Understand how to design community use cases for better business impact.

To break it down, whenever you are building a product, there is something that a community can enable for you. It can be within the platform/app or on a 3rd party solution.

In this discussion, we focused on understanding these use cases and how you can time these use cases with business impact.

The conversation was split into two parts. In the first one, we focused more on what is a use case, how can you design a use case and other questions with a higher focus on community architecture, product thinking, product design, etc.

In the other segment, we focused on topics such as RoI of Community that can be mapped with all those use cases right from the get-go when you're ready to start a community use case or a community program at your organization.

Community Use Cases That Drive Business Impact - Examples

Noele Flowers drew from her employee and consultant experience while answering this one Noele also talked about the need to emphasize choosing the business impact first and then figuring out what your opportunities are from there. She broke it down as a framework into 4 parts. As per her, your community can

• Help you keep members
• Help you get new members
• Help you get content or
• Help you get research.

Those are the 4 buckets that almost all the community use cases will fall into. For example, at Teachable, one of the primary use cases for the community was to retain customers. This established clearly that the community was for the customers and not an open community. Something as fundamental as this can help establish a clear use case that a business wants to drive through the community. 

DeMario Bell had a completely different perspective to share since the Culture Amp community is an open community of over 100,000 HR practitioners and people leaders. This means a person doesn’t have to be a customer to be a part of the community. They can be a prospect, a fan and you could be a customer as well since the objective of community is to be the premier thought leader for HR best practices and community.

In a very revenue-driven sense, in 2022, the community team brought about half of a million dollars 2022 back to the business. In 2023, they were able to double that amount to 1.1 million dollars. This is a clear value driven by the community, which led to increased collaboration because now users and the rest of the business units want to learn about the community at Culture Amp and how we can support their work.

The Culture Amp community is an advocacy and acquisition community and as such, the goals are truly tied to building this movement of advocacy and brand ambassadors who can go out into the market and evangelize for our brand. Good things happen when the community comes together because they will evangelize for our brands in unimaginable ways.

On the acquisition piece, our focus is on top-of-funnel growth. That’s why they focus on understanding how, as a result of driving more brand awareness, it translates to new business back to the community.

For the end user, it is a community of practice since in the field of HR, everyone goes to HR teams for support and the community is about providing support to these individuals too. Many times these members come to our community just to feel less alone.

People want to come to a community for utility but people stay for unity.

DeMario Bell

Once people can see value and get value, they want to come to form more connections, especially with large-scale (and open) communities. Having access to over 100,000 people opens up very high avenues for knowledge exchange not only amongst community members but also adds a clear brand value since people want to know the Culture Amp view.

This leads to a clear use case of “get content” as Noele had described earlier. The brand shares content around HR best practices and industry updates while also measuring things like:

• What’s the quantum of discussions happening in the community?
• What are the trending topics that are coming up in the community?
• How do the trends and discussion inform the content that the brand creates and co-creates?
• How does that inform the product roadmap?
• Is the brand focusing on the things that people want? What kind of events to host etc. and a lot more!

The brand focuses heavily on retaining users. Since the growth of the community is all organic, the focus for the community team becomes solely on ensuring engagement. This doesn’t just mean getting people to come back but also trying to get old members to post more while also ensuring new members post as well.

Defining Specific Use Cases From Previous Experience

When the discussion about core 2 or 3 use cases that the guests have driven so far in their community-building experiences this is how the host and guests defined identifying and driving use cases:

Noele: I sometimes describe the community as the hub of a wheel, and then the spokes are reaching out to all of these different departments. For example, you are working on some content for the community which is then feeding into content marketing. You're working with some customers that are feeding into product decisions. You're working on support deflection. So there can be lots of different things that are happening under the kind of larger umbrella

However, I think there are some kind of pairings that work better than others. So, for example at Teachable, where the community was for our existing customers and we focused on driving retention and reducing churn, for that kind of community a super user ambassador program works well where you may want to focus on the top 10% of users, or it lends itself well to product advisory boards that focus on the most engaged users helping make product decisions. It can also work well for curating case studies that might enable sales.

On the other hand at Commsor where the target audience was community managers themselves, the community was trying to design its own space and where it fit in. Our goal was to become kind of a central voice, thought leader, and trusted voice within that space that would allow us to tap into all of the different things that this persona of Community Managers might want whether as a service, software, or education, or whatever it might be

My big point or keyword is to start by focusing on the business impact stemming out to some of the use cases leading out to the architecture and programming of the said impact and use case.

