Step-By-Step Customer Community Launch Guide - Turf

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The Step-By-Step Customer Community Launch Guide

Table of contents

Intro

Step 1: Do research

Step 2: Set objectives

Step 3: Define community content

Step 4: Define community roles

Step 5: Share your strategy

Step 6: The beta launch

Step 7: The public launch

Step 8: Day-to-day management

Step 9: Communicating the impact

Intro

Welcome to the club! Congratulations on starting your customer community initiative. Launching this online community has the power to become the basis for sustainable growth for your entire company. It will become an incredibly powerful tool for rethinking the role of customers in your business. This guide was initially written for companies that are creating their customer community environment with the Turf platform. However, the guide is just as valuable for people using other community platforms.

A lot of online communities do not reach the previously described success. The hard truth is that most of the communities out there will die before they have the chance to prove their value to the company. This is either because the community was not able to nurture engagement from their members on a big enough scale, causing the community to not reach its expected added value, which leads to leadership moving it lower and lower on their priority list, or because your community simply couldn’t provide the right data and performance metrics to actually know or communicate its value.

If you are building your community with Turf, you have chosen the community platform that is specifically built to make your life easier by first solving the low engagement problem and second, giving you all the tools needed to measure, translate and communicate the benefits of the highly engaged customer community initiative to the wider company and leadership.

Logically there are more variables to this equation. Besides the tools that you are using, the launching strategy of you and your team is key in nurturing the engagement of your customers and community members. Your ability to nurture activity and member engagement will be the driver of the success and survival of your community.

Launching a community is a cross-functional operation and therefore requires the owner of the initiative to take on a lot of different hats. When we say “a lot”, we really mean A LOT. Because of this, we like to refer to community professionals as Community Wizards. A step-by-step strategy will support you in all the different and overwhelming tasks that you have to perform to become a Community Wizard that will reach the pinnacle of community success: critical mass with increased customer retention, lowered support costs, and increased user acquisition as the fruits of your labor. Now, let’s cut the small talk and get to work!

The lifecycle of a customer community

Every successful online community goes through a variety of stages throughout the course of its existence that move it from its birth to becoming the basis of sustainable growth for your company.

FeverBee has developed the most accurate and well-known model of the lifecycle of an online community. In their model, they identified 5 key stages that an online community must go through.

"The inception stage begins when you begin interacting with the target audience and ends with the community achieving a critical mass of growth and activity." - FeverBee

Logically, the first stage is the one that you want to focus on first. But, before you start interacting with your target audience, there are a lot of processes and activities that need to be done and set in place, to make sure your launch is successful, and you can actually start interacting with your target audience.

For this guide we will be focusing on the pre-inception and inception stage. For the first 3-6 months from now on, there is no need to focus on any other stages in the lifecycle. The success of your online community depends on how well you execute this phase. We recommend you to (actively) write down every action that has to be taken at every step, for your scenario specifically. Also, note that in this guide we have created a generalized scenario. There is no one size fits all scenario or strategy, and therefore you will have to actively think for yourself and write down how the info that we will be discussing in this guide is applicable to your specific scenario.

In this phase, the effort that you and your community team are putting in, will be a lot compared to the ROI that you will see. When starting out, you will be faced with multiple headaches and have to overcome multiple hurdles, all the while you will suffer from low engagement and little to no ROI to communicate back to your peers and leadership. But that is okay, and building the basis of the sustainable growth engine for your company takes time and effort. Together with the Turf platform and this guide, you will successfully close off the inception phase and move on to the phase of establishment.

Pre-Inception

Step 1: Do research

1.1

Get to know your target audience

First, you will have to answer 5 key questions about your customer base and target audience for your community:

Top tip: Reach out for advice to your company’s different departments (support, sales, product, customer success teams, onboarding specialists, etc.) and your customers themselves. This way, you will discover important pain points from different phases of the customer journey.

Top tip: Consider surveys for collecting quality and trustworthy feedback from your customer base about the support for the different incentives that you are considering. For community relaunch use-cases, consider having 1:1 meetings and collect feedback from top community contributors on what incentivises or would incentivise them the most. Also, analysing other successful communities in your niche will give you a general overview of what a community should offer to incentivise potential members. Note that when doing this for the non-brand or non-product related incentives, you now will have to deliver more value than other successful communities of practice in your niche, to actually incentivise members of your customer base that are a part of that successful community of practice to also join your community.

