If you’re unsure of what to focus on, you’re not alone.
There is no shortage of improvements you can make to your community. And there are plenty of major external trends to consider as well.
From an (admittedly informal) survey, here are five challenges I’d look to solve in the new year.
If you can solve these, you will be doing better than most.
Challenge 1: Truly Understanding Your Current Situation
From speaking to several community professionals, it’s pretty clear that many of us are unsure how our community compares against others, if we have the right strategy, or even if we are allocating the right level of resources to solve our challenges.
This is why the first challenge is to complete a full audit of your community and its environment.
This should include:
- Analysis of the environment. Make sure you know what’s happening in the ecosystem. Is your ecosystem mature and thus prompting a change in the technology stack? Or is it static and you can focus on doing what you’re already doing? Should you be pursuing an optimising, adapting, or repair approach?
- Audience analysis. You should have detailed profiles of the audience. You should know what they need, where they go to for information and what needs they have which presently may or may not be being met. You should know if those needs are changing or not as this will highlight what you need to change.
- Competitive benchmarking. You should know how your community compares against your competitors. You should have an understanding of the size of their teams, the resources they’re investing and what is and isn’t working for them.
- A review of the community experience. Undertake UX research with members of the community to see how they progress and experience the community. Begin before they even get to the site. Give them related tasks to do and see how they solve those tasks.
This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it gives you some broad benchmarks you can use to track progress as you develop the rest of your strategy.
If you don’t have time to undertake the audit yourself, we can help.
Challenge 2: Developing A Common Community Framework (or CoE)
When a community is confined to a platform, you have your own world you can largely control and directly influence.
The delineation of responsibility between you and other departments is usually clear.
What happens in the platform is your responsibility, what happens outside of that platform is someone else’s responsibility.
However, a major challenge in the Community Everywhere approach is you might increasingly tread onto the fiefdoms of other departments.
Each department is responsible for a different slice of the customer journey and held accountable for optimising their own part of it.
Many of them don’t consider their role to build and engage a community at all.
The solution to this problem is a common community framework (a centre of excellence). You might not be able to control or enforce standards of engagement, but you can cajole and support people to think of their work as a community approach.
This should include:
- A standardized definition of community.
- A clear vision and purpose of community activities.
- A governance model and an audit of who is responsible for which audience(s) and on what channels.
- An alignment of the customer/member journey to these different channels (and matching the channels to key member needs).
- An internal knowledge base of best practices on launching, growing, and engaging successful communities which anyone can use to develop their own community on new platforms.
- An internal community of peers to turn to for support when engaging in communities.
Not every organisation will need this. Generally, the larger your organisation and the more overlapping lanes of responsibility, the better it is to have this in place. This lets colleagues from any team use the power of community to achieve their goals.
Challenge 3: Navigating The Major Community Experience Issues
Developing a great community experience is becoming more complex.
In the past, you could simply select the best platform for your community, make it look as good as you can, and then get to work building your community.
Today there is a host of new concerns to tackle. Platforms are releasing new tools and features. Increasingly they’re being acquired to integrate with bigger CRM platforms. New preferences are emerging as you can see below.
Major concerns I’d focus on include:
- Should your experience focus on just one platform or many? This heavily depends on your agreed definition of community above. Are you building the big C or little c community? Does a single platform make sense in 2023 and beyond? In the Community Everywhere Era do you want to ignore people engaging on Reddit, LinkedIn, StackOverflow, and other channels where people talk with one another about you? Do you need connectors to integrate and respond to those channels?
- What should you do about AI? There’s no shortage of possibilities with AI, but very few people are showing concrete results just yet. ChatGPT can help answer certain types of questions almost as well as superusers. You can introduce an AI bot to a community to answer questions and even train AI specifically to answer questions in your community. AI can also do a great job in removing spam and promoting top members. But how can you implement this? Do you wait for your platform or can you begin building something yourself? Also, what are the potential negative impacts of introducing AI to a community?
- Ensuring high standards of data integrity, privacy, and security. I’m often surprised by how little thought is given to data issues given how much they impact the outcomes. You should be doing a regular data audit and understanding what data you need, what you’re collecting, how and where it’s stored, and whether you’re abiding by requirements in USA, Europe, and elsewhere. Are you abiding by the principles of data limitation and minimisation, consent when processing data, data subject rights, data transferal rules, and accuracy?
- Are you really providing a good user experience? Whenever we undertake UX research, we find most community experiences borderline inadequate. Often this research raises issues which should have been resolved a long time ago. Some things we usually look at here include: the quantity of emails members receive, the quality of their onboarding experience, the prioritised issues to resolve, removing outdated content, and the taxonomy.
- Email overwhelm. Are members receiving multiple unnecessary emails when they join (or shortly after they join) your community? If they become a customer at the same time, how many messages are they likely to get?
- Onboarding. Can you remove the majority of your onboarding messages and still improve retention rates? Is your onboarding actually having the impact you think it is?
- Have we identified and prioritised the issues we need to resolve through UX research? You should have a clear list with a set priority and when you plan to fix those issues. You can see an example of this below.
