TL:DR – A new role is emerging for a rising number of community professionals—the role of community architect. It’s a support function that enables other departments to build thriving communities across the enterprise. It’s also where many of us can deliver the maximum value to our organisations.
How Do You Deliver The Most Value?
How much value can you offer if you focus on a single audience engaging on a single platform?
A lot, for sure! Especially if you’re running a customer support community. Millions of people might come to your community and get answers to their questions.
But no matter how great of a job you do, you can only offer so much value this way.
It’s a little like a retail store owner waiting for customers to show up so she can delight them. It’s great when it happens, but it’s not happening as often as it used to.
When you draw the boundary around what is and isn’t in your scope, you also limit the value you offer.
If you’re not getting the support and respect you feel you deserve, it’s possible because you’ve limited yourself to too small a piece of the pie.
If you want to deliver more value, you can either:
- Get better at doing what you’re already doing. This typically means increasing engagement through better processes and better experiences etc. Much of our consultancy work focuses on precisely that. But all of this is about optimising what you’re doing or
- Expand the scope of what you do. I suspect this approach has much more value than the former.
Enter The Community Architect
My major argument is simple – senior community professionals need to evolve from managing platforms to managing cross-platform programs and finally to helping departments run their community programs.
We need to become a service for other departments (similar to IT, legal, HR to engage their audiences). We must provide guidance and guardrails for anyone who wants to engage in a community to do it exceedingly well. And we need to do it without the authority to direct behaviour.
You can see the differences here:
We need to become architects of community ecosystems.
Instead of clashing with each department over control of the community, we should encourage each department to be responsible for the audiences it already engages with.
We can support them with strategy, governance structures, training, best practices, stakeholder engagement, technology frameworks, and more.
This is best depicted in the diagram below.
The exact ownership of different programs might vary by organisation, but the broad approach is to create the structures for an organisation to do community well.
When any department wants to engage its audiences, it can get support to make the right decisions at each layer of the diagram.
These layers are:
- The unique value of the community activity. They must begin with a clear idea of what they want from the community activity. It must be unique to them and connect to a clear ROI measurement.
- Needs of the audience. They must know the unique needs of the audience. They need to connect the needs they will satisfy to the unique value they want.
- The value they will add. They must be clear about what unique value they will add to solve those needs. Why will they do it better than any other channel?
- The right platforms to use. They must select the platforms where they can offer this unique value and where audiences prefer to engage to solve that need.
The architect’s role is to help guide these decisions while facilitating collaboration between different organisations to resolve any overlapping areas (e.g., two departments targeting the same audience needs or engaging on the same platforms, etc…).
Many organisations already have a ‘Center of Excellence’ (CoE) team who perform this cross-departmental function.
More need to do so.
What Does The Work Of Community Architects Involve?
The architect’s role is to serve as a consultant for other departments.
It acts more like a legal team than a marketing department. It provides the structures and support for departments to thrive.
Many of the largest brands we’ve engaged with over the past few years are adapting to this. Instead of developing a team that controls community efforts, they’re developing one that supports community efforts.
In short, if the individual community manager’s work involves responding to and engaging with members, the architect’s role is to provide everything these folks need to do it well.
The role of the community architect is threefold:
- Ensure the organisation has a united approach. The primary goal is to create a united, collaborative approach to engagement that reduces conflicts and duplication of work, provides the best member experience, and seizes opportunities for groups to work together. This is achieved by having the right governance structure, a common strategy, and a clear technology framework.
- Help each department get the most from their community activities. The secondary goal is to improve the programs that are being implemented. This involves reviewing existing programs and ensuring they follow best practices to achieve their goals. This means creating a documented knowledge base, providing training and learning opportunities, and consultancy support.
- Building and sustaining support for engagement programs. The tertiary goal is to build and sustain support for community activities. This includes winning over internal stakeholders, increasing budget and visibility, and helping integrate the community deeper into the organisation’s DNA. This will come through constant stakeholder engagement and measuring and showcasing results in various channels.
We can break these down into the activities below.
| Unity and Alignment | Improvement | Support |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy | Best Practices | Stakeholder Engagement |
| Governance | Consultancy | Measurement |
| Technology Framework | Training |
Unity and Alignment
This includes three areas:
- Strategy. A vital aspect of the community architect is to provide strategic guardrails for developing successful community programs. This should include the following:
- Engagement approach. A free-for-all isn’t an approach. This means creating contours about what you will and won’t do and ensuring the brand guidelines and organisation’s values are translated into engagement.