1.2

Audit and analyze your company’s existing community efforts

Your company may not have a full-fledged customer community, but they may already be bringing people together in some way or another. Look at things like virtual and in-person events, customer counsels, ambassador programs, or social media posts from your company or colleagues that get the most traction. Determine what resonates with your community and also figure out content topics that are not yet being covered.

Top tip: If a company has an existing community and you’re looking to do the relaunch, make sure to analyze the current platform including strong and weak points, forum activity if present, including P2P engagement and resolutions, current success metrics, gamification, etc.

1.3

Check out the competition

Look at your direct competitors' community efforts to determine what your members might expect and how you can expand on what already exists. Which customer processes do they include in their customer community? How active is the community management and moderation team? How are they incentivizing their customers to join and come back? What type of content is the team publishing in the community? This is unskippable for community managers working at big brands who want leadership buy-in. Nothing convinces people more than "our competitors are already doing it and we're behind." You also want to look at highly engaged customer communities that fall outside your industry and see if there’s anything you can borrow from them. For example, if your company sells B2B, you can easily find examples of other B2B software customer communities and figure out their best practices and what they are missing.

Step 2: Set objectives

Setting your customer community objectives is the single most important thing in your community practices. Now, a big part of that is trying to determine and understand why leadership is aiming at launching a customer community initiative. What is the goal of the community as established by leadership?

Your community initiative is almost guaranteed to not contribute to key business goals if you or your team, who is the company’s sole link to the community and its overall initiative, do not value or understand its purpose.

2.1

Identify stakeholders

  1. Support: Customers perform self-support through the community. This increases support ticket deflection and provides the customer support department with more breathing room and reduces customer support costs overall.

  2. Product: Customers will communicate their feedback about the existing product and features in the community. Also, they will make suggestions for features and updates and the product team will be able to test the support and get feedback for upcoming releases while communicating the entire product roadmap, all through the community. The product department will be able to get more and better data about the customers’ product needs, by hosting this communication in the same environment where your customers will perform all their other communications with the brand.

  3. Marketing: The community becomes a great source of brand awareness, not only for your existing customers but also for potential customers in your target audience. The valuable niche and interest-based discussions that exceed being about your product are a great tool for your marketing objectives under your target audience. By being able to put that value under the noses of your target audience, you can attract a lot of potential customers who now will interact with your brand, in your community environment.

  4. Success: All in all, a customer community is about increasing customer success and therefore, improving the customer experience. Your community is going to be the go-to place for your customers to get their questions answered, provide their feedback, and participate in other valuable communications which all make it easier for your customers to become successful with using your product, and with what they want to achieve with using your product on a more generic scale. It is relationship-focused client management that aligns your customers with your company’s goals, igniting beneficial outcomes for everyone involved. The goal of customer success is to reduce churn, lower acquisition costs, and create more upsell opportunities. A customer community provides exactly that.

  5. Sales: The sales team gets provided with hot new leads, data about their behaviour and insights into their needs. All the while, they also gain more insights and data on existing customers with potential up-sell opportunities.

2.2

What does leadership want from it?

Become aware of why leadership wanted to launch a community initiative in the first place.

Top tip: Given that community is a relatively new niche that many companies are still exploring the benefits of, expect to have a proactive approach in demonstrating the potential business value of your community to senior leadership.

Here's how you can do this:

  1. Set up meetings with different stakeholders from:
  1. Identify their currently existing bottlenecks:
  1. Conclude how the community initiative can play a role:
  1. Identify the metrics that each department is tracking:

Your organization will already be collecting and reporting top-level business metrics — things like monthly recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, new subscribers, etc. Make a list of the metrics per department, to be able to actually measure and communicate how your community efforts solve their problems or improve their processes. For example:

2.3

Goal setting

Note that when setting these goals and prioritizing a specific one, the goal of the community is the outcome of member behavior, and not the behavior itself (Feverbee, https://www.feverbee.com/strategy/community-goals-and-objectives/).

For example: “increasing loyalty”, “having customers perform more self-support”, “creating brand advocates” or “better product feedback from customers”. These are not directly connected to value. You want to know what happens when customers become more loyal, customers perform more self-support, you have more brand advocates, and you get more product feedback from customers. This will mean higher customer retention rates, lower customer support costs, and increased sales.