A lot of times businesses start on the opposite side by accident where they focus more on the activity and then go in reverse towards the business impact which is harder since you need to justify the use case if you don’t start with a clear focus on business impact and the value community use case will bring to drive the business objective.

Nipun: If your company is fairly big, with large budgets you can invest in N number of programs but if your company is small or midsized you want to start with one or 2 problems that you're solving for your customers.

When we built Curofy, a community platform for doctors, we started with it being a generic discussion forum for them along with a few other things. Over time we went deep into analyzing what are the kind of conversations they were having in those forums and we narrowed it down to knowledge exchange. Within that though, we narrowed further down the use case to case discussions and we positioned the platform as a case discussion platform for doctors.

There were a lot of things that went into it but narrowing it down to the primary objective that your users are coming for helps a lot with establishing the community positioning.

I ask my clients to define 3 to 4 content pillars as top-level things that the community can discuss around whatever the community’s goal is. For example, say that you are a personal trainer and you are creating a community where you will send your training plans to all of your clients, and they're expected to talk to each other about their experience with your plans. Within this umbrella, there can be many different things that people might want to talk about, and the PT is sort of outlining that in the architecture. Instead of this, go back to your goal. What are you trying to get people to do? Are you trying to get them to book more one-on-one personal training sessions with you? Are you trying to get them to talk to you less because you've reached a capacity, and you want them to talk to each other more so that you can kind of like spread out and get a subscription on that?

Then, taking from those top-level goals there emerges 3 or 4 macro categories that they would discuss or do within this space which would kind of ladder up to those goals. A mock up exercise where you visualize step by step, the kind of interactions users will have can help in defining what should you prompt and nudge your community members to do.

DeMario: In a previous role I had built a customer community and the business value was focused on product adoption and customer retention. We knew that customers who are getting more value from your platform are twice as likely to renew. As a community use case in this scenario, we focused on the questions of providing resources, knowledge exchange, customer education, etc. that led to more value for the users. All of this led to product adoption, platform expansion, and retention.

Once you have established certain use cases, you need to think about how to build a team for scale and efficiency. As a business, Culture Amp focused on doubling down on customer love. This as a business value meant increasing the lifetime value of a customer. As a way to understand community evolution, we asked ourselves, what does our community look like in 2028? What does what do our community members want? What are they looking for?

Identifying Use Cases pre-launch Versus Post Launch

One of the key differences between pre and post-launch use case design is that before launching you don’t have a lot of data to analyze and go back to whereas post-launch you have that luxury.

The question then becomes, how do things change in both these cases in terms of driving the business impact and identifying the next thing that you need to do to create that impact in your community pre-launch and post-launch?

Noele highlighted that things ideally won’t change a lot if you have nailed down the impact and done your research. The core thing here is to focus on trying to create a strategy before the launch as accurately as possible, to predict the launch and the next stage. This means sometimes doing more research than what seems necessary.

That said, you don't get things perfectly every single time. So the way to de-risk that is to do things one at a time and launch 1-2 initiatives each quarter. A quick example of iterative launches is to run a long-term challenge instead of launching a course program that is the foundation of the community. This helps in understanding the user's wants and needs and investing heavy resources only when the survivability of the course program is established at a higher confidence level.

DeMario emphasized on the importance of keeping the members at the heart of the decision-making.

Build your community with people, not for them. At times businesses and some community builders assume what the community wants. Instead, treat the community as a product. Just ask them, what is it that you're looking for? Only survey as much as you can take action. People don't get survey fatigue, they get inaction fatigue. So if you go to your community, and you survey them and ask for feedback, and they hear nothing they will think “What did you ask me for”? Make them feel like an integral part of the community.

If you want to do something well right out of the bat, develop an ambassador program. Ambassador programs are a very specific use case for the community, especially for driving brand awareness. They are great advisors. evangelists, they think about 10xing community, and they're also great super users.

To build a great ambassador program, identifying super users from the early adopters who will ride with you, will help you build the community, not around you, but around them. Because ideally, you want a community that's gonna endure way after you leave, anyway.

Driving Community Behaviour Towards Intended Use Case

One of the tricky aspects of building a thriving community is to keep the community on track with its intended objective without the moderation and nudges becoming mechanical and taking away the organic growth and engagement of the community.

DeMario started answering this concern by starting with the fundamental factor - we can't control human behavior.

A community program is different than other programs because typically with other programs, we're trying to manipulate and control things. What we can do with community programs is, we can influence behavior.

