It’s hard to proactively manage what you can’t measure - or define. Traditional communities led by people like mayors, principals and ministers have long been an important part of the human experience and a critical mechanism in guiding the behavior of individuals. But community management was rarely explicit and there was no common understanding of what made a community successful.
As digital channels reveal how social networks work, it’s easier to see how communities form, grow and adapt in ways that support or destroy the success of their participants. That understanding is leading to explicit roles for community professionals and with it, more definition of what community management is and how it can be applied to proactively encourage specific behaviors that establish successful communities.
For over six years The Community Roundtable has been participating in, analyzing and defining the changing community landscape. In this session, Rachel Happe will share The Community Roundtable's extensive research into the community management practices that drive successful communities, and explore how community management is redefining the role of organizations in their ecosystem.
In this session, Rachel will introduce ways to think about community architecture based on community maturity, share a case study of how to change the culture of a community and share common culture issues and how to address them.
8. 1. Who engages and how
2. How communities form and evolve
3. How network structure impacts outcomes
4. Aggregate behaviors and culture
5. How to trigger and influence behavior
Online, we can see
@rhappe
9. We now know how to build
communities efficiently…
15. Things that matter, which can be measured
Input: Management
The approach to building successful communities
Output: Behavior
How individual communication behavior is changing
Output: Results
The value produced by the community; benefits including ROI
Investment
Return
Return
@rhappe
19. 19
“If you don’t know where you are
going, any road will get you there”
- Lewis
Carroll
20. • Information Seeking
• Content Management
• Collaborative Analysis and
Decision-Making
• Co-creation of content
• Work Synchronization
• Stakeholder review
• Communication of decisions
or outputs
When a member wants to
___________________________
they will use the community to
__________________________,
instead of doing _____________
__________________________.
Output: Behavior
Define behaviors that generate value
@rhappe
24. Output: The Holy Grail - ROI
5 Data Points You Need:
1. Number of answers
2. Number of searches
3. Estimate of % of successful
searches (start with 20%)
4. Financial value of an answered
question (customer support will
have a good number for this)
5. Cost of the community program
(z)
Calculations:
1. Answers * Value of Answer = x
2. (Searches * % Successful) *
Value of Answer = y
3. x + y
4. (x +y)/z
@rhappe
25. Output: Results
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
August September October November
Responses Helpful Response Correct Responses
$0
$10
$20
$30
August September October November
Thousands
Value of New Answers Value of Search Results
Response Rate
No Response Response Helpful Correct
Response Rate Trend, by Month
Value of Questions, by Month Compounding Value of Community
$0
$20
$40
$60
$80
$100
August September October November
Thousands
Value of New Answers Value of Search Results
@rhappe
26. Output: ROI
Return on Investment
-$50
$0
$50
$100
$150
$200
$250
August September October November December January
Thousands
ROI Cost Total Value
@rhappe
30. 1. Dedicated community
manager
2. Professional development
– this is an emerging
discipline
3. Invest in advocates
2. Invest in Community Management
@rhappe
32. 1. Start small
2. Watch, ask and listen
3. Experiment until optimal
engagement profile
develops
4. Use social norms to
rapidly acclimate new
members
3. Start as You Mean to Continue
@rhappe
34. 4. Invest in Operations that Scale
1. Build out policies and
governance
2. Develop a playbook and
training
3. Grow your community
management team
4. Invest in customizing the
technology to support
what works
@rhappe
36. 5. Measure what Matters, not what is
Convenient
1. Identify behaviors that
generate value
2. Focus measurement on
those behaviors
3. Use metrics to educate
stakeholders and make
tactical adjustments
4. Translate behaviors to
financial value and ROI
@rhappe
38. 1. Determine the value of a answer
2. Prioritize key behaviors
3. Optimize community management to
encourage and reward key behavior
Tasks for tomorrow:
@rhappe
Good morning – it’s great to be here and surrounded by so many amazing community builders. I’m looking forward to hearing as many of your stories as possible today.
A big thanks to Rich for having me and for hosting this event – it’s a hugely important opportunity to gather our tribe and share our tribal knoweldge with each other. Today I’m going to kick things off by sharing what I’ve learned collaborating with many of you.
The question I want to pose tto community professionals today is this: do we want to continue in an ad hoc fashion – doing our best individually – or do we want to run the tables, which in our case is our organizations. I know what I want – I think a community approach is the future of business, the future of management and the future of work.
One of the biggest opportunities in the community management space is to get better at community operations – it is the way in which we will translate what we know about community tactics and scale it in a way that transforms our organizations. Yet is is also the biggest area of weakness in the community management field – and it’s not particularly sexy. It requires long and challenging conversations with our IT, finance, HR, legal, compliance and business development teams but it is what will help communities transcend functional goals and become the way we manage organizations. In my opinion, it is where the magic happens.
If you remember nothing else from my presentation, remember this: Pave the roads and cars will use them.
One of the challenges for community professionals is that community is everywhere – offline/online and in every area of life and it has always been a critical component to success.
Because community was and is everywhere, it is hard to find common definitions of what success looks like…
And how communities formed and evolved was hard to see and define – it was a bit magical when it worked.
The Internet has enabled us to watch and see how communities form, interact, grow and evolve – and their value has come into focus because we can now define what different types of communities look like explicitly.
Because of this – and decades of hard earned knowledge by the people in this room – we now know how to build communities efficiently…
And we have some standard recipes and measurements for them – which for me is very exciting because…. It means we can operationalize what we know into consistent, repeatable governance structures that encourage and reward the behaviors that have the most value, for both members and a community sponsor.
The ability to define standards is also exciting because it means we can more rapidly improve – I believe we are at an inflection point in being able to build successful communities.
However, many of you may still feel like this. The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away – online we can measure *everything* and we are drowning in data… making it extremely hard to focus.
However, it is critical that we focus only on what matters – not what is easy. What that means – as one of TheCR’s Community Analyst would say is… do not look at or pull any data until you know exactly what you are looking for.
Let’s dig into this a bit more – because this is an essential piece of understanding how to scale and operationalize a community approach.
You can essentially measure two categories of things: inputs and outputs.
Your input is your community management approach – what activities do you invest in to generate engagement and value?
Your output can be measured in two ways, which are really the same but one will come first; Behaviors – how individuals are using the community to do something and Results which is the cumulative value of all member behaviors.
One of the things we do at The Community Roundtable is create models and frameworks that help define what community and community management means