There is a lot of delusion that if you just have the right community ROI metrics, you will get the support you crave.
I.e., if you had the data to prove community ROI, you would persuade people to support you.
But it doesn’t work like that.
The ROI metrics are the facts; they are helpful, but they matter most when people are already predisposed to supporting a community and need facts to persuade others.
It provides the argument for why they want to do this.
There’s a big difference between convincing someone to hold an opinion and persuading someone to take action.
The ROI metrics matter – but they’re only the icing on the cake when it comes to persuading.
If we’re going to build a stronger case, we need to become adept at persuading, and persuasion is a game of emotions.
As part of our Strategic Community Management course, I want to teach you a more effective and savvy approach to gaining internal support and crafting the right narrative.
A Text-Book Study In Persuasion
One of my first consulting clients was a pharmaceutical company in 2010.
My primary contact and I needed executive support for an internal community. Her boss, let’s call her Helen, would be in the meeting to support us, and I was there to provide the community expertise.
I had prepared around a dozen slides. They demonstrated the compounding value of community over time and the cost of inaction and zeroed in specifically on the metrics I thought would matter most to the executive whose support we needed.
About an hour before the meeting, Helen walked into our meeting room and said;
“Don’t worry about all that” [she was referring to the presentation]….”I’ll run the meeting – just be prepared to take any questions that might come up”
I was quietly furious that our hard work was being ignored (and also curious how to prep for ‘any question’).
Then I watched her deliver one of the simplest, most effective pitches I’ve ever seen. She essentially said:
“[competitor 1], [competitor 2], and [competitor 3] have all launched internal communities for colleagues to collaborate and share information all in one place* – while our teams are still emailing documents to each other one at a time.
It’s making us look archaic, and we’re wasting too much time trying to find basic information. We’re in danger of falling farther behind. So I want to launch our own community with a pilot within three months in [division] and roll it out to the entire company within the year].”
The exec nodded, asked a few basic questions about cost and timelines, and then greenlit the project.
That was it.
*aside, I later found out she had no idea whether other companies had launched internal communities or not.
A Savvier Understanding Of Decision-Making
Before that meeting in 2011, I had prepared a dozen slides with metrics like:
Reduced duplication of work.
Cost savings in employee time looking for information.
Improved employee engagement through community participation.
Improved employee retention value etc…
But Helen knew that data doesn’t drive most decisions; emotions do.
She knew the exec cared far more about falling behind competitors (on his watch) than in broad benefits to the organisation, so she specifically targeted that.
Her pitch was a mix of jealousy and status, and she used words like ‘archaic’ and ‘falling farther behind’ deliberately to provoke the response she needed.
(Aside, I’ve found showing execs benchmarks of how their organisation’s communities compared to competitors is the most effective way to gain and sustain internal support ever since).
She also knew the message had to come from her—the person the executive knew and trusted. While her method was brisk (Dutch?), it worked.
The reality is that organisations are collections of people, each of whom responds to the system’s incentives, their own biases, and according to their own traits and value systems.
This is the reality we need to consider when building our business case.
And the most important thing to remember is this:
People make decisions based on emotions and then use facts to rationalise that decision.
The common advice about gaining support isn’t wrong – it’s just incomplete.
The Decision-Making Process
I’ve been a consultant for over 15+ years and worked with many of the world’s largest companies.
What I’ve learned is that the way organisations make decisions in theory is very different from practice.
There will be a lot of variability from one organisation to the next, but the key takeaway is that decision-making isn’t rational.
You can be making the perfect pitch, but if it comes at the wrong time, it’s not going to land.
Likewise, you might have all the right benefits for the business, but forget to include an appeal to the individual’s status. Or you might not bring the right gatekeepers along at the right time.
The point is this;
Gaining support for anything is about mastering the process, not producing facts.
The Multi-Level Business Case For Community
During our Strategic Community Management course, we’ll discuss how decisions are made in organisations (especially large organisations) and how to craft the right narrative.
This will tackle how you persuade people at every level.
You can see a simplistic breakdown here:
Yes, metrics and data are essential, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg—the icing on the cake. During our course, we’ll cover every single layer.
Earning trust: How do you earn the trust you need to deliver the message? If someone doesn’t know or trust you, it doesn’t matter what you say. That’s problem number one. How do you even get on the person’s radar?
Ensuring understanding: What’s the best way of describing the community? What’s the right metaphor, analogy, and comparison to use? How do you properly position in the minds of someone outside of this world?
Mitigating fear: How do you make the community seem less risky? This isn’t just about finding the words; it’s about making the community less risky to host for the organisation. Pre-empt the issues that can arise.
Boosting status: How can you align the community to raise the status of individual(s) involved in supporting the community? How do you make it easy for them to see themselves the way they want to be seen by saying yes to the community?
Generating Excitement: How do you make it fun to be involved with the community? When so many aspects of organisations are dull and stodgy, how can a community generate excitement and something people want to associate themselves with?
Only then do we get to the metrics, goals, and data side of things to demonstrate the community’s value to the business.
Learn To Create The Right Community Narrative
One of the key skills we’re going to cover in our Strategic Community Management course is how to build and gain internal support for a community.
This is going to go far beyond the basic advice you’ve heard many times before.
“Focus on business objectives!”
“Speak their language!”
“Show real ROI – that’s what execs respond to.”
Instead, we’re going to share the multi-level approach to building and gaining support which reflects a modern (chaotic) business environment.
You’re going to learn how to talk about community at all levels of the organisation, position it in the minds of executives, and, yes, present the right ROI at the right time too.
We’re going to share case studies of how we and others have gained and sustained internal support in the past – with a view to the principles of persuasion.
The course begins on July 17 – you can sign up here.