So how do we get members to leverage our community in which it was designed and intended? One of the simplest ways to enable this is community guidelines. Well-designed guidelines lay out the use case for the community, defining within it the objective of the community. They tell the members best practices thus nudging them towards the use case while also ensuring that this is how they can best leverage the community and get the most out of it.

If however, you see an action in the community, that is not aligned with the community architecture you can address it in multiple ways. One is to observe and see if it’s an emerging theme and if you should keep an eye on it as a trend or if it's completely off the ba because maybe in such situations, this isn't the right community for this individual. So let me have a one-on-one check-in to better learn. What is it that they're looking for? And if this and our community is not right for them.

In such cases, the ideal practice is to guide them to a new community. For example, Culture Amp is an HR community and a software developer joined the community. And while the community is open to anyone who believes a better world of work is possible it may still not be the right fit for someone who wants to connect with people who write code. In such situations, after doing a one-on-one consultation I told them about another community that might be a better fit, said DeMario.

These two approaches highlight the importance of community guidelines in setting the tone for model behavior including the don'ts while also highlighting to allow new behavior that’s within reason.

DeMario also highlighted that while this is hard to do, you want to build a community with the right people instead of throwing people together in a shared space and calling it a community, It has to be more intentional than that. And then you, as the community builder, have to model the behavior that you want to see in your community as well.

Nipun then asked Noele about a common practice in community-led growth - seeding.

Noele answered it by highlighting how community managers are a lot like classroom teachers - facilitators within the space. Community members won’t spontaneously start doing the things that you want them to do within space most of the time. Through modeling behavior, you're showing them what it looks like to have a conversation in that space, what you can talk about, and how to establish norms, etc.

A lot of that can look like proactive engagement in the form of skiing questions to start the kind of conversation you want members to have especially in the beginning.

To ensure that the seeding doesn’t feel like dominating a conversation one must behave like a good member instead of an outsider or even a Community Manager. 

Measuring the Impact of Community Use Cases

DeMario: We have been very intentional here at Culture Amp to minimize our tech stack and centralize that into a solid platform that would give us a 360 view of all of our community spaces. All of our tech tools here communicate with one another.

You need your tools to be able to have capture points set up. It can be in the form of cookies or forms a person fills out or a community content piece a user clicks on.

If someone has liked any content and says they want to book a demo with Culture Amp that's attributed back to the community team because you took action on something that happened in the community. Now with attribution, we share attribution with other folks. So we're just one captured point.

The other piece is referrals. If someone introduces someone from our community. So to be concise, it is content that we share. If you click on our content and you like it. You book a demo that gets distributed back to community referrals. A similar approach is there in the case of referrals and events as well.

Nipun highlighted a term used at LikeMinds, CQL - Community Qualified Lead where for everyone who has come to the event, we try to see if there is a way, to start a dialogue with them.

Noele then went on to give a word of caution about measurement being very specific to the business setup itself and why reproducing the outcome of one community may be harder. A good way to get started with measurement is to start with problems or the outcomes that you want to produce and the tools that you have to measure the same.

Pay attention to the things that are discussed in high-level discussions and what is critical for business for example referrals or ticket deflections. Understand how those are being measured today and how can you showcase the impact the community has on those. Another good way to measure is through cohort comparison. For example, for a metric like churn reduction you may want to compare people in the community vs those not in the community and how are they comparing. You need to communicate in a way that is already related to the stuff executives are tracking, and that's already in their dashboard.

In cases where it is harder to track these use cases for one or other reason, you can highlight how you are servicing existing teams. For example, keep an eye on case studies or content pieces that come from the community. If for example the community is around content creation, and there is a formalized way for members to contribute to content or become speakers in something, and oftentimes there's already a form of measurement for that.

Another example where counting is easier is user interviews. Oftentimes, one of the big problems for product teams is that they're looking for people with whom, they can speak. There is often a real dollar amount associated with that for them to incentivize the person to come in. People pay for user interviews. If you extend the measurement of the amount of time that the product manager spent on it, and kind of extrapolate from there you can come up with a rough number of contributions made by the community. I can connect to it.

DeMario talked about how community teams help other teams scale their work. A good community manager can balance between the needs of the business and the members.

Role of Technology in Enabling Community Use Cases

For these questions, Noele highlighted how technology should be an enabler of the intended use case and how this should inform the technology selection process too. For example, if the use case is content creation then the platform you choose had better have very high-quality content, creation, and programming skills. If the goal is ticket deflection, then choose a tool that can be integrated clearly with the ticketing and customer support systems.

DeMario then talked about the latest thing of all, AI, and ways AI can help in better storytelling or areas such as moderation.

About LikeMinds

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