1. Why Your Customers Need
an Online Community
(And how to prove it’s working when you have one)
© 2018 Becky Benishek
Twitter: @beckybenishek
linkedin.com/in/beckybenishek
Case Study
Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) & Yammer
crisisprevention.com

2. Who I am
• Becky Benishek, Manager of Online
Communities for the Crisis Prevention
Institute (CPI).
• Over 8 years experience with strategy &
tactics for external social media and
internal/private online communities.
• 2x Microsoft MVP for Office Servers &
Services (where Yammer comes in).
• Children’s book author with a working
Commodore 64 and two guinea pigs.
Twitter: @beckybenishek
linkedin.com/in/beckybenishek

3. Don’t just build. Optimize.
• Make sure this is really about your
customers, not just you
• Measure engagement and
effectiveness
• Bring online and offline worlds
together!

4. Take a (really good) look
at your customers
Case Study
Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) & Yammer
crisisprevention.com
“Our attitude towards others
determines their attitude
towards us.” – Earl Nightingale

5. What we do
crisisprevention.com/results
• We’re a mid-sized company
that helps schools,
hospitals, and other service
organizations throughout
the world create safer,
more respectful work
environments.
• We do this by providing
training to human services
providers in ways that
prevent and de-escalate
violent behavior.

6. We’ve trained over 30,000
human service providers so far.
In turn, they’ve trained over

7. How do we effectively
support people who are
busy supporting others?
Only about 5% of our customers actually
“do” CPI training as their full-time job.
• Sometimes questions come up after office
hours.
• Sometimes there is only a single CPI
customer for their facility, district, state,
region, or country.
• Sometimes they just want to talk to
someone who really gets what they do.

8. cuteoverload.com
Bringing The One To The Many

9. Bringing the One to
the Many
We wanted to provide a way for our customers
to exchange ideas and strategies on training.
This would, we hoped:
• Strengthen their knowledge and skills.
• Help them connect and form partnerships.
So we set up an online community for them,
using a Yammer External Network.

10. But we still didn’t know. . .
Will this online community really
work for our customers, given how
busy they are offline?
And how will we really know when
it does?
Let’s find out!
Anup Deodhar | Comedy Wildlife 2016

11. Build, Realize,
Optimize
Case Study
Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) & Yammer
crisisprevention.com
“You don’t have to be great to
start, but you have to start to
be great.” – Zig Ziglar

12. #1: Know your why.

13. Know your why
Whether building or re-launching a
community, understand and define your
objectives.
• Foster meaningful collaboration
• Connect around common objectives
• Measure for business outcomes
• Enhance relationship between you and
your customer
• Enhance relationships between customers

14. funnyanimalphoto.blogspot.com
#2: Get executive buy-in.

15. Get executive buy-in
(as high up as you can!)
“What’s in it for me?” works at all levels.
Have reasons prepared in advance that
align with:
• Company goals
• Company culture
• Customer needs
• Customer requests (not always the same
thing!)

16. pinterest.com
#3: Build your team.

17. Build your team
For any platform, you need a:
• Dedicated community manager, or at least
dedicated part-time
• Dedicated team OR volunteer colleagues
And think big. Wouldn’t it be great if
everyone in the company was able to talk to
customers about this sweet online space?

18. #4: Get the word out.
funnyanimalphoto.blogspot.com

19. Get the word out to
get people in
How do you reach your customers today? Use
the same methods:
• Email
• Phone
• Website
• In person
• Direct mail (yes, really)
• Fax (also yes, really)
Don’t hesitate to use offline means to get
people online. See Appendix A for examples.

20. #5: Nurture to grow

21. Nurture to grow
(not set & forget)
There is no “Build it and [they] will come.”
Even if it’s just you managing the platform
at first, you need to be there.
This means: Listen, manage, nurture,
engage, expand, evaluate, lather, rinse,
repeat.
And this includes all the efforts to remind
people that this wonderful thing exists.

22. #6: Lurkers gonna lurk.
Dmytro_Skorobogatov/iStock

23. Lurkers will lurk, but…
Something to know about communities:
90% of your members will lurk. 9% will contribute.
1% will carry the community.*
Don’t panic. That 90% doesn’t mean they aren’t
doing. As long as you’ve got content that people can
learn from, you’re providing value.
Lurkers also need time to figure out that they are
confident enough to post. Think of ways to help
encourage posting; think of how to help build their
confidence for them.
*The 90-9-1 rule is always under debate. But it’s oddly true that you
have a very good chance of ending up with most people quite silent.

