To complement the launch of Build Your Community, we’ve recently launched our resource site:

www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity

This site contains dozens of templates, guides, tools, and resources to help you build your community. My plan is to continue curating an expanded list of resources over time.

If you’re looking for surveys to use, benchmarks to follow, methods to analyse your community, this site will definitely help.

A few weeks ago, we hosted a private workshop event for members of a private community.

The community targeted elite members in a highly technical area. While activity had been ok, it wasn’t accelerating to the critical mass point and it was time to adapt our approach.

Alas, due to unforeseen circumstances, we had to reschedule the event at the last minute and reschedule the date for two days later.

Yet, amazingly, the event was still a great success. More people showed up and participated in an event than had been active for the past month in the community discussion areas. Better yet, since the event, the level of participation has begun to accelerate to the critical mass point.

There are two powerful takeaways from this.

The first is members who claim not to have the time to participate in a community will participate in an event (especially an exclusive event). In many spaces, events work because they set a fixed, limited, time to visit and participate. We’ve since decided to incorporate regular events as part of the community effort.

(p.s. sending out calendar invites to engage in a community at a particular time seems especially powerful)

The second is the more you can engage members in designing the solutions to the community challenges, the more they tend to take ownership of them (and thus the community).

FeverBee’s mission is to help great companies build thriving communities of customers, employees, and members.

Over the past decade, our clients have included many of the world’s most successful organisations including Apple, Facebook, SAP, Oracle, Google, etc..

The foundation for our successes is deeply understanding both the needs of our clients and their audiences. We spend a vast amount of time reaching our audiences (and their environments) to determine how to develop indispensable communities.

To support our work, we’re now looking to hire a community analyst to join the team.

If you love working with large organisations, diving deep into community data, and helping some complex problems, this role might be for you.

(p.s. If this job isn’t for you but you recommend someone we hire for 3 months, you receive a $500 referral fee).

Objectives

• Help clients deeply understand the needs and desires of members.

Responsibilities

• Undertake qualitative and quantitative research of audiences to develop detailed member needs and personas.
• Gather and analyse macro-level data to identify broader sector trends to effectively position our client’s communities for success.
• Review existing communities against established benchmarks to identify and prioritise areas of improvement.
• Develop and improve the systems through which FeverBee gathers, analyses, and uses community data to develop successful community strategies.
• Present data to clients and other external audiences in compelling and persuasive ways.
• (potentially) Build measurement frameworks to help clients continue measuring and evaluating the success of their communities.

Skills And Experience

• Past experience gathering and analyzing qualitative data is critical. You should be comfortable undertaking interviews with a wide range of individuals.
• Strong analytical skills are essential. Experience as an industry analyst, UX researcher, economist, or statistics might be beneficial.
• Proficiency with statistics and dataset analytics (using R, SPSS, SAS, or Excel) is a plus. You should be able to run tests of significance on normal and non-normal data.
• Intermediate data-visualisation skills. You don’t need to be world-class, but the output needs to look polished and something you would happily share with clients.

Location

• This is a remote position. However, you should be in a time zone that allows for communication with clients in Europe and North America.

How To Apply

• Send an email to [email protected]. Including your resume/CV can help, but examples of your work would be even better.

Salary

• £40k to £45k GBP ($54k to $61k USD)

To apply, contact [email protected].

I wrote Build Your Community because I believe a new era of building communities has begun.

This new era is defined by five major forces which are already having a huge impact upon your community.

On July 29th, I’m hosting an open webinar which will identify each of these forces, why they’re becoming increasingly important, and how to adapt your strategy to thrive in the new era of community building.

• Date: July 29th, 2021
• Time: 5.30pm BST (UK), 12.30pm EDT, 9.30am PDT
• Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2ffJ1wB8Qr6ppybZ44YtgA (also sign up to get the recording)

At the end of the webinar I’ll also share some resources you can use to plan your community efforts to thrive in this new era.

I’m not an enterprise level customer for most of the software I use.

It wouldn’t take much to turn me into an unprofitable customer either.

