Alex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
11/29/2022, 9:12 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
12/05/2022, 10:02 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
12/07/2022, 1:15 PMAllie Kerr
12/12/2022, 8:10 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
12/15/2022, 10:06 AMQuick summary
• Community is everybody's responsibility in a business and making sure that everybody knows that is one thing, but making sure that they are truly invested in it is another.
• Think of community as a product. You really cannot just go out and launch a community if you don't even understand what you're building.
• Best thing to start is gathering information before coming in and making assumptions
• Talk to people in the community - where are their pain points? What are they excited about?
• Talk to people in each function of your business and leaders on the exec team - ask what are you trying to do? What are your goals? What are your challenges?
• After you do your listening tour you can come back and think about the ways that community can bring value to those teams
• The second step is thinking about how to communicate that value. How will you show them the value that community brings to them, whether in the short term or the long term. You need to paint that picture for them, so they see what that growth curve looks like and what the timelines are for each milestone
• For example, break the curve down for them and explain each milestone and each goal. For example: once we hit that goal, then we're going to move forward to phase two of the plan, which is focusing on X and Y in that quarter. Those will impact Z, etc.
• When you are looking to sell the value of community internally, Holly’s ‘Community Centre of Excellence’ model is very helpful (see the picture below)
• When looking at the model, you should think of ‘community’ in two buckets of metrics
• The first bucket is the community health metrics. You can't even begin to look at the things on the centre of excellence model until those are taken care of: Are people joining? Are they coming back? How long are they staying in the community? All of those pieces that make a community healthy and thriving
• The second bucket are the ROI metrics across each function. Once you have reached a critical mass, you can start looking at these other functions too
• Start by looking at your top level company goals, then figure out how community plays a role in helping those. Then break down the top level goals into the different areas of each function that are contribute and prioritise the most related ROI metrics for each
• It's not just about tying it directly to dollars and sales, though. For example, if product feedback is critical, then community is a great place to collect that in a scalable and thoughtful way through sessions or beta testing opportunities with incentives
• Finally, when speaking to C-suite/Leadership you've got to get really tight on your communication to that team, and keep them as focused as possible. So be careful not to put anything on your ROI list that there isn't a way to measureAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
12/17/2022, 1:33 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
01/05/2023, 5:27 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
01/16/2023, 8:03 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
01/23/2023, 9:13 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
01/29/2023, 7:00 PMAllie Kerr
01/30/2023, 8:40 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
02/03/2023, 12:46 AMHere is my summary of our event. I hope it is helpful!
What does it mean to lead the Airbnb host community globally?
• Airbnb has two stakeholder groups: supply (hosts) and demand (guests)
• Hosts are the most critical community for Airbnb as they form the product (accommodations) for guests
• Community at Airbnb is a combination of supply optimization and injecting humanity into the process
• Hosts are the face of Airbnb in the real world and face real-world challenges
• Airbnb's community has a unique value proposition due to its two-sided marketplace and hyper-local nature
• The community helps hosts deal with hyper-local issues such as local short-term rental laws, taxes, and property maintenance issues
• Connecting hosts with each other is crucial in supporting them through these challenges
• The community has a unique business value for Airbnb due to its unique circumstances and is part of the power of Airbnb's team.
What is the format and the structure of the community
• Airbnb has a community team with three sub-teams: rewards and recognition, host voice and feedback, and community connection.
• Community connection focuses on host-to-host relationships and addressing local challenges through the host clubs program.
• Host clubs are local hosting chapters run by passionate hosts, with 700 clubs in 84 countries and around a thousand volunteer hosts.
What platforms do you use to engage with the community?
• The community uses Facebook groups as an online digital communication tool
• Regular meetups are organized using Splash and are a critical component of engagement
• Meetups were previously virtual using Zoom, but in-person meetups have resumed since the end of the pandemic
• Host clubs engage with local communities through volunteering and forming partnerships with local organizations
What is the level of interconnection between Airbnb's reward and recognition, host voice and feedback, and Community Connection sub-teams?
• Community journey is as important as user journey. It is a progression path for hosts: starting as a host, becoming a super host, helping other hosts, leading host clubs, representing host voice at the regional/national level, and joining the host advisory board
• The host advisory board is a small group of 30 highly engaged hosts who are deeply involved in Airbnb's product development process
• The community journey is designed to keep hosts feeling like they are progressing and unlocking more opportunities with Airbnb
How big is your team?
• The team responsible for managing community engagement is divided into two parts:
• A central team of 7 people who are responsible for global strategy, systems, tools, and resources.
