Finding the Giants: Creating and nurturing community advocates
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•138 views
I’m going to share how we leverage our empowered community members to help us grow developer mindshare of MongoDB. In this post, I discuss how you can motivate your community by offering them a clear path towards achievement.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Finding the Giants: Creating and nurturing community advocates
Similar to Finding the Giants: Creating and nurturing community advocates (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Finding the Giants: Creating and nurturing community advocates
- 1. Francesca Krihely, MongoDB @francium Finding the Giants: Creating and Nurturing Community Advocates
- 2. ~GAMIFICATION ~ It sucks for me… Does it suck for you?
- 6. Lots of users we can engage! Give them the tools to grow OUR CHALLENGE Competitive market Strong legacy vendors Engaged community but with no way to scale
- 7. Lots of users we can engage! Give them the tools to grow Offer a clear path Give them tools to grow Give them what they really want: community
- 8. Offer a clear path
- 15. Figure out what motivates them Show them how to make it to the top Build your community’s journey
- 16. Give them the tools to grow
- 18. Blogging: What they needed - Where do I host my blog? - What do I write about? - How do I share my content? - What should my title be?
- 21. Blogging - 15 Advocates to created new blogging sites - Over 120 blogs written in response to challenges
- 22. Uncover the obstacles to engagement Offer resources to help them get started, fast Reward those who excel NEXT STEPS
- 23. Give them what they really want: community
- 29. Make spaces where people can connect Aim for inclusion YOUR SOLUTION
- 30. Join our team!
- 31. Offer a clear path Give them the tools to grow Give them what they really want: community YOUR SOLUTION
Editor's Notes
- A few years ago Tamao, one of the organizers of DevXRel and I were at a conference together, and she hosted an unconference discussion called “Gamification sucks for me, does it suck for you?” And I was like “yes it totally sucks for me!” And throughout the years as I’ve worked in DevRel people have asked me “How do you motivate your advocates? How do you make people want to do more for your brand?
- Gamification is seen as a strategy for inspiring and motivating your community to become advocates. You’re told gamification can give you product feedback, contributions, blogs, testimonials, but gamification sucks for everyone except StackExchange and Candy Crush! I’ve a recovering Gamifier. Is there anyone else in the audience with me? Now I say, I know Gamification sucks, but have you tried Rock Climbing?
- Now you might be thinking what does Rock Climbing have to do with Developer Advocacy? I got really into rock climbing recently, and by really into rock climbing I mean, I go every day when I’m in new york. How many of you go rock climbing? I started off not being able to make it up a wall, my legs shaking two holds from the top, to getting up V2s+V3s within a month. Now I’ve always been into playing sports and working out, I used to play tennis competitively in high school, but I don’t think I’ve ever had such a strong desire to play every single day. i’ve found myself waiting for my work day to end so I could go to the climbing gym. I stay at the gym with until 12:00am! I couldn’t figure it out. Why am I so addicted? And I realized there’s a few things that a uniquely motivating about rock climbing, that have also taught me you how to inspire my developer community at MongoDB, and I’m going to share some of those things with you today!
- And so today I’m going to share how I’ve taken lessons from Rock Climbing and applied them to the MongoDB community. I’ve worked at MongoDB since 2011 and now I run Developer Relations. And driving adoption for a new database comes with a few challenges.
- And so today I’m going to share how we overcome some of those challenges by empowering community members into advocates! We’re going to discuss how you offer your community a clear path towards achievement. How to share resources with them that can help them grow and offer them an inclusive community that they can call their own!
- Every route you take when you do indoor climbing has a grade. In bouldering, where you are climbing without a harness, grades can go from V0-V14, with the easiest ones starting at V0. As someone who is new to climbing, you can see a clear progression of your skills. You know exactly where you can go. Offer this path of advancement to your community. Show them how they will advance, whether it’s just becoming a better developer or getting a promotion, or starting an open source project. It might be helpful to set up a customer journey map to see the places your community can go!
- We didn’t always do a good job of this. At MongoDB we have a massive open source community. Most of our users are completely unknown to us, so engaging them is very challenging and putting them on this path towards advancement is even harder, because we have limited opportunities to communicate with them. But we need them, because our competitive technology has been around for 40+ years! We need our advocates to help us spread the word about MongoDB. Making them our allies and advocates is a challenge, but we saw there was tremendous potential to engage our advocates who were already investing in their MongoDB education.
- So we started with our certified professional network. We thought, these people are investing in learning MongoDB as part of their professional career. Let’s see how we can make them part of promoting MongoDB! So we invited them to our Advocacy Hub, which, at the time, was a new platform we were testing to mobilize community in specific activities like creating and sharing content, answering questions on stack exchange, and speaking at events. We positioned the Advocacy Hub to the certified professionals as their next step on their way to being a MongoDB expert, a way to engage with the community and a way to connect with MongoDB.
- And of course, our Advocacy community is that same type of place for our members. They start discussions, create relationships and support one another as they go through different stages of their MongoDB journey.
- And guess what? They loved it. Our certified professionals are our biggest group on our Advocate Hub because we’re able to show them how to clearly
- When you climb, you need a ton of resources to get started. Equipment, lessons, etc. It’s intimidating to get started.
- When I started climbing I did this program run by Brooklyn Boulders called beginner to badass. The package had 3 intro climbing classes, a fitness assessment and gave us free equipment for an entire month! They made sure we had everything we needed to become a proficient climber! So if you think about yourself as a dev advocate, there are a number of activities you want your advocates to do that they might not be familiar with! So you need to help them get to the next level in those areas. One of the things we realized is, while we wanted to blog, we weren’t helping our community advocates learn to blog. So we surveyed some of our top advocates and found out some of the areas they had questions about that were preventing them from blogging!
- And so we ran a series of challenges around blogging in our Advocacy Hub, so we could do a better job inspiring our advocates to create new content. We ran the first educational challenge for 3 weeks This, was one of our challenges, for example, was meant to further inspire our advocates to blog, and it shared a great blog post by Major Haden from Rackspace on why its so important for technical people to blog. Other challenges we sent them were around the pros and cons of hosting your blog on medium, suggestions on topics
- And we always make sure we reward the people who do great work.
- So as a result of the first blogging challenge, we had 15 advocates who didn’t even have blogs before create new blogs. And in the past year, we’ve had 120 posts created in response to challenges. So it goes to show you, when you teach an advocate to fish, they will blog!
- This is one of the more famous climbing videos. It’s called “the Friend Problem” and you NEED a friend to get to the top of this one. Both in Rock Climbing and in Software development, friends, or people who can help you solve problems, are what help you get to the top. No one codes in their room alone. The most successful developer relations companies have hinged themselves on the networks they create, the talent they build and the people they’re able to connect in their community.
- So a few examples of how community is developed in Rock Climbing, first is Climb like a Girl, which is a weekly hang session at the gym designed to get more women into rock climbing. Everyone, from total noobs to experienced climbers come and climb together. It’s a great way to make climbing, which tends to be very white and male, more inclusive.
- And there’s another group called “Brothers of Climbing” that aims to make climbing more inclusive for Black Men. There’s a documentary about this group as well! As you can see, offering people a space to make their own community is essential for motivating and inspiring advocates.
- A few examples from what we did. In 2016, we started a female innovators program, that invited nominations in for amazing female MongoDB community members. They all got a free ticket to attend our annual user conference. And two of those women are giving talks at MongoDB World next month! So we were able to grow hose women into advocates!
- And of course, our Advocacy community is that same type of place for our members. They start discussions, create relationships and support one another as they go through different stages of their MongoDB journey.