- Setting practical goals. Each department might have its own broad goals for the community (e.g. reducing support costs!). However, they still need to support converting these goals into specific behaviours and targets they can measure. It’s also essential to ensure the goals and targets are feasible based on an understanding of the audience. This often means hosting workshops or providing resources like the one below for groups to work through.
- Measurement framework. The community architects should provide the measurement structure for the community. Many organisations today suffer from different groups creating their methods of measuring the success of their work. This creates confusion and conflict. The architect should be able to develop and implement the proper measurement structures. This may also mean acquiring the relevant measurement tools and external support to implement the measurement framework.
- Governance. The community architect should create the governance structure for thriving programs. This will keep everyone aligned and eliminate potential conflicts between different groups.
- Creating standard, shared definitions of community. It’s hard to progress if everyone shares a different definition of community. What is and isn’t in the scope of community? An early task of any community architect is to create standard, shared definitions of community and work, ensuring widespread understanding and support of them. If people don’t share the same definitions of community, it’s hard to align on anything else.
- Identifying overlapping engagement activities. The community architect should maintain a portfolio of community engagement activities by audience targeted and the platforms used. Processes should be in place whenever there is an overlap to determine how each group engages with that audience. They should ensure audiences have a consistent engagement experience from one platform to the next.
- Approved Technology Framework. Far too many organisations use multiple community platforms to target the same audiences. Occasionally, it makes sense. Developers often prefer different platforms (Discourse/Discord) to customers or the typical member. However, it’s important to have an approved community technology framework in place for data integrity, information security, cost-effectiveness, and management. This outlines which platforms should be used and the principles that bind them. This might include:
- Technology Stack: Defining the specific technologies and platforms to build and deploy community solutions. It’s best to create a list of the best platforms for audiences and use cases. It’s best to create a list of technology vendors that have been internally approved—this will save a lot of stress later.
- Design Principles. Design and navigation principles should be consistent across all platforms. Even social media platforms should use similar graphics. It’s typically smart to have a similar design and navigation for hosted communities while allowing for some customisation and flexibility.
- Implementation partners: One implementation partner is typically better than several. One partner can ensure consistent branding, development, design principles, etc…Having a recommended partner (or a handful of partners) to work with is a great idea.
- Data Management Policies. Having clear guidelines covering policies and practices related to data management and governance, integrations, and how data is extracted from the platform is essential. In the long term, you probably want to extract and ingest data from multiple sources into a single platform. You need to prepare that now. It’s also important to have uniformity in data structures across platforms (you don’t want to deal with people alternating between listing Britain, England, United Kingdom, and Great Britain as their country between each platform).
This isn’t a comprehensive list but a starting point for thinking about when creating a technology framework.
Improvement
This includes three areas: best practices, consultancy, and training.
- Best Practices. The community architect should maintain a portfolio of best practices for engaging each audience on each platform (and possibly also by the type and maturity of the community).
- Unique audience. How you approach and engage with developers, partners, influencers, and customers is very different. Likewise, the approach to engaging with younger or older demographics and other nationalities might vary considerably. The community architect should maintain a database of best practices for engaging relevant audiences that any department can utilise.
- Unique platform. Building a community on a hosted platform is very different from social media. How you would engage members of a customer support community differs from how you might do it on Reddit. It’s up to the community architect to maintain a database of best practices for engaging audiences on each platform.
- Stage and type of community. The community architect should have a playbook for launching, growing, and maintaining a community, which should vary by type. It should be easy for another department to find the guide and launch a community. The playbook should include every step of the journey and key considerations prior to launching.
- Training. Many people who engage in community programs learn on the job. They make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. There are two obvious problems with this. First, some errors are more costly than others. Members suffer from those mistakes. Second, there is plenty you won’t learn on the job and don’t know to ask. Community programs need trained community professionals. It’s the role of the community architect to provide that training.
This training can come in several forms, targeting different audiences. It can also be procured from consultancies like ourselves to be developed in-house. But, the key training should cover the transferable skills between the various community types. This includes the psychology of communities, strategic thinking, and community value.
This ensures people know how to engage well, ensure they are working on the right activities, and how to drive value.