• A field team of around 30 community engagement managers who are located in 20+ countries.
• The community engagement managers support the community leaders who then support the club members.
• The team structure is designed as a distributed model.
How does Airbnb's community-based platform impact leadership's view of community professionals?
• Community is considered an important part of Airbnb's values, but it is still especially important to balance the belief in community with data that shows the impact it has on the bottom line of the business.
• Community professionals should aim to have a meaningful and measurable impact on the business.
How to pitch creative engagement programs to leadership?
• Two levels of effectively pitching creative or experimental engagement programs to internal stakeholders (leadership): field-level experimentation and consensus building at the program level.
• Wempower community engagement managers in the field to test and experiment with new methods.
• We then share successful experiments as playbooks and give credit to the originators.
• When making big changes globally, it requires consensus building and a strong vision backed by compelling storytelling.
• Roadshow the change to different groups of stakeholders with different perspectives and adapt the storytelling to their interests.
• Consensus building with bigger ideas can be a 200-stakeholder journey and requires patience and persistence
How are successful community engagement tactics or ideas shared among managers internally? Is there an effective platform for this?
• Regular communication is important to make the team feel like a team.
• The team has weekly team meetings, office hours around specific topics, and a Slack channel to share what they're working on.
• The team has partnered with an advanced analytics team to measure the business impact of their projects through formal pilots.
• The results of the pilots help to demonstrate the importance and criticality of their work, making it easier to replicate.
What are some of the key ways you facilitate knowledge sharing between local host leaders?
• Facilitating leader-to-leader learning and connection is crucial for scaling the community and reducing the pressure on the community manager
• A Facebook group for leaders is used for learning and connection
• Local WhatsApp groups chats are used for quick interactions between the community engagement manager and leaders
• Regular office hours and formal meetups are held for leaders to gather and share
• Weekly emails, called community toolkits, are sent to leaders that include inspiration from other leaders, which can be tailored to the local region.
Are there certain metrics that enable you to identify the hosts that you want to nurture the most?
• When identifying and training leaders, intrinsic motivation is key. The focus is on finding people who are already leaders and providing them with a platform, rather than convincing others to become leaders.
• The most important factor when identifying leaders is their motivation to build community and help others, rather than their status as a super host or their quality.
• Red flags for non-ideal leaders include a desire for rewards and recognition rather than a genuine passion for community-building.
• The reward and recognition structure should lean on intrinsic motivation, rather than being transactional, in order to be sustainable and scalable.
Why did you select Facebook groups as the medium for those host clubs to communicate online? How do you choose platforms?
• Choosing a platform for community communication should be based on the needs and behaviors of the community
• The decision of choosing a platform should be based on where the community already lives, what can be controlled, and what data can be extracted
• Airbnb chose Facebook as the medium for its host clubs as research showed that's where the majority of its hosts were engaging with each other and looking for information about Airbnb
• The decision to use Facebook was made as a strategic choice to go to where the community was rather than trying to force them to come to our choice of platform
• The debate on whether to continue using Facebook or move to a different platform is ongoing and constantly being evaluated
• The real challenge is not just choosing the right platform, but capturing the complexity of the community's interactions, which is often more than just talking online.
What are your top tips on how to make events impactful?
• Start with understanding the needs of your community and the brand's needs
• Always think about the intersection of the two and build events in that intersection
• Consider the value proposition of the event to your community
• Have a clear purpose and goal for the event
• Read the book "The Art of Gathering" by Priya Parker for more insight
• Avoid defaulting to past events and question if it makes sense for the current event
• Structure the event around the goal and purpose
What are some strategies for engaging disengaged members?
• Leaders of clubs have low churn, which can be attributed to us finding people who are intrinsically motivated.
• When there is churn, it is often due to major life events and leaders should be allowed to leave if they no longer feel the role is for them.
• To prevent burnout and churn among leaders, it's important to catch them before they disengage by having structured data in place to identify risk points.
• A flow chart process is in place for community managers to remediate and re-engage leaders, tailored to their particular needs.
• The key is having the right data to notice leaders' disengagement and intervening in a way that makes sense before they fall off.
• It may be harder to re-engage members at scale, but the same principle of structured data and intervention before a falloff point applies.
Tips for keeping a large team motivated?
