls, AMA’s and feedback to make sure they are growing as a leader.

They conducted lots of user research to see what the community would want, what they found was that developing tech leaders wanted to connect with other tech leaders offline and online in a structured way. The format that works best for them is events that interview experts in the field and also had networking and breakout sessions where they could dive into deeper discussions. They call this the “Elevate Series”, while they are flying out to all the events currently they plan to build a playbook from what they learn and use that to scale the program with their community.

They look at several metrics from the product and the community that help drive their decisions. For every call that their members have with mentors, they ask for feedback to both improve their product and see what the community needs are. For their events specifically, they track both NPS (Net Promoter Score) of the events and the number of attendees to gauge the success of their events.

Richard Millington is the Founder of FeverBee, FeverBee is a community consultancy company that has helped companies like Facebook, SAP, Lego and many more. He started his first online community in 1999 and is the author of Buzzing Communities and The Indispensable Community. Needless to say, he knows a thing or two about community!

Richard dove right into what communities should be doing today and what communities serve as a good example of what to do. He shared that since the industry has had some years to mature companies are now generally doing a good job of getting engagement in their communities but not a very good job of getting the value out of their communities. 

Two examples he shared were FitBit and Alteryx which are both doing a great job having the community support multiple goals within the company. There are so many areas the community can touch and improve like support, recruitment, product feedback, time to resolution, case studies, testimonials and so many more. 

Richard also touched on the fact that most brands overestimate just how much their community members want to be apart of the community. If you think about yourself how many branded communities are you apart of? Keeping that in mind, you want to build a community around a practical need, something that fulfills a need of the community. Just because you love a product that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will join a branded community, solve a problem they have and they will be more likely to join and participate. 

In the last section, we went into several social psychology strategies that Richard has used building communities. The first was the theory of self-determination which basically means the more you can get what you want out of the community of your own volition, not being sold, the more they will feel a sense of community. Richard also mentioned the “Sense of Community”, a research paper that outlines how to cultivate a sense of belonging that builds a community. Using all the strategies, metrics and material above has helped Richard and the FeverBee team grow some of the best online communities in the world. 

eBay is one of the longest-running communities born out of the digital age. Luckily we got the chance to sit down with Alan Aisbitt who has been at eBay for over 9 years and has been a community manager since 2013.

Community is everything for eBay, it’s a pure marketplace that relies on their buyers and sellers which are the community members. Their C2C community has grown very organically because passionate sellers who want to meet other sellers in their area will host events in their city to help support the local community.

eBay knows that support the power members of your community is a smart thing to do so they keep tabs on cities that are gaining traction with their events and reach out to support them. They support them by providing content, news on product updates, swag or even eBay staff going on the road to meet the sellers.

As far as what they measure for success they look at a few metrics including unique visitors, overall growth of users, posts and levels of activity. One of the metrics that's unique to them is their “accepted solutions” and “kudos”, an “accepted solution” is when a user marks their question as solved and “kudos” is similar to likes on social media. With those metrics, they are able to see not just quantity but the quality of the activity that their community is putting out.

Of course, it’s always good to prove the worth of the community from as many angles and perspectives as possible. One way that eBay does this is through their “voice of the customer” report. They take an incredible story every week from one of the customers in their community and then turn that into a report that they send to senior leaders. Sharing these helps create meaningful change that the community team can then bring back to the community and show that their voices actually matters. Alan strongly suggested any community team create a report like this because it’s a great touchpoint from inside the company and great for the community as well.

Karin Wolok is an expert at activating her community, she has a deep knowledge of what they need and what makes them tick. Graphs. Yes, graphs. Neo4j is a graph databasing company and work with eager community members all around the world who want to be apart of the community Karin has helped build.

There is something that Karin did that we have seen with many other communities like Docker and Startup Grind that have worked very well to activate your community. When you are running events with local volunteers you will never have 100% hosting events every month (we’ve seen 75% as a high mark for Startup Grind). It’s also seasonal as there are vacations, busy times for different industries ect. All that being said there is a very effective method for activating them in one month that Karin touches upon very creatively.

She realized that Leonhard Euler had a birthday in April and decided to build a campaign around it called Global Graph Celebration Day. She was able to activate 50+ cities to host events just by announcing it. She knows the Leonhard Euler is revered in her space and ignited her community into action!

So many metrics, so little time! Luckily on this episode Jess Burnham from Unbounce breaks down for us what some of the key metrics and areas of impact community has. If you are in any way trying to show how valuable all the community work you do is this episode is a must!

