Hey <!channel> Community Hacked on 🔥 Can't wait to host 2 incredible community leaders in December: 🌟 Erica Kuhl, former VP Community @ Salesforce 🌟 Holly Firestone, EVP Community @ Venafi With Erica, we will be discussing the fundamentals of developing an engaged customer community and with Holly, how to communicate the value of community to Leadership. ✅ Register now ↩️ https://lu.ma/ericakuhl https://lu.ma/hollyfirestone

Reminder: Tomorrow is our event with Erica Kuhl, former VP Community @ Salesforce <!channel> It'll be great for anyone: • Running a customer community • Keen to learn how to define business objectives of community and related metrics • Wanting to discuss different growth and engagement strategies • Needing to prove the ROI of community to leadership Register here 👉 https://lu.ma/ericakuhl See you all there 👋

Hey <!channel> - Delighted to share our full event summary (and soon the recording too) for our awesome event from last night with Erica Kuhl The topic was 'The Fundamentals of Developing an Engaged Customer Community' Transcript here

<!channel> Reminder: Tomorrow is our event with Holly Firestone, EVP Community @ Venafi Great for anyone who wants to learn more about: • Framing community as the glue between all teams • An explanation of Holly's '*Center of Excellence' model* • Aligning community to top-level company goals • Presenting your community strategy and reporting on progress Register here 👉 https://lu.ma/hollyfirestone See you all there 👋

Testing this to see if it is valuable to post event summaries straight into slack for you all 😄 During our event with Holly Firestone, she taught us all about communicating the value of Community to Leadership, so check out our summary below for a great summary playbook

Quick 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 measure

Next event confirmed and published everyone! https://lu.ma/ashleywilliams

Another great event launching tomorrow officially!! https://lu.ma/nishabaxi

Hey everyone! After the Erica Kuhl event, we had some extra questions sent through to Erica that amazingly she was happy to spend the time reviewing and responding to....so...here they are! Hope the Q&A here is helpful to y'all!! • How early should you come up with community values to ensure you stay focused when designing your objectives? ◦ Erica: As early as possible! I tend to do the internal stakeholder interviews to start hearing trends about value and foundation of community understanding internally. Then I survey a group of customers with questions about engagement patterns, and reasons/motivations to engage. Once I have that, I think it’s time to start thinking vision, values, and objectives. • @Ellie Peterson - Are there any moves you made early on in the Community building process that proved difficult to reverse or change as the community got bigger? What would you do differently now? ◦ Erica: I didn’t fall into this but I know many that did. Getting too focused on the internal support team answering questions. This is very hard to scale and also hard to undo and move toward encouraging peer-to-peer engagement. I had the opposite problem where I didn’t fight hard enough to get support’s support to answer the questions the community couldn’t answer. This also was harder and harder over time to convince our support team to dedicate resources to keep the large % of deflection and make it worthwhile to take this on. Support teams can at times be a bit old fashioned in how they think about community. • @Richard Hoffmann - What are some best practices for community member retention that can be put in place while also trying to scale acquisition for an early stage, pre-product-market-fit community? ◦ Erica: I still think email is very much alive and great for driving retention. You can try an email drip campaign that triggers when a member hasn’t logged in for certain amount of time and feeds them content, and programs that might entice them to log in again. Also you can try bringing in other cross functional teams to have them host their content and programming on the community. This will keep a steady stream of members coming back for a wide variety of reasons. Always have a CTA to draw them back to the community shows that the community is not just a one time transaction. Also try out all sorts of different ways to prompt your community. If it’s not working, pivot and try something new. • Julie - What if your company has a Community that has been created by Members and thrives only because of this fact, should the Company start moving/directing the community to an owned platform to get more control and insights from it? ◦ Erica: I hate to say this, but it depends. As long as you can balance it and not make it smarmy and not marketing, I think you can move more toward ownership for metrics and business value. As long as you do this transparently and make sure you are sharing everything with your community and WHY this is happening along the way. It also is very dependent on making sure your community members are getting a huge benefit still from the community changing “ownership” - if they know it’s for a great reason and that it will ultimately mean they continue to have a community and thrive, they might be ok with it. If they are bought into the vision and how it will make them ultimately more successful and that they’ll still have a say and a voice - this can work. • Hailey - What process should a Community team take to identify their differentiators and key value propositions? (many communities "bring people together" but that is not unique) ◦ Erica: I have a formula to uncover this that I go through with every client. 1) Internal stakeholder interviews to uncover trends and the why/what behind the community. 2) Customer survey and focus group to vet the strategy and to understand content and program prioritization. You can ask in the survey why they would be motivated to come to your community and what can you provide that’s unique • Michelle - How much do Community Managers need to become experts in their customer communities domain? Do they simply need to know enough to empathize and serve their customers well, or do you find it helpful to become an expert in that product area or industry? ◦ Erica: This may depend on the community, but I feel like you need to know enough to gain the respect of the community but you don’t necessarily need to be an expert. They are the ones that will often be the experts and your job is more to make them more effective, more successful, more knowledgeable. To celebrate their successes and participation. You need to understand what motivates them, what they struggle with, how and when to escalate, what people they need to talk to, what content they need. Usually you don’t need to be an ultimate expert to do all that

HAPPY COMMUNITY MANAGER APPRECIATION DAY <!channel> We truly appreciate all of you ❤️, and are so grateful to be working to support all of you as much as possible through go ch