If I’m paying $500 a year for a software product and each support call I make costs the company $13 (for example), my value as a customer drops precipitously with each call I make (or ticket I file).

It’s not uncommon for the costs of supporting lower-value customers to exceed the revenue generated by the customer.

This is where organisations increasingly rely upon communities to fill the gaps.

At the top tier (enterprise plans/customers), customers will always expect a support representative on-hand to resolve any problems. The speed and quality of response is often detailed in the contract. But organisations increasingly rely upon communities (notably Q&A discussion forums) to support lower-value customers.

This makes sense. If lower-tier customers can answer each other’s questions, the cost of supporting each new customer approaches zero as time (and activity) increases. This is where a typical Q&A platform approach comes into play.

But this doesn’t mean community approaches are only valid for lower-tier customers. As we can see in the pyramid diagram, community approaches can still provide tremendous value to all tiers. But they have to be catered to each tier.

For example, premium customers may not have traditional support questions to answer, but we’re noticing they still want to connect and learn from each other. But they need you to provide a private, facilitated, space for that to happen.

The sense of privacy and freedom to exchange tips / learn from each other is critical here. Enterprise customers can join this as well, but they also seem to value exclusive meetups and invites to engage directly with key staff.

To simplify, the basic Q&A forum is probably for basic-level customers. Beyond that you may need to create private, facilitated, places to support customers to proactively exchange ideas.

It’s great to read books about building communities, but there’s also a danger in only reading books about building communities.

If the goal of your community is to improve customer support, you should be reading the best books and following the best blogs about customer support.

If the goal of your community is to increase customer success, retention, loyalty, and innovation you should be reading the best books, blogs, and articles about those topics too.

The more you become an expert in the area(s) where your community delivers results, the better you can fine-tune your community to achieve these results. Better yet, you can speak the right language and understand the bigger picture.

The great thing about this is for $100 or so you can become up to speed in almost any topic.

I’m following two private communities of practice on the same platform launched at approximately the same time.

Neither had a big audience to begin with.

One community manager has been initiating a new discussion once or twice a week and then emailing 15 to 20 members to reply to it. He also reaches out to people talking about the topic on social media and invites each person to join with a personal, private, email.

Every new member receives a personal private email that aims to begin a discussion. It’s absolutely draining work – but over the past month, the number of posts has risen from 5 to 10 organic posts per week up to 60 to 70 organic posts per week now (and it’s really beginning to accelerate). The community has around 150 registered members.

In the other, the community team initiates a new fun discussion each day, publishes fresh weekly content, and looks for more opportunities to get members to join. This community has 400+ registered members but attracts only 3 to 4 organic posts per week (from 2 to 3 active members). This number has declined since the launch.

The lessons here should be clear. Registration means nothing without discussions. And the way to get discussions isn’t to pack a community with members, it’s to create discussions that can solicit useful information for others and then work hard to get people to reply to them.

If you buy a new car and then a week later your neighbour buys a better model of the same car, your satisfaction level with your car plummets.

If you get a pay rise and then a week later your coworker gets a bigger pay rise, your happiness has been turned to anger (perhaps fury).

After the Grenfell fire tragedy in London, I remember listening to a radio show where callers in the nearby area said they were disgusted by the idea survivors might be given new homes in their building. Apparently, callers had “worked really hard” for their home and it wasn’t fair.

Much of the anger and satisfaction we encounter in managing communities is based upon members comparing themselves positively or negatively to other members. The absolute value (points, rewards, punishment) is of lesser importance than how members relate it to the points, rewards, and punishments experienced by other members.

We once ran an interesting (if rather uncontrolled test). We gave top members in one community a big reward in private and top members in another community a much smaller reward in public. It wasn’t even close, the latter group engaged far better (and appeared far happier) with their small reward announced in public.

The biggest source of growth isn’t going to come from within the community, but from outside the community.

It’s easy to forget this. You can spend vast amounts of time trying to optimise rewards and tweak the technology. But, ultimately, the biggest source of possible members are those interested in the topic but don’t participate in your community today.

