How Airbnb Help Their Members Thrive
An event summary from our February 2023 event with Ashley Gallman Williams
In yesterday's event we learned from Ashley Gallman Williams, who leads Host Community engagement and connection at Airbnb, building a thriving global community of hospitality entrepreneurs who are committed to fostering belonging.
During the event, Ashley taught us all about the structure and creative techniques that they use to help their community members thrive. See a short summary of what we covered below 🌟
What it means to 'lead the Airbnb host community globally': Optimising the supply side (hosts) while injecting humanity into the process. The host community is the face of Airbnb in the real world and faces real-world challenges, so connection is important for them
This community is made up of 1k community-driven hosts in 84 countries who are part of chapters called 'Host Clubs'. Chapters enable them to gather their fellow hosts online and offline, and engage the communities where they host
The structure of the community team includes a central team, plus a field team of community engagement managers in 20+ countries. There are three sub-teams: rewards and recognition, host voice and feedback, and community connection.
These sub-teams work together to help hosts progress through the community journey from host to super host, to host club leader, then host advisory board member. The host advisory board has 30 members who are involved in supporting Airbnb with product development.
Airbnb has a decentralised approach to testing and expanding creative engagement programs, with engagement managers encouraged to trial local-level experimentation and then share any successes and learnings with their peers and managers.
Sharing successful engagement tactics internally is done through weekly meetings, office hours, a Slack channel, and community toolkits sent to leaders. An advanced analytics team also measures the impact of projects.
When it comes to enabling knowledge-sharing between local Host Club leaders, this is facilitated through leader-to-leader meetups, Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, and community toolkits.
Meet a Community Hacked member 👋
Startup Program Manager @ Aiven
Purpose of your community: Our community exists to bring early stage tech founders together and empower them to grow their business by offering free access to our technology, knowledge and support.
Favourite engagement tactic: Know your members and try to add value with every interaction. I believe that personal touch points go a long way, so I try to interact with each community member in a meaningful way on a regular basis. I’m lucky that my community is still relatively small and I can spend time getting to know my members and sharing useful resources with each of them.
Open to connecting with: People running startup programs at other tech companies.
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.
If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