24. Remember: Don’t panic!
snocoach.com

25. #7: Plan to Re-Evaluate—Constantly
Ashish Inamdar / Wildlife Photo 2016

26. Re-evaluate constantly
(or at least periodically)
It goes all the way back to your basic strategy
of getting people in, and keeps on going.
For us, it’s because of this periodic evaluation
that we keep our online community opt-in. We
wanted people in this space who had both
time and inclination to be there. Our
engagement numbers uphold this strategy.
You might be able to stick with a one-size-fits-
all policy for a long time, or quickly evolve to a
wholly different model.

27. #9: Failure is your secret bonus
Nicolas de Vaulx / Comedy Wildlife Photo 2016

28. Failure is your secret
bonus
Once upon a time, we had a community on a different
platform. The layout wasn’t user-friendly. There were no
notifications. We had to do a lot of extra work just to let
them know this space existed.
It just wasn’t right for our customer base.
R.I.P., but the story doesn’t end there! When Yammer came
around, I was able to identify it as a platform where we had
a pretty good chance at succeeding with our goals.
Why? Because our customers had told us loud and clear
what they wanted and what they didn’t want, simply
through how they did and didn’t use that old community.

29. #9: Remember who this is for.
Andrea Zampatti / Wildlife Photo 2017

30. Don’t forget they’re
people.
Whoever this community is for, what
you’re building is for them.
You may want: Synergy! Impact! Retention!
They may want: Help. Answers. Fellowship.
What do you do? Let them have it. You’ll
find that you get what you want, too.
It’s not about the words. It’s about the
people.

31. Measuring what your
eyeballs see
Case Study
Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI), Yammer, and
tyGraph
crisisprevention.com
“Even if you are on the right
track, you’ll get run over if you
just sit there.” – Will Rogers

32. Value has weight
Numbers are great, and people like the big
ones. But in an online community, even the
biggest number won’t help if it doesn’t
correlate to real value.
And—this may be radical—it shouldn’t
even be about quantity. At least, quantity
shouldn’t be the sole measuring stick.
Whether you have 100 or 10,000
community members, measure the actual
value people are getting from the space.

33. Value has quality
Engagement. Messages. Views. These are all
actions that show me people are looking,
doing, learning.
I love that Engaged % number at the top. Yet
one of my favorite metrics is the Responded
Not @Mentioned %. That means people see a
question posted and don’t wait to be tagged to
jump in. They just want to help.
You don’t get that on email. You don’t get that
on the phone. But you do get that with an
online community.

34. Your next “Don’t panic!” moment
Tibor Kercz/Comedy Wildlife Award 2017

35. Offline reflects online
(and vice versa)
Metrics don’t exist in a vacuum and neither do the
people who use your community.
Here we’re looking at overall engagement
measured by several criteria. Even without
looking at the numbers, it’s evident that there are
highs—and lows.
Don’t panic at the lows. Stop and think what may
have happened offline to influence them.
The high ones definitely count, too!
Big offline
conference!
Analog postcard
Holiday
YamJam
Summer

36. What our customer community does for us
(And what one could do for you.)
We see:
Challenge-to-success stories
Resources freely posted
Resources requested of us
Strategy brainstorming
“How do you…?”
“I’ve trained CPI for 20 years.”
“I’m a new customer!”
“Hey CPI, I need…”
We provide a service.
Customers find value
in this service.
Customers use
service with purpose.
We learn what they
need to succeed.

37. Recap
• Define your objective (and let it evolve).
• Get leadership buy-in.
• Have a dedicated person/team.
• Market offline & online.
• Let lurkers lurk.
• Measure and remember: Offline matters.
• Remember that your community is made up
of people. Continually evaluate: What do
THEY want?
• Try it out!

38. Appendix A: Offline
manifestations
Case Study
Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) & Yammer
crisisprevention.com
“People forget how fast you did
a job, but they remember how
well you did it.” – Howard W
Newton

39. Example #1: Analog in a
Digital World
Per my peaks & valleys analytics slide, one of
the reasons for the climb in online
engagement was the introduction of a
postcard. A real, live, in-the-hands-of-our-
customers postcard.
Side 1 here has the value proposition:
“Why” they want to join.
Side 2 has the how.

40. Example #2: Online to
offline to online again
Message posted in Yammer about offline meeting:
“Please join us at on [Date/Time/Location].”
Phone/email messages went out, too!
1
Online recap of that offline meeting (which
was about an awards ceremony). This also
helped people who couldn’t attend.
2
A press release for all the public to see—which came
from that offline meeting organized online!
3

41. Appendix B: The
platform and the data
Case Study
Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) & Yammer
crisisprevention.com
“Either you run the day, or the
day runs you.” – Jim Rohn

44. Thank you so
much!
It is my sincere wish that you
found value from my company’s
experiences with customers in a
Yammer External Network.
Connect with me:
Twitter: @beckybenishek
linkedin.com/in/beckybenishek