These stated outcomes right here should be your goals. A customer community initiative can reduce customer support costs, increase customer retention and increase user acquisition. These are clear goals that are easy to understand in terms of value to the broader organization. Select your biggest pain point, with the most room for growth and improvement, and make that your priority! Down the line, once it is measured that your community has significantly improved the goal that you prioritized, you can start looking at prioritizing other key strategic organizational goals.

  1. Increase customer retention:

  1. Existing customers buy more of your existing product or buy new products.

  2. A higher frequency of new purchases from existing customers.

    • Member behavior in a customer community that generally leads to this value:

  3. High levels of self-disclosure with other members.

  4. Posts in-depth product feedback and feels like it is being considered or implemented.

  5. Posts product suggestions & feature requests and feels like it is being considered or implemented.

  6. Rises to prominence in your community through gamification.

  7. Consistently visits your community environment and therefore reads more info about the brand, new product releases, experiences from other customers, the product roadmap, and has a greater feeling of community around the brand.

  8. Participating in general/niche-based community discussions.

  9. Gets successful answers on their questions in the community.

  10. Answers other customers’ questions.

  11. Takes part in community events, trainings and workshops.

  12. Reduce support costs:

  1. A lowered number of support tickets.

  2. A reduced support ticket handling time.

    • Member behavior in a customer community that generally leads to this value:

  3. Asking questions in the community and receiving a successful answer from another customer.

  4. Typing their question in the federated search bar and finding an answer in an existing post from another customer, an article from your help center, or other resources.

  5. Customers creating posts about their best practices in using your product.

  6. Customers answering questions and demonstrating expertise about your product, brand, and proposition.

  7. Consistently visiting your community environment and therefore reading more customer success resources, best practice posts, and knowledge hub articles, through which the customer becomes more educated.

  8. Increase user acquisition:

  1. New customers.

  2. Increased spending from existing customers.

    • Member behavior in a customer community that generally leads to this value:

  3. Customers perform niche interest-based discussions that exceed solely being about your brand, which creates value for non-customers in your community and increases traffic from potential customers through SEO and search.

  4. Non-customer community members create posts with questions that are product or brand-specific and get answers from existing customers.

  5. Non-customer community members interact (commenting, upvoting, or sharing) with existing product or brand-specific posts.

  6. Existing customers interact with posts about new product feature releases.

  7. Existing customers submit feature requests and provide feedback on existing features.

Since these are examples of general observations of the average community, you should really think about which behavior in your specific and unique customer base will lead to the value you need to achieve your organizational-level goals.

To conclude, Instead of setting the goal for your community, you should uncover the goal of your community by proactively understanding the value to stakeholders from different departments, and therefore to leadership (Feverbee, https://www.feverbee.com/strategy/community-goals-and-objectives/).

The goal of a community is to change member behavior. Identify the specific behavior members need to perform in order to achieve the goal (Feverbee, https://www.feverbee.com/strategy/community-goals-and-objectives/).

A community creates value by changing the behavior of its members (Feverbee, https://www.feverbee.com/strategy/community-goals-and-objectives/).

It is important to note that the community metrics and KPIs that you use to quantify the effect of member behavior in your community, will vary at different phases of the maturity of your community. For example, within your first six months, it is more about the stickiness of your community, than member growth. The stickier your community, the more it indicates that your community environment will affect key strategic business goals and department objectives as it matures. Therefore, it might be more relevant to select success metrics such as active members, unanswered posts, and member retention. After 6 months, it will become possible to see the benefits for the company and individual department health metrics (that were defined before), which can now start being used as success metrics for your set community goals. Defining what success means at different stages of your community’s lifetime will help you set realistic expectations for yourself and within your company.

Now, write down what your goal is expressed in your selected success metric for the first 6 months. For example, “During the first 6 months, 75% of our community members will come back on a weekly basis”. The success metric being used to measure this is active members.

After this 6 month period, you will start being able to do the same for the member behaviors that you are trying to cultivate to achieve your organizational-level goal. For example:

Your organizational-level goal is to reduce customer support costs with 25%.

For this, you need 25% less support tickets being created, which is the equivalent of X less support tickets, aka X support tickets now being handled through self-support in your community. The needed member behavior for this would include, but is not limited to, ‘asking questions in the community and receiving a successful answer from another customer’ and ‘typing their question in the federated search bar and finding an answer in an existing post from another customer, an article from your help center, or other resources’.

