Communicating the Value of Community to Leadership
An event summary from our December 2022 event with Holly Firestone
In yesterday's event we learned from Holly Firestone, who, before Venafi, was Senior Director of Community at Salesforce and Global Community Lead at Atlassian. In other words, Holly knows a thing or two about Enterprise Communities 🙃.
From her extensive experience, Holly is a strong believer that community should be an integral part of business strategy; that it’s no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. When executed correctly, community has the power to deliver ROI across the business, from product, to sales & marketing, to customer success.
During the event, Holly 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
Meet a Community Hacked member 👋
Head of Community @ Triple Whale
Purpose of your community: To help ecommerce brands and agencies scale and solve common business challenges
Favourite engagement tactic: I've been hosting Community Hangout virtual meetups where we bring in an expert, get to know each other, and learn together
Open to connecting with: Anyone with an innovative programmatic approach to engagement over time; connect with me here
This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.
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