<!channel> Final call for our event on Wednesday with Ashley Gallman Williams, global head of the host community at Airbnb! Members get guaranteed access! Join to learn more about how Ashley uses creative engagement techniques that help her members thrive, including: ✅ Creating programs to help gather insights and feedback ✅ ​Developing a powerful community events strategy ✅ Launching and growing Ambassador Programs ✅ ​Empowering members to connect with and support each other ➡️ Register here ⬅️

Hey <!channel> Excited to be able to announce the launch of the Community Hacked Job Collective via Pallet! In the Collective you will find: 1. CH Job Board: featuring the best community roles curated by CH Co-creators and the membership. Post and seek open roles here. 2. CH Talent Collective: Are you seeking a new community role? Join our curated list of available CH member talent (featuring members only). Every few weeks we’ll share a “drop” of candidates to our wider network, where companies can reach out to connect! Find these updates in channel #3-find-or-post-jobs to find jobs and candidates & ask for and share advice relating to job searches and open roles. In the spirit of #buildinginpublic we’d love any and all feedback on how to make this the best experience for you. My DMs are open!

Last night we hosted Ashley Gallman Williams, who leads Host Community engagement and connection at Airbnb. She taught us a lot about the creative engagement techniques that they use to help their community members thrive.

Here 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.

LAST CALL to join us tomorrow to learn from the expert, Nisha Baxi, Director of Community at Gong. With a track record of success at Microsoft, Salesforce, and Facebook, Nisha is a true leader in community-building. Discover how to increase product adoption and improve customer retention through powerful community programs, and get first-hand insights on the process of taking your program ideas from concept to launch. Register here >> https://lu.ma/nishabaxi

<!channel> starting now! Developing Community Programs that Improve Customer Retention with Nisha Baxi, Director of Community @ Gong · Zoom · Luma

Last night we hosted the amazing Nisha Baxi, who is the Director of Community at Gong. She taught us a lot about developing community programs that improve customer retention.

Here 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.

📣 New Community Hacked Event Alert 📣 Can't wait to interview Jayvee Nava, fmr VP of Community at none other than Peloton Interactive! We will talk about 'Making Community Integral to your Company'. We will dig into all the ways in which Jayvee advocated for community to be core to the product & customer experience, and how she managed, maintained and grew the community across all its channels, both online and in-person. Interested? Register below👇 https://lu.ma/jayvee

has renamed the channel from "4-ch-announcements" to "5-ch-announcements"

<!channel> last call to join our event tomorrow with former VP Community at Peloton from startup to IPO. I'll be interviewing her about: • how she advocated for community to be integral to the product, and • how she managed, maintained and grew the community across all its channels, both online and in-person REGISTER HERE

Excited to announce our next Community Hacked Event! Can't wait to interview Emily Lakin, Head of Creator Community at Patreon! We will talk about 'Empowering Community Leaders in Niche Communities" Join us on March 20th to learn more about the fundamentals of building an impactful customer community, such as: • How she built the Accountability Club (A. Club) program from 0 to scale • Creating sticky programs for community • Finding your niche and finding your connection • The importance of cross-functional relationships and internal champions Interested? Register below👇 https://lu.ma/EmilyLakin

has renamed the channel from "5-ch-announcements" to "0-ch-announcements"

<!channel> I wanted to share a note about the future of Community Hacked. I'm really excited to announce I am now full-time on it and am super excited to be building a dedicated space for community-builders to learn and connect. If you have a few mins please give it a watch/listen and I'm really looking forward to your feedback, thoughts and ideas ❤️ go ch

Hey Everyone! Excited to announce the rescheduled date for our event with @Emily Lakin! We’ll be chatting with Emily Lakin, Head of Creator Community at Patreon to talk about Empowering Community Leaders in Niche Communities. Join us on April 12th to learn more about the fundamentals of building an impactful customer community, such as: - How she built the Accountability Club (A. Club) program from 0 to scale - Creating sticky programs for community - Finding your niche and finding your connection - The importance of cross-functional relationships and internal champions Register below 👇 https://lu.ma/EmilyLakin

Yo all, please feel very welcome to be proactive in sharing any content you create, read or watch that you think might be useful to other members in the newly created #4-share-useful-content channel

<!channel> Excited to announce our next event! I will be interviewing the awesome Shira Re'em, Head of Community at Miro! Register now ⬇️ https://lu.ma/shirareem

Looking forward to learning from Miro's Head of Community on Wednesday <!channel> Register now if you haven't already 🙂 https://lu.ma/shirareem

Latest Community Hacked newsletter just out! https://newsletter.communityhacked.com/p/the-role-of-community-in-product?sd=pf Event transcript and recording will be added to the new CH knowledge hub going up soon !

<!channel> Pumped to host Nicole Saunders, Director of Community @ Zendesk for our next event Register now ⬇️ https://lu.ma/nicolesaunders

<!channel> Latest Community Hacked newsletter just out! https://newsletter.communityhacked.com/p/creating-sustainable-business-impact?sd=pf

As community professionals, we appreciate the value of 1-on-1 networking with the right people. That's why <!channel> I'm excited to announce that we've set up a curated connections program exclusively for members of Community Hacked! ch Use the link below to start getting introduced to other community professionals from our small vetted community based on your experience, goal and preferences. https://curatedconnections.io/communityhacked And please DM me or @Alex Gordon-Furse (Community Hacked) if you have feedback for making the matches more helpful for you.

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