Author: Richard Millington

The purpose of creating a strategy is to allocate resources to achieve decisive outcomes in favor of your objective.

As you saw previously, there are many exciting optimizations you can make. It is often optimizations that are talked about at conferences, in webinars, and demonstrated in blog posts. These can help, but only to a degree. Ultimately, your performance in any single area is influenced by the amount of resources you have to allocate to that area.

This means we need to know what resources we have to allocate. There are four major resources:

1. Your time. With very few exceptions, the more time you spend on the task, the better the outcome. Time lets you do more idea generation, more research, build better relationships, go the extra mile in what matters, etc. But time isn’t the only resource you have to allocate here.
   
   How you allocate your time and the time of your team is entirely within your domain of control. Be aware that some of your time might be taken up by meetings and existing commitments. Estimate perhaps 60% of any individual working full-time on a community could be spent doing community work. Also be sure to include any volunteer time here as well. This might be more flexible, but you can base it on the current amount of time volunteers spend in your community.

2. Audience attention. You might be able to do a big promotional push to get members to perform a behavior once every few months, but not once a week. There is a law of diminishing returns about audience attention.Tweet This Each message has a lesser effect. This means audience attention is limited and, thus, a valuable resource.
   
   This is a variable metric, but it is essentially how often you can communicate with your audience before they begin to tune out. You can test the open and unsubscribe rates by email to understand this better. It might also include how many big announcements you can make.
3. Budget or money. Although different budgets can magically appear and disappear on the whims of stakeholders, let’s assume money is very much fixed. If you have a discretionary budget to spend, you get to choose when and where to spend it. This might be on services that will help you perform your role, on paid support, or other miscellaneous costs (e.g. hosting events). This can often be the difference between publishing a series of blog posts or a professionally designed book. You could just as easily develop a self-published book people can buy if you can afford an editor/designer etc.
   
   It is not always easy to catalogue a budget. In many situations, your boss will not agree to a budget before she knows where the budget will be spent. Try to understand if there is a broad range of discretionary budget which could be spent on key objectives.
4. Internal goodwill. This can refer to a number of tangible or intangible assets within the organization. For example, this might include the ability to ask a developer to help you code software you need, or a designer to help you design assets for the community. It might refer to the length of time the organization will give you to demonstrate success. It might be contrary to the organization’s trust to let you do things they perceive as risky.
   
   It might be hard to catalogue internal resources and your access to them. If you have the broad support of your boss, you might assume you could, if the idea was strong, use in-house resources to achieve your objectives.

Catalogue Your Resources

The first thing you need to do is to catalogue the resources you have available. This means your budget, your time, the audience’s attention, and internal goodwill (access to in-house assets).

By this point, you should have a clear idea of what resources you have to allocate. Now you just need to know how to allocate them.

A key feature of a successful strategy is that it is signed off by relevant stakeholders within the organization. This will often just be your boss. Sometimes, it might be a broader group of stakeholders.

The most common mistake here is to present stakeholders with a comprehensive strategic plan to sign off instead of a strategy. There are some clear challenges with this:

1. The bigger the plan the longer it will take for stakeholders to read. Every additional page reduces the number of people who will read it. Your entire community project might be slowed down not because the strategic plan is good or bad, but simply because it’s long.
2. If you present an entire strategic plan to stakeholders, stakeholders will often comb through and pick apart every detail. This takes a lot of time and is not likely to lead to the best outcome. This happens partly through an idealized sense of self-importance and partly through the transferral of responsibility. If they approve a strategy and you fail to implement it, it’s your fault. If they approve an entire strategic plan and it doesn’t work out, it’s their fault.

Don’t develop a strategy without interacting with your audience. You can should go beyond surveys here. Surveys can yield very useful insights about which audience to target or what tactics might work, but it fails to answer a key question.

How do members feel about the behavior you want them to perform?

Speak to your audience and find out how they feel about the behavior today. This stretches beyond asking them what they do and what they think. It means speaking to members who are performing the behavior and understanding how this behavior makes them feel.

We so rarely consider what we want members to feel about the community and their contributions to it. When we do, we default to positive-sounding emotions (e.g. we want members to feel excited and happy). But what do these emotions mean and are they the best emotions to use?

