How a Mystery in a Cancer Community Uncovered a Major Industry-Wide Flaw
(From a talk I gave two years ago, if you want the video version, click here.)
In March 2020 I received an email from a friend running a non-profit community.
She’s panicking – engagement has suddenly collapsed. She’s tried everything: gamification, events, translation tools… nothing worked. Can I help?
So I begin by digging into the data.
Survey results? Off the charts – members love the community.
Registrations? Dropping.
Search traffic? Falling off a cliff.
It’s a search problem – but why?
I dove into the Google Search Console and discovered that, in recent times, all the previously good URLs had suddenly become bad URLs.
At the same time, the average time to load the site had increased to a whopping 5+ seconds. That’s an eternity!
After speaking to the platform vendor, we soon uncovered the problem.
The community’s platform vendor quietly moved hosting from AWS… and page load speeds rose to 5 seconds. That single change tanked the search rankings of not just one community, but every community on the platform!
The lesson here is this:
Far too many of us are wasting time, money, and internal goodwill by randomly implementing community programs to boost metrics, rather than addressing the root cause of problems and achieving the greatest possible impact.
Don’t Just Look At The Data, Explore It!
The vast majority of people track a wide variety of metrics without ever translating them into insights.
Look at your metrics now. You will see a bunch of lines going up or down.
But do you know why?
Do you know why the numbers are going up and down? Do you know what’s driving it? Do you have a very clear and vivid understanding of what’s happening?
As consultants, we think in frameworks to understand the problem.
Without a framework to understand the root cause, you’re simply guessing at the problem and guessing at solutions. With the proper framework, you can get laser-focused on what you need to change or improve.
And this doesn’t just apply when the numbers are going down, it applies to when the numbers are going up too!
Do you have more active members than before? Great!
…but why?
Is the customer base growing, and are more people naturally joining?
Is the customer base becoming more aware that the community exists?
Is the community retaining more members for longer than in the past?
This will tell you where to focus your efforts to achieve even better results.
Turn Your Goals Into Frameworks
Let’s imagine you’ve been set a goal (we’ll use engagement for now for simplicity) of increasing views in the community by 10%.
Most people will jump immediately into tactics. And there’s no shortage of those.
But first, let’s get strategic and break down the options:
We’ve turned the goal into a problem, created the possible options and now we get to explore which of these is most viable before selecting the tactics.
This is what we mean as consultants when we talk about being strategic and data-driven.
You have to stop jumping immediately to random tactics and drill deep into the data to solve the real problem.
If you just do that – you’ll achieve much, much, better results.
Launching Our Strategic Community Management Course [July 14]
On July 14, we’re launching our Strategic Community Management course.
The Strategic Community Management course is designed to help you think strategically, not just tactically.
This course distils all the lessons we’ve learned working with the best community professionals in the world into a set of templates, models, and practical steps you can take to ensure you’re precisely the right things to create the best community you can.
This course covers:
How to diagnose your community and prioritise what you’re working on.
How to improve the community experience through great UX research.
When, where, and how to engage strategically in third-party platforms.
How to powerfully and effectively position your community in the minds of your members.
How to bring new communities, groups, and other initiatives to life.
How to optimise every aspect of your community.
How to gain and sustain internal support for your community.
The course will also include:
Five live workshop sessions will be taught by us (beginning on July 9).
Access to the templates and resources we use for our own clients.
Our entire video library of resources.
Feedback from myself and a community of learners.
The fee for this course is $750 – I think it’s a bargain.