Jess shares that while sign ups and total number of community members is good what you really want to track are ACTIVE members. For example, you have 10k community members but many are attendees at your events? You can easily get lost in the big vanity metrics and end up with almost no one actually engaging so focusing on those metrics makes sure you actually move the needle. In Jess’s case, she tracks the weekly active users (aka return visitors) on her forum.

She also mentions that product development is a huge area of impact that the community contributes to the company. Her top community members get direct access to alpha and beta features and give it thorough testing and share the positive and negative feedback that Jess relays back to the product team.

She also has created a group for the top 1%-3% of community members called “Unbounce Experts”. These are the people who are sharing feedback, helping other community members, sharing the product with potential customers and sharing on social. Jess knows it’s extremely important to engage and reward the “Unbounce Experts” so she gives them perks like a private slack channel, free tickets to their CTA Conference, access to the early features (mentioned above) and much more.

While she has made sure to track metrics and scale to 16k members she also knows that some parts of community are unscalable. She still has regular conversations with the “Unbounce Experts” and remembers fun facts about them that they appreciate. That’s the art of community, creating a system where the community can scale and grow itself while still engaging deeply and meaningfully.

Creating a community with a focus on quality over quantity isn’t something all communities do but Underscore VC focuses on. We talked with Jenni Goodman on the show to hear how they have built a carefully curated community for their VC firm that serves the Boston area.

It's called the “Core Community” which is made up of investors, advisors, and founders that Underscore connects together to so they can support each other. She makes a great point in the episode that by focusing on getting quality over quantity she has members who refer each other to the community.

They have tried many different types of events and have found that the best format for them have been roundtable dinners. They found that this lead to the best conversations with around 8-12 attendees at the event.

They also have an extremely strong incentive for their “Core Partners”- giving them shares in the companies they work with. That a great way for them to keep people engaged, finding new community members as well as helping companies in their portfolio.

The most powerful thing about their community is that while they have a small staff, roughly 70%-80% of their portfolio members have come from their community. Even if you have a large firm people only have so many people in their networks but a community never has to stop growing!

Today on the show, we welcome Brent Messenger, the Global Head of Community for Fiverr. If you haven’t already heard of Fiver, it is the world’s largest marketplace for creative and digital services. Brent has also worked for the 2008 Obama for America presidential campaign and has consulted with some of the most innovative companies in the world, such as Lyft, AirBnb and SolarCity.

Derek sat down with 3 of the best community builders in the world to talk about how they built their communities. The guests were Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack), Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian) and Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce).

They talked about how they got started and got the initial buy-in to create the program, what strategy they used to gain traction and get people to their events and how they were able to measure their success for themselves and to prove value to the C-Suite. Here are some of the top tidbits from each of our guests.

Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack)

(starts at 15:21)

Not only did Elizabeth build community with the people attending her events at Branch Metrics but also she did that with the panelists who spoke. She focused on the speakers being extremely knowledgeable in the space to provide a lot of value and being very diverse to show the attendees that the community was like them.

That went a long way in both building the brand and setting the expectation that the events would always provide value and that they really cared about showing that anyone no matter their background could attend the events.

Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian)

(start at 12:24)

Atlassian is invested in getting feedback from their users and get NPS (net promoter scores) from their users, knowing this Leslie and her team measured NPS on customers who attended community events and didn’t. They found strong correlation with that showed NPS was higher when customers attended community events.

Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce)

(starts at 10:30)

Instead of assuming what the community what Erica asked the community “What do you want?”. The answer she got was that they wanted to get connected to each other and get connected and become apart of the brand. The ability to put Salesforce on Linkedin, featuring them at their Dreamforce conference was extremely meaningful and motivating for them.

(starts at 18:18)

Erica knew that the future of community would be data-driven so she decided to attach the community metrics with the top 4 business metrics that Salesforce had which were: Pipeline, ACV (Average Contract Value), Adoption and Attrition. By doing that she was able to prove that the already beloved community was irreplaceable to the business.

Today’s episode is short and sweet! We have announced that Bevy Labs has acquired CMX, which is the premier community for community professionals. Bevy and CMX have been working together for a couple of years now, and have worked together on a lot of projects in the community industry. In today’s episode, CEO, Derek Anderson, will be talking with the CMX CEO, David Spinks, about what the acquisition means for both companies, how Bevy is going to support the CMX community, and how Bevy and CMX are going to be partnering together to help build this incredible new industry.