What Does It Mean To Be Happy?

Imagine a member tells you creating great content makes them ‘happy’. You need to probe beyond this. What does happy mean?

Does it mean they feel respected and valued? Does it mean they feel creative and inspired? You need to identify the very specific emotions you want to amplify. This will take work to interview people about their current attitudes towards the behavior.

The first step is to set up as many interviews as you can with people performing this behavior today (aside, simply setting up interviews helps you build useful relationships that will help later on). You need to push very deep at this level to identify the exact emotions they feel. You need to get really specific answers, otherwise your entire strategy might be based upon the wrong emotion.

For example, if you want people to join the community, ask others how it felt to join the community. If you want people to perform a specific behavior, ask those that perform the behavior how it feels. This works better in a direct call/interview setting than it does via surveys.

Data Should Surprise You

The data here should surprise you. We often find the emotion we thought was driving the behavior is not the one most cited. If your data does not surprise you, you might be biasing the data towards what you expected (or hoped) to find.

Identifying The Emotion To Amplify

The answers will always be more nuanced than joy, happiness, and excitement. You need to push hard for people to explain how they feel when they make a contribution. You often need to translate this into an emotion into something deeper. The emotional wheel below will help you push deeper to find the very specific emotion that people feel.

These emotions will lead into one or more really clear strategies that you can choose between.

Let’s look at three really simple strategies based upon the example above. To illustrate how the strategy changes based upon the emotion, we will keep the goal and objective consistent.

Example 2: Respect Strategy

If your research revealed that people who create quality content most desire to feel respected, your strategy should work to amplify this level of respect.

You can see here, too, that tactics would not be about gamification or notification systems. Your tactics might focus on levels such as a personal thank you from the CEO, reviews of their contributions by senior staff members, inclusion in staff meetings, etc.

Should You Use Negative Emotions?

This is also perhaps the most controversial area of strategic community management. Should we amplify negative emotions to gain behaviors?

You must use your own ethical barometer here. If fear of something bad happening encourages people to create quality content that builds their reputation and improves their condition, that is a mutual win. If it draws people further into despair, that is clearly unethical.

Our advice is to consider whether this behavior would improve your member’s condition. If the answer is yes, then fear and worry can be a powerful motivator to drive positive action. If members are already afraid or worried, it makes no sense to us to ignore this. You can instead signpost your community as a place to resolve and alleviate those worries. If you disagree, you can stick solely to positive emotions.

There are three separate strategies to achieve the same strategic objective. Each of these will lead you down an entirely different set of tactics to achieve your goal. This is why the strategy you decide is so critical. It must be based upon clear research to avoid making a costly mistake in the wrong direction.

You should only have one strategy per strategic objective.

The best strategies shut down as many opportunities as possible to focus on a few single, decisive areas. In a community context, you need to find the best way to achieve your objectives above.

A strategy is the emotion that will change the behavior of your target audience. This means that, in order to write a great strategy, you need first to understand what changes behavior. This is where we need to understand a little more about psychology.

What Changes Behaviour?

Facts are far less powerful than emotions when it comes to changing member behavior. Think about climate change. Most people believe that climate change is both man-made and a serious threat to this planet. Yet, few people have changed their ways.

Behavior change is achieved by amplifying specific emotions to evoke a sustained behavior change.

Community strategy is therefore, the science (not art) of amplifying emotions to change the behavior of the specific group of people. A good community strategy identifies the emotion you want to amplify among the group. This is based upon research.

Your strategy is the approach you will take to get members to perform the behavior. As behavior is largely driven by emotions, a good strategy will target a specific emotion and use that emotion to drive the behavior you want members to perform.

Remember, too, that you will need more than one strategy here. You will need at least one strategy for your priority objective(s) and a unique strategy for your failsafe objectives. If you are lucky, the two will closely align. In practice, it is more likely you need to pursue two relatively distinct strategies for different target audiences.

Don’t Worry About Tactics Yet

You don’t want to worry about tactics at this level. Tactics are the specific things (e.g. invite experts to meet the CEO) that provoke the emotion. Tactics are irrelevant at the strategy level. If you get the strategy right, all of your tactics become more effective. Changing the platform, introducing gamification, creating an ambassador scheme, launching a new event… these are all tactics.