When translating this into a success metric, you want to track the number of “this post or resource has helped me” indications in your community (a metric available on the Turf platform). Success is achieved when this metric indicates X clicks.

That's it! Now you have set your goals and you also know how to measure them.

Step 3: Define community content

3.1

Plan your content

To get started, you’ll have to spark meaningful conversations by creating and posting engaging content yourself. Making a plan for the kinds of community material you'll produce and how frequently you'll publish it is the next stage in developing a community strategy. Some of this work will be based around your findings in the research stage. You can run your content ideas and concepts by your customer base as you have a clearer notion of the kind of content that you might provide in your community. Also, check for areas where your content overlaps and could potentially outperform those of competitors’ communities.

  1. Surveys & polls

  2. Best practices for using your product (product-centered)

  3. Best practices in your niche (non-product-centered)

  4. Discussion starting questions

  5. Announcements about developments in your niche (non-product-centered)

  6. Announcements from the company (product-centered)

  7. Posts about the product and its roadmap (product-centered)

  8. Posts with frequently asked questions (product-centered)

Whereas weekly, monthly, or annual content, such as recorded videos, webinars, ebooks, blogs and articles, will require a longer time frame to plan and produce. Then again, there is a big chance that your company is already creating this type of content. You have to get clear on which content you are going to be producing and which content created by other teams, you can utilize.

Note that which content you are creating and posting in your community before you start inviting your members, depends on your findings in the research stage and how you are planning on incentivizing your potential members to join your community.

3.2

Create your content calendar

Make an overview of all the different topics and subjects that you will cover in recurring daily posts, weekly posts (videos or more in-depth written content), and monthly webinars or ebooks. You do not yet need content for each and every individual content piece/post, but try to fill up your content calendar as much as possible. This will allow you to focus more on measuring and tracking member behavior, especially in the early stages after your launch. Try to cover a big variety of topics in your content, so you can start identifying what type of content your members engage with the most and stimulate the best discussions/conversations in your community.

Top tip: Community Content Calendar Template: https://www.notion.so/71f4bf68c5824860aa01fa9a721469df?v=d6b1a6164e2b4e498879bbce5c35bd8c

3.3

Decide access levels and what content to gate

Your community can be split into open and private channels. You can create private channels based on the different subscription or engagement levels of customers or separate customers from non-customers and provide content that you do not want non-customers to have access to, in this private channel to customers. Your content calendar should map the different types of content based on these access levels, if any, from the start.

Step 4: Define community roles

You have already defined who from your company benefits from your community and why they need to be involved. Let’s determine what this involvement looks like in terms of roles and day-to-day practices.

4.1

Roles within the company

  1. The customer support department will be involved in the community through community posts that get escalated as support tickets and (for the Turf platform specifically) through the direct support channel in the community environment, where customers that are in the community will reach out if they have a specific question that can not be handled in the community itself (e.g. for their account or subscription, billing, etc.). The support team interacts with these created tickets from their original omnichannel support dashboard. In this direct support chat environment the support team will also be sharing existing posts or resources from the community in the chat, if they are applicable to that specific support ticket.

  2. The customer support department will be creating posts in the community about frequently asked questions in support tickets.

  1. The product team will be involved in the community through the product module. Here, either the product team itself or you (the community manager) will monitor the posts with feedback on the existing product and features, with suggestions/requests for new features in the product, communicate the product roadmap & status on requested features, make announcements for new product/feature releases and display how that product or feature works. Based on the number of upvotes and data on what type of customer segment seems to support certain features, they can prioritize certain feedback and requests, improve their roadmap, or they can create posts requesting feedback on specific areas of the product through surveys and polls.

Top tip: If you face the scenario where your company’s product and R&D teams are reluctant to have the community promote the feature request option because of them not being able to handle all requests, show them how they are completely in charge of communicating and labeling statuses of submitted requests, as well as how easy it is to clarify under a request why it is or is not being considered. Changing the channel/module title to “feature ideas“ instead of “feature requests” is another trick to lower customer expectations of the request that they are submitting.

  1. The marketing department will be involved with your community activities by promoting the community under customers and non-customers. This will help gain awareness and traction for the community to grow the number of community members.

  2. The marketing department will be involved in reviewing which non-product-centered posts in the community are performing the best. They can then use these posts and content for other marketing efforts.