- Consultancy. The community architect should be on hand to provide consultancy support to anyone in the organisation who needs it. This can be booked on request, with slots available for people to consult an expert to review their work and get expert advice and support on their problems. It’s usually best for these discussions to be kept private and confidential to enable anyone to speak openly about the challenges without being concerned about the views of others
Support
Support covers two key areas; stakeholder engagement and measurement.
- Stakeholder engagement. The community architect’s critical role is stakeholder engagement. They need to develop and maintain positive relationships with stakeholders in the organisation and build support for community programs. This will include engaging with people throughout the organisation to ensure they understand what community is, the unique value a community approach offers the organisation, how they can contribute and gain unique value from the community. The key activities here vary but typically include:
- Developing and maintaining a community roadshow deck. This presentation contains 10 to 15 slides addressing the questions above. It is constantly updated with new metrics and figures. Anyone engaging in the community should see it, and it is helpful to present it to new hires (especially new executives) who join the organisation.
- Proactively communicating community value. The community architect should proactively reach out to and communicate the value of community to executives within the organisation. This means regularly scheduling meetings, highlighting progress, explaining how the community can support their goals, and gaining their support for the community.
- Shaping the internal communication messages. The community architect will also shape and refine the internal communication strategy regarding the community. This includes how community programs are positioned, how to persuade executives, the branding of the programs, and what stories to share. They are the keepers of the community narrative. They present and share community updates throughout the organisation.
- Measurement. The final aspect of the work of the architect is creating a unified measurement system. Too often, departments measure the same things differently, creating confusion about community values. The purpose of the architect is to build a unifying measurement system. This might include:
- Developing the overarching framework. This covers the approach to measurement. It identifies the project goals, the decisions on the type of answer required, the process for determining the answer, and the metrics that matter. During this process, community architects need to help the organisation understand (or uncover) the type of answer it needs. Do they need a precise dollar value, or do they need another measure of impact—perhaps one that can be compared against the efforts of other departments?
The framework will typically also have leading indicators of that desired outcome. These generally are activity metrics, which represent community health, attitude metrics, which reflect whether members are getting value from the community, and outcome metrics, which reflect value to the community.
Often, you might want to create some universal standards of measurement—especially in areas such as call deflection, measuring changes in attitudes, or changes in behaviour. The same methodology can often be adapted to multiple departments. Other times, especially for developer-related communities, you might need a tailored approach. However, it is essential to have a universal framework in place.
- Gather and analyse data. This is where you gather the data you need to implement the framework. Sometimes this involves complex statistical techniques, other times it’s simply looking at where way the lines on the graphs are heading. At the simpler end of the scale, this is often a manual process of gathering, cleaning, and combining the data each month. At the more advanced end it involves developing data pipelines to automate the process.
- Presenting the data. In addition to gathering the data, this work usually involves presenting the results. There are a couple of steps involved in this.
- Developing dashboards. Ideally, you want to have a single system for presenting dashboards at both the department and overall levels. This might involve a simple custom dashboard or the acquisiton of a data visualisation tool like PowerBI, Tableau, Looker etc…
- Telling the story. It’s not usually a good idea to share data without context. Data is typically a snapshot in time – it’s once part of the story you tell. It’s key here to create a narrative about what’s been happening, why it’s been happening, and what the results of this have been.
- Create forecasts / set realistic targets. Once you have the data, you can forecast future results based on past activity. This enables you to set realistic targets for community activities. Now, if there is additional investment, you know where to look for the impact.
Don’t treat this as a definitive list of measurement activities – but it highlights the key activities to undertake.
Summary
As an organisation’s community efforts mature, so does the need for coordination between different efforts to avoid creating a technical and social spaghetti of overlapping interests and conflicting goals.
- Community architects ensure the organisation has a united approach to the community, help each department get the most from community activities, measure results, and build and sustain support for engagement programs.
- The community architect’s scope covers all activities involving voluntary many-to-many interactions – including engaging customers, superusers, partners, developers, brand ambassadors, influencers, employee advocates, and prospects.
- Community architects focus less on engaging with individual members and more on improving the organisation’s overall approach to communities. This includes developing overarching strategies, governance, technology frameworks, best practices, upskilling community-engaged staff, measurement, and sustaining stakeholder support. Ultimately, it’s defining best practices and ensuring the organisation abides by them.
- Success is measured less by engagement and more by metrics comparable to other internal support functions. This includes compliance to best practices and the combined value of community programs established.
Good luck!
p.s. If you would like help building this structure for your organisation, please feel free to contact us.
