At the beginning of this month, FeverBee entered its 15th year of operation!
During that time, we’ve published thousands of articles, hosted hundreds of webinars, created over a dozen courses, published three books, and worked with over 300 organisations.
Recently, an acquaintance mentioned:
“I know you’re a consultancy, but I don’t know what you do.”
Which was a proverbial kick in the teeth.
So, if you can forgive the one-off indulgence, let me reveal what FeverBee does and how we (and probably other community consultancies) work.
FeverBee Essentially Does Six Things
To boil a lot of complexity into a simple list, FeverBee essentially does six core things.
1) Community Strategy
Helping clients decide WHAT to do
This is the principal strategy piece of work. It’s ensuring the client gets the major decisions right. It typically includes things like stakeholder engagement, audience research to prioritise their needs and desires, cost-benefit analysis, and competitive benchmarking etc…
The outcome is usually a set of recommendations which are supported by all key stakeholders to move forward. These recommendations will usually cover things like:
- Setting specific, measurable goals.
- Which segments of the audience to target?
- Deciding which audience needs to satisfy within the community (and which not to)
- How to properly position the community to ensure high levels of engagement.
- The experience we need to offer to ensure we achieve the above (selecting the technology platforms).
- Who will be responsible for the community (and integrating it within the broader ecosystem).
The key to this is getting the analysis right. You can learn more about the discovery phase here.
If you make the right decisions initially, everything else is a lot easier. However, a mistake during this phase is usually a considerable burden to overcome later. Many projects we take on to save or revive a struggling community begin with correcting bad decisions made previously.
This support is helpful when you’re in the early phases of launching the community, undergoing a significant change (platform, goals, staff), or want an external perspective on your strategy. If you’re not sure you’re doing the right things, strategy support can help.
2) Strategic Planning and Implementation
Ensuring Clients Do It Right
This is when everyone is aligned and supportive of what needs to be done, but now it needs to be done well.
This part of the work involves delving into the minutia to ensure the strategy’s implementation is as good as possible. This is where we make the decisions and develop the plan to implement them.
This will typically include:
- Detailed roadmaps to launch or develop the community.
- Onboarding journeys.
- Operation structures covering roles, responsibilities, and staff progression.
- Budgeting and financial planning.
- Process maps and workflows.
- Playbooks for managing the community.
- Templates to solicit and sustain participation.
- Platform configuration.
- Engaging with implementation partners on technology.
- Managing aspects of the implementation.
- System integration plans.
- Recruitment of community staff.
The key is to ensure that the implementation of the community experience is as strong as possible.
This kind of support helps when you have an excellent idea of the community goals, audience, and technology – but now you need expertise to bring it to life. This is great for new and existing communities undergoing major changes.
3) Process Improvements
Improving the results of an existing community
Many of my favourite projects involve working with existing communities that are already doing well but want to do even better. In these cases, we bring best-in-class practices to bear to significantly increase engagement, results, and members’ experiences. This kind of work usually begins with evaluating and benchmarking the current community program. Then, we work to identify areas for improvement and make the change happen systematically.
This will include:
- Evaluation of the current community against best-in-class standards.
- Onboarding journey maps with specific improvements.
- Upgraded templates and resources for managing new situations.
- Improvements in the community playbook and standard operating procedures.
- Improved designs and user experience recommendations.
- Revised growth and engagement plans for the community.
- Introduce new programs and/or activities to engage members.
This type of work usually involves a lot of staff engagement, speaking to members, in-depth user experience research, and finding a relevant comparison set of examples to benchmark the community. It also often involves research calls with other organisations to identify and upgrade best practices.
This kind of support helps if you want to ensure that everything you’re doing is aligned with best practices.
4) Measurement And Proving ROI
Proving the value of your community
A rapidly growing aspect of our work is properly measuring and proving the community’s results. These types of projects can vary widely based on the organisation’s needs.
Sometimes, we help organisations build better systems for measuring and forecasting future levels of engagement to set better targets. Other times, we undertake a full analysis of the community using one of many statistically valid techniques.
This kind of work can include:
- Developing operational dashboards.
- Creating forecasting models for future community performance.
- Setting community targets and means of measuring the community results.
- Improving the organisation’s systems for using data.
- Gathering and cleaning community data.
- Undertaking analysis of community impact on key metrics of value (measuring ROI).
- Producing performance reports for executives.
This kind of work can be undertaken as a one-off project or on a retainer basis (i.e. we serve as the measurement team for the organisation).
This kind of support is ideal when you’re unsure if you’re measuring the right thing, need to provide real, statistically valid, data on the value of community, or want to create the right kind of community dashboards.
5) Change Management / Training
Increasing the capacity and skillset of the organistion to develop successful communities
Many organisations are either developing communities for the first time or have experienced high turnover when critical community expertise was lost. This often means internal understanding or support for the community has dropped.
Sometimes it means people without a massive amount of experience in managing communities are now in charge of one and need support. These kinds of projects are also common when people are managing communities part-time alongside another role.
These projects fall into one of two categories.
- Improve the organisation’s culture and attitudes towards the community. These are organisational change projects where we increase executive support, build awareness of the community’s value internally, work collaboratively to ensure the organisation is providing the community with the resources it needs, and integrate community thinking into the organisation. In this capacity we catalyze change. We are likely to develop the community narrative, host workshops, engage with stakeholders at the one-to-one level to build understanding and support for the community. This might include:
- Change management plans.
- Stakeholder engagement programs.
- Cultural assessments.
- Integrating community metrics into measurements of staff performance.
- Organisational design recommendations.
2. Improving the skills and abilities of the community team.
These projects are about improving the skillset of the community team. We would typically benchmark the current level of the community team, identify the skill, knowledge, and resource gaps, and then work to close them. This will often include:
- Custom in-house or online workshops.
- Provision of on-demand courses.
- Development of an internal centre of excellence.
- Provision of a suite of resources for better management of the community.
- Management of internal community of staff.
- One-to-one coaching for individual staff members.
This kind of support helps when you rapidly need to build support for a community, are recovering from a significant change, or need to train relatively new staff in community best practices.