  3. The marketing department will be involved with retargeting leads (non-customers) that are participating in the community, through their marketing efforts.

  4. The marketing department will be creating, or has already created, part of the content that you are going to share in the community.

  1. Usually, the community team consists of people from the customer success department or people who used to be in the customer success department. However, aside from the community team, the customer success managers need an overall overview of how the customer experience is of your company, now including the customer community. They will be involved in making sure the community meets the needs of the customers. Questions such as, are we delivering the right content in the community, which discussions do we need to spark, and how can we constantly improve this community experience to improve customer success as a whole.

  2. They will review community performance data and KPIs.

  3. Potentially they will be involved in producing the needed content to meet the needs of your customer base and smooth out bottlenecks in different customer lifecycle stages.

  1. The sales department will be involved with your community, by following up on non-customer community members (leads). They get access to these leads via their CRM or an exported CSV file and can either see the activity of a lead in the community, in the community itself, or see their activity in the community in the leads’ CRM profile. This way the sales team knows what questions those leads have asked, what they are interested in, and they get insight into what the best selling points might be to convert those leads.

  2. The sales department will look for and identify upsell opportunities with existing customers, based on their activity and requests in the community.

4.2

Roles within the community

Top tip: Ideally, you would want to have experts (super users), who are open to taking on this role, become a part of your moderation team.

Step 5: Share your strategy with stakeholders

You have performed your research, set objectives, planned your content, defined your strategy, and set roles for all the different stakeholders involved. Now you need to communicate this back to your key stakeholders.

5.1

Find your champion

Spend time talking to people in your organization about your community. Is there someone with power in your organization — preferably an executive — who is bought in from the beginning? Having them in your corner from the get-go can be of tremendous value if you need to convince leadership of your strategy and approach for growing the impact of this community initiative.

5.2

Get buy-in from all the departments that will be involved

Choose one or two stakeholders from each department and meet with them to get department-specific feedback on the defined roles and strategy on how they are going to be involved with your community.

5.3

Check-in with the tech team

Down the line, you may require assistance from your company's technical staff for any flows or integrations that fall outside of your expertise. If you require continuing technical support to assist you in resolving issues as (and when) they arise, it's important to identify these needs as soon as possible and push to ensure you have access to the technical project owner.

5.4

Share your research and recommendations with leadership

The last thing you want to be doing is dragging higher-ups into the weeds with you, so don't jump the gun on this one. Do this when you know that you have buy-in from all the different internal departments that are involved. Share your strategy, goals, and your definition of “success” for different time periods with leadership and make them understand that it takes effort and time to reach those goals. This is incredibly important since you will not be seeing results from your community efforts right away, and you do not want leadership to die down on you before you have been able to reach critical mass and reap the fruits for the company in terms of reduced support costs, retention and/or user acquisition.

5.5

Ask to present at a company all-hands or team-wide meeting

This will help your colleagues understand how big of a deal a community initiative is. It's also a great opportunity to make sure everyone has the opportunity to weigh in and give feedback besides creating more support and involvement with your initiative from the company as a whole.

5.6

Make your strategy documents available to the company

Make sure your strategy, research, content, customer interviews (their support for your approach, content, and statements of their needs), and all other documents created in the previous steps of this guide, are all easily accessible for anyone in your company, organised in a way that they can easily navigate and you can easily reference. This is another way of creating transparency and a company-wide initiative feeling that will lead to extra support from your colleagues and leadership all the way during your journey until you have created a growth machine for your company and the benefits start to become known.

Minimal Viable Community (MVC)

Step 6: The beta launch

For your MVC, you can use the Turf platform for free (for up to 100 community members). This way you can set everything up, test the platform and create a proof of concept without committing to any costs.

6.1

Prepare your community environment

  1. Your welcome channel will be the first channel that new members enter and interact with. Make sure that you welcome those new members with a video message and instruct them to introduce themselves to the community. In their introduction, make sure they let the community know who they are (role, company, interest, etc.), how they are going to contribute to the community, and what they are hoping to get from the community. Optionally, you (as the moderator or community manager) can send them a private welcome message in the 1-on-1 direct messaging chat.
  1. Communicate to your users what goals the community serves, how they can use it, and how it benefits their customer experience. Communicate this in a 'Welcome' or 'What do we use this for' channel. Ideally, you want to create a video stating the above-mentioned information and copy-pasting those statements below the video in the same post.