Sometimes, they are very effective tactics to achieve a strategy, but they are tactics nonetheless. If they are not strategic, they are taking you in the wrong direction.

A good tactic will significantly amplify an emotion. But a good strategy will amplify the efficacy of all tactics (even the bad ones). For example, a tactic that has a small impact towards amplifying the right emotion is far better than a tactic that has a big impact upon the wrong emotion.

If you only pursue a single, specific objective mentioned above, will you stop doing the things that keep activity going every day? What about welcoming newcomers? Removing the posts? Maintaining the website, etc? Many of the tasks you perform today, for example, are critical tasks to keep activity ticking over.

Trade-offs to Succeed

This is where you have to understand the trade-off required in strategic community management.

If you want to increase the quantity of valuable behaviors, you have to be comfortable with a decline in some of the metrics you measure today. This is natural. You are shifting resources away from maximizing engagement and towards strategic goals. The challenge is to identify what level of decline is within your comfort zone.

It is important to have clear, strategic, objectives to hit. You should decisively allocate your resources (more on this later) to achieve that objective. However, you should not allocate all of your resources to achieve this (or these) objective(s). You still need to perform many other tasks that keep a high level of growth and activity in the community.

You cannot hope to decisively increase the number of newcomers joining the community if you only allocate another 10% to 15% of our resources to promoting the community. Yet, you would see a huge change if you commit 70% of your resources to achieve this goal.

This leaves 30% to best sustain the level of activity from members we have now. It’s at this point we set a failsafe. What kind of decline are we comfortable with? This should usually between a 5% and 30% drop in growth or engagement, which is acceptable in order to achieve our goal.

The critical thing is to include this failsafe as its own unique objective.

This 12% failsafe depends entirely upon the number of resources you allocate. For example, if you allocate 95% of resources, you might expect a 30% drop. If you allocate 50% of resources, you might expect closer to a 5% drop. This gives you some balance to work with. If you’re not keeping within 12% of current levels, you may need to adjust your resources accordingly.

It is also critically important you prepare any internal stakeholders for this drop in engagement metrics. If you do not, you could find yourself facing serious problems later on.

You have identified both the goals and the behaviors (objectives) which will likely accomplish these goals. Remember to drop these into your template. Your next challenge is to make these objectives strategic. This means understanding which audience you will target and why.

This level does not concern your stakeholders, but it does determine what you will do and why.  In the previous chapter, you learned the goal of the community is to maximize the quantity of valuable behaviors. However, you face some limitations here.

Keep Members Satisfied

You cannot repeatedly message members to perform the behaviors you want. That will annoy your members and drive them away. You can only maximize the quantity of valuable behaviors by keeping members satisfied and influencing their behavior in ways that add value to them.

What audience should you target?

Your primary community objective(s) will target just one of these four audiences (you will have other objectives too, but we will come to those shortly). The quadrants will depend upon whichever approach is most likely to maximize the number of valuable behaviors being undertaken.

This relies upon four key questions:

1. Is it easier to increase current behavior from existing members?
2. Is it easier to change the behavior of existing members?
3. Is it easier to attract more members?
4. Is it easier to attract more members and change their behavior?

It is important not to keep the community objectives to yourself. Every senior stakeholder might understand what the goal of the community is. However, you also need to take the time to ensure they understand what the objectives of the community are.

This ensures them to make a direct connection between the work you do and the value you create. You’re not just getting people to chat online; you’re getting people to share knowledge that increases customer satisfaction with the product. This supports the goal of the organization.

It is easy simply to agree a goal and work alone going forward. Do not do this. Proactively build positive relationships with your stakeholders. Keep them frequently updated with progress. Do not let them wonder if the community helps their departments, but make sure they know exactly how it helps. Reinforce this view at every opportunity.

Far too many communities are killed by stakeholders who do not understand exactly how the community benefits themTweet This . This is the most critical lesson to learn about community and value. Your work is not to maximize a random proxy metric of engagement (e.g. posts). Your work is to maximize the quantity of valuable behaviors.

This confusion is the reason why so many organizations ask for data on the level of activity or the number of members. Try to avoid providing this data. Instead, report on your member objectives. Are you seeing more valuable member behavior now? Report on whether the community has helped achieve goals. Always try to focus on value, not low-level metrics.