• Set clear goals and over-communicate them
• Celebrate when goals are reached or exceeded
• Have a clear vision and make sure it's communicated to the team
• Human side of motivation: celebrate small wins, encourage discussion about inspirations, leaders, and job satisfaction
• Allow space for healthy venting and complaining
• Teams bond and connect during both happy and challenging moments
• Creating moments and spaces for shared struggles can help team members feel less alone and less overwhelmed.Alex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
02/08/2023, 7:55 PMAllie Kerr
02/09/2023, 6:02 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
02/15/2023, 3:28 PMHere is my summary of our event. I hope it is helpful!
Identifying effective community programs for customer retention starts with adoption.
• Nisha works in the customer success organization and their north star metric is net dollar retention (NDR).
• Retention is a lagging indicator and must be influenced by leading indicators, with product adoption being the universally agreed-upon leading indicator.
• Nisha suggests that when rolling out programs, one should focus on how they will help with product adoption and encourage more usage of the product by working cross-functionally with other teams that are focused on adoption
Building culture of experimentation is critical when trying to identify the best community programs to improve adoption and retention
• Experimentation is a crucial factor in determining the success of different methods. Therefore, before taking on a role as a community-builder in an organization, it is important to evaluate the level of support and empowerment that will be given by the leadership team to conduct experiments and determine the most effective approaches for the community.
• When planning and running experiments, make sure you track them, including the name of the experiment, time box, expected outcome, and results
• Avoid taking big bets on one big thing, and instead focus on finding the fastest path to success
• Use the "Continuously Integrated and Continuously Deployed" (CICD) model to ensure enough data points are gathered and a model is built to help quickly determine what works and what doesn't
• Experimentation can involve working with existing programs and teams, rather than starting from scratch
• Be open to collaboration, and look for opportunities to work with existing programs or teams that align with the goals of the experiment.
• Be outcome-driven and focus on the goal of product adoption.
• Create a culture of transparency by admitting when experiments fail.
• Use deductive reasoning to determine what elements of the experiment were successful and which were not.
• Modify the unsuccessful elements of the experiment in a new iteration to achieve the desired outcome.
• Approach experimentation like reverse-engineering to find the right solution.
• Don't be afraid to start over if necessary, but try to build on what worked before.
Engaging with customers and understanding their pain points can be a hook for building deeper programs.
• Nisha surveyed over a hundred ideal and best customers to understand what they wanted and found out that the number one feature they wanted was to connect with someone like them in their role and on their own time.
• Matching programs, such as a one-on-one matching program between customers with similar roles has be effective in increasing license utilization
• MeetSy.io allowed Nisha to create her own criteria for who they want to connect with and then it built an algorithm to connect users with each other.
• Nisha has seen that when people are connected to each other, they are likely to renew at higher dollar amounts and the level of activity in the community is directly correlated to that
“You're either building the product or you're selling the product, and everyone else is overhead”
• Community building is becoming a prominent function, requiring a combination of commercial mindset, empathy for customers, and ability to communicate with technical people
• Requirements for community managers are growing and expanding over time.
• Make sure as community, you integrate as closely as possible with the product and sales and marketing teams to make an impact on the business
• Focus on the acquisition and product (Capital A and Capital P) aspect of the SPACES model
Don't just extract information from the community, create a place where people can share their ideas and insights, and make sure you review, share internally and also close the loop with customers too.
• The responsibility of prioritising and deciding which product features to build or fix lies with the product team.
• The product team gathers feedback from various sources, including the community, customer service managers (CSMs), Gong calls, and support tickets.
• From a community perspective, don't rely on ideation and upvoting/downvoting features, instead focus on gathering detailed information about why a feature is wanted.
• Share the information gathered from the community to the product team to show the value of the community
• Consider creating a group in the community for direct customer feedback on new features
• Valuable feedback doesn't have to be in large quantities, focus on the depth of the feedback and use it to test hypotheses through the experimental approaches mentioned above
• To build trust with the community, ensure you thank members and tag them publicly when their feedback is turned into a feature.
• Ensure you also inform the Customer Success Managers when a feature request from one of their accounts is built.Alex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
02/21/2023, 7:19 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
03/03/2023, 12:15 AMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
03/07/2023, 2:08 PMAllie Kerr
03/13/2023, 5:23 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
03/17/2023, 5:27 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
03/17/2023, 6:07 PMAllie Kerr
03/29/2023, 3:59 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
04/13/2023, 4:00 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
04/18/2023, 7:36 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
05/01/2023, 9:51 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
05/04/2023, 6:27 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
05/15/2023, 7:38 PMAlex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked)
06/02/2023, 12:57 PMNityesh Agarwal (Community Hacked)
06/02/2023, 6:52 PMNityesh Agarwal (Community Hacked)
06/02/2023, 6:53 PM