Template:

What do we use this community for?

As a user of ….., this community will be the starting point of every interaction or communication that you have with the brand. You go to the community to:

  1. Every community, of course, needs its guidelines. Your guidelines need to support your community objectives and help you while you are performing your community strategy. Communicate the ideal behavior that you would like in your community and note specific behaviors that are not allowed. For example, in which scenario can members reach out through the direct support chat, and when do they just create posts in specific channels? At last, state the consequences of not following these guidelines. Create a post where you communicate this in the “Culture” channel. Once again, ideally, you want to create a video stating this information and copy pasting those statements in written text, below the video in the same post.

Template:

To meet the collective goals of our community, it’s important that all members feel safe and supported. To help everyone have the best possible experience, please take a look at our community guidelines:

Positive guidelines:

Rules and restrictions:

Consequences:

In the event of someone violating these guidelines, we will take action to protect other members of the group. This might include a warning or in the event of extreme or repeat behavior, the member may be banned from the community. If you experience or witness any behavior that doesn’t follow our community guidelines, please contact us through the direct support chat channel. All reports are kept confidential.

  1. Create a minimum of 2 surveys or polls to ask members about their community onboarding experience. This not only helps you optimize the community onboarding experience for your specific customer base but also has your members performing ideal behavior in their first interactions with the community: providing feedback.
  1. Reach out to the support team and ask them to make a list of 20 of the most common support questions that they receive. Create a script for these questions and the answer to these questions. Do not create the posts with these questions with your own account as the community manager but ask early adopters to join your community at this stage to create posts for these questions in the “FAQ” channel and ask other early invited members to comment on those posts with the correct answers. This helps you to show your future members what ideal behavior is in the community and how they are expected to participate. More on inviting these early members and getting them involved in setting up your customer community in bullet point 3.
  1. Look at your company’s product roadmap and select up to 10 major product features or updates that have been released in the last year. Create a post for each individual product update, in the “What’s new” channel and describe what the feature or update does, how it works, why it has been released and how it will better serve your customers.
  1. Look at your product roadmap once again and create individual posts in the “Roadmap” channel for all the features and updates that are stated on the roadmap so far. Describe what the feature or update does, how it will work, why it will be released, the status of the feature, and how it will better serve your customers.

  1. Look at your company’s customer processes, customer communication, and outgoing external communications. What are processes or communication topics that are in need of their own channel or even an entirely new tab? Your Turf customer community environment allows you to create entire new tabs with channels, add new channels to existing tabs, and manage/organize the default channels by deleting, renaming, or restructuring them.

  2. Create a tab dedicated to niche-specific topics and discussions. The channels underneath this tab are meant to promote non-product or non-brand-centered discussions about day-to-day activities in your customers’ niche, and other niche-specific topics. Think about your customer base and about which topics they would be interested in. By allowing the conversation and posts in your community to exceed solely your tool, your community not only becomes a valuable space for other non-customer niche professionals but also is an incredibly valuable incentive and engagement trigger for your existing customers and future community members to consistently come back to your community.