• How do you reach them?
• What do you tell them?
• How will you persuade them to ask a question?

These are the critical questions.

A while back I purchased a Hubitat hub. It was tricky to figure out how to set it up, so I went to Google and landed on a community post.

Up until that moment, I hadn’t noticed Hubitat had a community (despite it being a homepage navigation tab!).

When I got stuck again, my first instinct was to search Google for an answer.

Why didn’t I ask in the community?

These are the critical challenges right now to growing a community.

Do members know you exist?
Do they see the value of your community?
Do they believe the community will deliver on that value?
How are they getting that value if not the community?

Why is there not a link, message, or QR code in the Hubitat box inviting me to join the community, ask questions, and get help?

Why did I not receive an email inviting me to join the community and a specific mentoring group for newcomers?

Why was I not sent a list of regular questions/issues people have along with links to top influencers in the community (and the ecosystem) I should follow?

If you want to grow rapidly, you have to work more outside of your community than within it.

Every few months we scrape a sample of brand communities to analyse if the level of participation has increased or declined.

This data is a pretty good benchmark for both the level of participation you should expect in your community and what the trend line of a mature community should look like.

Here’s the current data.

No. Active Users Per Community

The number of active users in most communities has declined over the past few months and appears to be returning to the pre-pandemic baseline.

If you’re seeing a drop of between 30 to 40% in the number of active users since January, this is probably less a result of something taking place in your community and more a result of bigger trends beyond your control.

However, as we can see below, there is considerable fluctuation between different communities.

Gaming is clearly a seasonal activity that peaks in holidays. However, sectors like Fitbit and HP appear to be following post-pandemic trends. Other communities (i.e Upwork) fluctuate considerably without an obvious cause.

Broadly speaking, if you’re a mature community with 1k+ active posters per month and seeing a drop of less than 30% since December, you’re probably doing fine.

No. Posts Per Community

The number of posts is strangely disconnected from the number of active users as we can see below.

The data feels a little skewed here, but overall the number of posts in communities has increased since January (11% on average, but 50% by median).

This probably reflects a broader trend of fewer members participating more frequently in many communities. However, as shown below, this clearly varies by community.

Summary

Overall, it’s hard to parse clear insights from a dataset that has been so disrupted by the pandemic. It’s clear community participation isn’t exploding. But nor is it clear that it’s in decline neither.

My hunch is we’re returning to pre-pandemic levels of participation where growth and activity are highly dependent upon external factors (no. customers / no. questions they have). I would expect relatively static to slight increases in participation over the coming year.

My podcast interview with David Spinks of CMX was published last week where we discuss the critical challenge of motivating members to engage in communities today (along with a bunch of other topics).

One of the key discussion points is how we adjust our approach to motivating members in the new era of community building.

Many of the old reward-focused tactics no longer work. The competition is too ferocious. Instead, we need to engender the right feelings in the right way to thrive.

We also take a deep dive on many other topics (I hope you find it useful).

You may also get value from some other events

If you’re curious about advanced approaches to nurturing and engaging superusers, I recommend watching this video with TokyWoky.

And if you’re looking for global community trends, you might find my keynote on Thursday worth attending.

In a recent project, we had trouble agreeing on whether to launch a community on a forum or as a Facebook group.

The demographics and research sat right on the borderline of benefits between the two.

Instead of guessing, we took the more obvious approach. We did both for the first two months and treated it as a test.

We invited the same members to join both platforms, started the same discussions, and waited to see what would happen.

The Facebook group quickly came to life and the forum spluttered and struggled.

The community won’t stay on Facebook forever. But to generate the initial momentum and then decide where to go long-term (if we need to move) is worthwhile.

Two interesting points here.

The first was the level of resistance we came up against running this test. A couple of people felt telling members they could join two groups to discuss a topic would cause overwhelming confusion. As best as we can tell it didn’t. People simply picked the platform that suited them.

Second, sometimes you have to accept that what members want and what you want can be very different things. Sometimes you need to change your vision to suit your members.