Your very first step in any community project is to determine the goal of the community as established by leadership.

You should do this in the job interview before you begin working on a community. If it’s too late for that, understand the goals on your first day. If it’s too late for that still, set a meeting with your boss’ boss tomorrow and identify the goals.

Believe us, we know how hard it is if you’re the sole link to the community in an organization that does not appreciate or understand its purpose. However, set a meeting and ask a combination of questions. This might include:

1. What would you like to see from the community (and why)? Try to link this to a key value metric (see our ROI project) for more information on this.

If this does not yield a useful answer, try something along the lines of:

2. What are your biggest problems? What opportunities do you see ahead? Look for something that would relate to a clear value metric along the lines of increasing revenue, reducing costs, or social impact (for non-profits).

You need to be really proactive and persistent in understanding the goals for the community here.Tweet This The best approach is to speak to your boss and find out what the goal of the community is. Push repeatedly to understand what behavior the organization is attempting to change and how this fits in with the organization’s broader strategy. Clarify, clarify, clarify…

You might find yourself having to ask several repeat questions to get the real answer. For example, many organizations might set the objective to increase customer loyalty. But does customer loyalty mean people then become advocates? Does it mean they stay as customers for longer? Does it mean they upgrade their products to a premium level, or spend more on related products?

You need to persistently clarify how the community is considered to contribute to the organization’s value.

Setting Your Own Goals Is A Bad Sign

If you find yourself being asked to set your own goals for the community, this is not a good sign. This suggests the organization does not know how the community creates value and is ambivalent about finding out.

You need to work with stakeholders to uncover their biggest problems and see where the community solves those problems. Make sure that your stakeholders accept and agree these goals in order to avoid problems later on.

Key Performance Indicators

This means we have three specific key performance indicators (KPIs) we can measure to follow success:

1. Search traffic to content articles created by the community.
2. Number of email addresses submitted to download relevant resources that suggest buying intent.
3. Number of problems shared in the community that are tagged as leads.

We could even break this down further. We could identify particular topics that are frequently searched for, identify the kinds of resources that are useful to identify potential buyers, and identify the kinds of problems where the brand can most help. This would be a more precise measurement.

Make sure that the objectives at this stage are converted into specific member behavior which you can measure. Then, make sure that these objectives are also agreed by your stakeholders. If the stakeholders do not agree that these objectives are tied to the goal, you will struggle to prove the value of the community later on. Once we know what these behaviors are, we need to understand how we can maximize them.

When we talk about community strategy, we are usually talking about the strategic plan.

A community strategy forms one part of the community’s strategic plan. It’s neither the first nor the last part.

Strategic planning is a process of identifying the broad goal, of translating that goal into member behaviors (objectives) you need to achieve. You then create a strategy (or strategies) to achieve those objectives.

Once you have created the strategy, you identify the best way to fulfil that strategy (tactics). Next, you decide who, what, and when those tactics will be executed (action plan). Finally, you measure and improve.

Strategic Plan Example

You can take many approaches to achieve your goal, multiple strategies to fulfil your objectives and many tactics to implement your strategy. Let’s connect these together into a similar example. The broader business goal might be to increase retention rates of a software platform. The customer success department might do that by building a community that shares useful tips on using that platform better and increasing the perceived value of the product.

• The community goal is to increase customer retention rates.
• The objective is to get members to share their best tips on using the product.
• The strategy might, in turn, be to turn those that share the best tips into stars that others feel jealous of and want to emulate.
• The tactics can include regular interviews with the top members, webinars featuring stars, inviting these stars to speak at events, or flying them to the headquarters for specific access and previews.
• Then, our action plan will identify the costs involved in doing these interviews and activities. It might identify who is best suited to do them, when they can be undertaken, and steps required to execute them extremely well.

Notice above how everything fits together. Also, notice how the strategy works. By devoting the majority of our resources to create stars and amplify the sense of jealousy (or admiration), we are taking resources away from other areas and other members. This means you face the risk that this will fail and other areas might be a better use for those resources.

In the next few chapters, you’re going to learn more about the community goals, objectives and types of strategy you might choose.