  1. Does your company currently have a knowledge base, help center, academy, blog, and other text or video resources? If so, make sure the integrations into these solutions are active, so you can start centralizing all those resources in your community environment or transfer those resources manually to the community environment. If not, you can start creating new resources from the Turf environment or upload pdf docs of resources with specific designs and categorize the knowledge hub tab, with all its different channels, from the ground up. You can structure and organize your resources based on topics, product sections that they cover, different customer types, or whatever suits the purpose of your different resource types the best. Also, you can gate certain content and only make those resources accessible to certain customers or community members. It is all customizable!
  1. If your company has opted for a customer community on Turf with the integration of your help desk/live chat (e.g. Zendesk, Intercom), make sure the integration has been made and is working properly. Perform a test with the customer support team where you create a support ticket through the direct support chat. Are they receiving the message correctly and are they able to reply and send existing posts in the chat box? Make sure that this functionality is 100% up and running before you start inviting your customers to the community. By combining your direct support channels with your community environment, your users always have to go to your community to get some type of support. This drives adoption of the community under your users in the first place and ensures that your members will come back to the community. It is about making the community the starting point for your users in every interaction or communication with the brand.
  1. If your company has opted for an integration of community data with your CRM, make sure this integration has been built and is working properly. You can test this by checking if the posts or comments that one of the 10 early invited members has published, also show up in their profiles’ activity data fields in the CRM.
  1. If your company has opted for the Pro plan that includes the in-app widget, make sure this integration has been made and is working properly. Test it yourself by creating a post or comment in the community from your SaaS tools’ environment.
  1. Make sure the custom SSO integration has been set up and your members can log in to your community environment with their credentials for your application. They should be able to login without creating any new credentials and if they are coming directly from your application, be able to start posting in the community environment without facing any authentication or login flows at all.
  1. Invite your team, stakeholders from different departments, and every other person that is going to be involved in the moderation and management of the community. Once they have become members of the community, make them a moderator of the community. You can do this by going to your moderator dashboard → go down and select “Manage members” → type the persons’ name or scroll in the list of members → click on the three dots at the end of the row → select “Make moderator”.
  1. Put yourself in your members' shoes and imagine what it's like to join the community for the first time. While everything may function flawlessly from your perspective as the manager and moderator, it may be difficult or annoying for your members to use. You'll have the opportunity to fix errors and improve the user experience by testing this before you invite your first super users. As a quality control procedure, you also need to let multiple coworkers establish accounts and give them a short list of things to attempt and give feedback on (login, follow the onboarding, create a post, give their opinion on the categorization of the community, etc.).
  1. Ask up to 10 of your most engaged customers/users, that usually provide a lot of feedback and are in regular contact with the company, to:

Provide them with a script for everything that you want them to post and allow them to come up with input themselves on what they think is valuable to post for other future members. Together with these 10 early adopters, build your community, fill it with content, make it feel alive, and constantly iterate and improve.

6.2

Invite more members

After you have finished filling up your community with relevant content, have gotten enough feedback from early adopters, and made improvements, you are going to start inviting other members. Pre-select up to 100 of your most engaged and involved customers, who you know will be interested in joining and testing your community. Call them ‘super users’ and explain to them clearly the role they will play in your community. This will create a sense of exclusivity and prominence under these selected members, who will now help you further fill up your community with more content and discussions, taking your community to the next step in its inception stage.

6.3

Get feedback

Ask those 100 super users to use the community as intended, and review how they navigate this environment. Ask them what content they are missing, and what would improve their experience.

6.4

Repeat

Listen to their feedback, review their behavior, and implement your learnings from it. Continuously test your community to get an idea of what’s working or not. Once you feel like you’re on the right path, gradually keep inviting more members, spark new discussions and keep on gaining feedback on the community experience. Do this up until the point where you feel like there is enough content and engagement from early adopters and super users present in the community and you are ready to invite your entire customer base at scale.

Minimal Viable Community (MVC)

Step 7: The public launch

In the previous step, we ended with inviting your early adopters and super users. In this step, you’re going to create a plan and agenda for the activities that you are going to perform once you start inviting your entire customer base to your community.

7.1

Segmenting your customer base

While inviting your entire customer base, it is about inviting your most involved customers first. Those customers are more likely to perform ideal behavior in the community and will influence the culture and behavior of future members that will join after them. There are multiple approaches possible here, depending on your customer base:

  1. First, invite the customers that are on the highest subscription/tier and work your way down from there. The customers with the most financial commitment will normally be most involved with the brand.

  2. Invite customers based on how long they have been a customer. The older customers might be more involved than younger customers and have more expertise about your brand.

  3. If you already had an existing community beforehand, start by inviting those community members.

  4. Look at what the biggest customer tier is and invite the customers in that specific tier first. This way you invite the biggest similar group of people at the same time, allowing you to better cater the community to the needs of your average customer.

7.2

Inviting your customer base

Template:

A new and improved customer experience for you through community.

Hi ………,

We are launching a customer community environment to improve your experience. The aim is to make this community environment the starting point of all your interactions with ……… (company name). You will go to this community to:

We are delighted to provide you with this new and improved experience. Make sure you join the community here: (insert link).

Template:

Hi …..,

Hope you’re doing well. The company is launching a customer community environment to improve your experience. The aim is to make this community environment the starting point of all your interactions with …… (company name). You will go to this community to:

I will be setting up a meeting to onboard you onto this new customer experience initiative as smoothly as possible. Cheers!

Template:

Big announcement!