Issue Solution Severity Effort Priority Doesn’t realise the login option is also the registration option. Easy to tweak to login/register. Severe Low High The ‘forgot password’ feature isn’t working. Needs a developer to review the process and resolve it. Severe Low High Community is ‘overwhelming’. Members don’t know where to ask questions. Revamp homepage with separate instances for members depending upon profile data Severe Moderate Medium Members can’t find the posts they’ve recently made. Need to show members the recent posts they’ve made on the homepage when they visit and in the member profile Medium High Medium Members can’t find the latest information about products. Need a separate signposted area on the homepage and on discussion pages Medium Moderate Medium The registration process takes too much time to progress through. Need to reduce redundant pages and information we ask from newcomers. Medium High Low Members are unable to connect with people like themselves. Need to create a member directory and solicit metadata from members Low High Low Archiving outdated content. Are you systematically identifying and archiving old or outdated content within the community? Have you removed and updated the static information where possible? Are you keeping your keystone content up to date?
Is your taxonomy and navigation suited to member intent? Are you intuitively satisfying the real needs of people who visit your community homepage? Have you gone through the checklist of things which should be on the homepage?
- Data integration. By this point, you probably integrate your community with your CRM in some form. At the very least you should be able to sync CRM profiles when a member registers/edits their community profile, sync user activity to CRM profile activity streams, create support cases from community discussions, view leads from community professionals, and sync use activity with the CRM. However, you may also work to build a data pipeline which houses all community data into a data warehouse.
Challenge 4: Turning Superusers Into Superstars
A growing trend over the past year is the tendency to learn from individuals rather than organisations. You want your audience to subscribe to each other’s newsletters, podcasts, and video channels.
Yet, most community programs still follow the classical approach to superusers.
This means you identify people who are answering questions well, invite them to be part of the program, and then offer them special access, points, badges and more to keep them engaged. And this still works fine if your community is entirely oriented around customer support.
But if you want to have your smartest members proactively sharing their best expertise in the form of videos, blog posts, reels, and courses, then you need to provide the structure and support to make that happen.
This means turning superusers into superstars. You need to design a program which:
- Encourages more people to share their expertise on platforms they prefer to use. You need a place within your website or community where people interested in becoming an influential figure in your space can access resources and get help.
- Provide support to help people to overcome the barriers which force many to give up. You need to focus efforts on key leverage points where many people will give up (e.g. not attracting an audience fast enough).
- Promote and spread the best content and resources created by top members. Naturally, you need to feature your constellation of stars prominently so the people who do emerge can rapidly build an audience and you are sharing their expertise widely.
- Connect and organize your stars. You need to be connecting stars with one another and helping to organise them so they’re constantly provided with useful information, and support, and can collaborate with one another to build their reputation.
Your ultimate goal is to have a growing number of people eager to share their expertise about your products, services, or mission amongst their own audience and in their own channels.
And don’t forget this applies to employees too. People want to engage directly with people like Nicholas Renotte, Bogan Tunguz, and Naiffer Romero.
In the future, you need a program which turns employees and superusers into industry superstars. This is going to be part programmatic, part coaching, and part good old-fashioned community organizing.
Challenge 5: Going Past Call Deflection As A Measurement System
A major challenge is finding the best means of measuring a community.
We’ve spoken a lot about the problems with measurement before.
In the past, too many of us resorted to rather suspect measures of call deflection simply because it was the easiest thing to measure.
This typically means:
- Multiplying the no. visitors to answered questions by the % who got the answer (via survey results).
- Multiplying this figure by the % who otherwise would have contacted support (determined using a survey).
- Multiplying this figure by the avg. cost of a support call.
For example, if you had 10,000 visitors to answered questions last month and a poll/survey tells you 68% got the answer to their question and 70% of them would have contacted support, you know that’s 4760 deflected calls (10k * 0.7 * 0.68).
Multiply this by the avg. cost per call (let’s imagine $25) and you get $119k cost savings for that month.
Alas, there are several problems with this methodology. The biggest is the nonresponse bias.
The people who don’t get an answer don’t stick around to complete surveys!
This drastically distorts the results. By changing the pop-up time for a survey you can drastically improve the positive responses to your poll.
The other problem is it assumes people only visit one answer. What if someone clicks on a dozen answers, doesn’t get the answer they want, and then asks a question? Is that 13 calls deflected if they later say they got the answer?
What if 30% of traffic to the community is bots? What if the majority of visitors are on the site for less than 30 seconds? Can you honestly count them in your figures?
Call deflection metrics are widely used because they give you a really high number and data you can use to support the number. However, the methodology is usually deeply flawed. A far better measure would be to survey the customer base, and compare those who use the community vs. those who don’t, and then calculate the difference in tickets filed between them.
We need a better method
Any method you use will run into clear problems. Controlled trials are extremely difficult to do, separating correlation from causation is incredibly problematic when comparing groups as is assigning a value to a behavior. Surveys run into the non-response bias (and low response rates).
This doesn’t mean that measurement is a bust. It just means it’s time to get a lot more precise about your measurement system.
Accept that measurement is complex and the system you design has to be more complex than what you’re using today.
Every method involves a trade-off between precision and simplicity, correlation and causation. The solution involves working with your team to understand:
- The question you’re trying to answer.
- The type of answer you need.
- The data you have access to.
- How the answer will be used.
- The right methodology for each of the above.
This is where you need in-house experts (or a community consultant like ours) to help.
This is a collaborative process where you work hard to identify
These slides from a recent workshop might help
Focus On The Long-Term Challenges
There are always going to be fires to extinguish when you develop an enterprise community. But try not to let the urgent crowd out the important.
If you invest the time, effort, and resources to solving the challenges above you will be in great shape this time next year.
And if you don’t have the time to solve the challenges yourselves we’re always happy to help.