Hi everyone. We are launching a new and improved customer community environment. The aim is to make this community environment a more in-depth and broader experience that will be the starting point of all your interactions with …… (company name). You will go to this community to:

We will be abandoning this current environment, so make sure you join the new and improved community before …/…./…. Our community is what drives our brand and therefore we want to provide you with this improved experience. We appreciate your cooperation and would love to see you continue your knowledgeable conversations and discussions in this new environment. Join the new community here: (insert link).

7.3

Indirect promotion of your community

Now that we have covered and utilized the primary channels of communication between you and your customers, let’s start utilizing the more indirect ways of promoting the adoption of your new customer community initiative.

Template:

Big announcement!

Hi everyone. We are launching a new and improved customer community environment. The aim is to make this community environment a more in depth and broader experience that will be the starting point of all your interactions with …… (company name). You will go to this community to:

We are delighted to provide you with this new and improved experience. Make sure you join the community here: (insert link).

7.4

Welcome messaging for new members

This step is crucial for the success of your online community. You should always make new members feel welcome when they join. In addition to your already set up “Welcome” channel, send new members a welcome message through the direct message inbox, where you once again welcome them and ask them to introduce themselves through a post in one of the discussion channels (which company, their role in the company and how they are willing to contribute to the community). Also, ask them if they have any questions and show them that you’re there to help.

To conclude, make sure the content you, your early adopters, and your super users post within your community is appealing to your newcomers and that engaging discussions are taking place before you invite your entire customer base at scale. The key to creating lifelong members and contributors in your online community is giving them the feeling that they have become part of an actual community of valuable and knowledgeable peers, as quickly as possible.

Once you've finished these steps, your community's strategic planning isn't over. It takes time to create and implement strategies. As you continue to gain knowledge about your community and its members, you should continually build upon the strategy documents that you created and shared with colleagues and leadership.

Minimal Viable Community (MVC)

Step 8: Day-to-day management

Consistently creating new and useful posts, improving the onboarding process for newcomers and constant promotion of your online community are sure ways to make it grow and flourish. But, at the same time, you also have to maintain your community to ensure that it does not become chaotic, you need to track the performance of your community and you have to track the activity of members.

8.1

Moderate posts

You have to review posts, comments, and other interactions from your community members on a daily basis. Your members and yourself are able to flag posts. You can view all the flagged posts in your moderator dashboard, but you will have to constantly review the entire community feed yourself as well, especially during these early stages when you are really creating the foundation for your community’s culture. In the early stages, a good way to go about this is to go through all the new posts that have been created on a daily basis, the posts that have had new comments, and flag the ones that are not compliant with your guidelines. Then go to the flagged posts list in your moderator dashboard and review all the posts that you have flagged and the ones that your members have flagged, and decide on whether you want to delete the post. If you do delete the post, write down your reasoning for deleting it. The creator of the post will be notified of the reason why their post has been deleted.

8.2

Measure KPI's

Track your analytics dashboard. You have set goals for your community to achieve and need to monitor how your community is performing in order to know if you are growing towards those goals. Remember, the preferred metric to track may vary from time to time depending on the stage of the community or the challenge you might be handling.

Top tip: Consider focusing on the following categories of metrics to measure your community’s success: community growth & member conversion and community engagement and business impact. For membership growth and conversion, you’d look at metrics like new members, total visitors per timeframe, new visitors (meaning non-members), etc. For engagement and business impact, look out for metrics like the number of unanswered posts, the number of ‘this post has helped me’ clicks, engagement rate (of the total members how many have performed an action within the selected timeframe), etc.

8.3

Request and implement feedback

As your online community grows, you’ll need to constantly pay attention to what your members are saying. Request feedback through polls and surveys and track the content topics of the discussions or posts that are the most popular. If members make recommendations or complaints, it’s your job to communicate with them and address their issues. Constantly keep implementing feedback and improving the community experience as a whole.

8.4

Create more content and expand your content calendar

You have to continuously create new content to post in your community. This can be in cooperation with your marketing or success department, who most likely are already creating content. This is not only about posting product updates, communicating other announcements, or making short conversation-starting posts, it is about providing real value for your members. Post newly created resources in the form of articles and videos, that will spark valuable discussions. These resources cannot only be about your brand but also create resources that are purely dedicated to the niche you’re serving and their day-to-day activities. The aim is to provide an incentive, through constant new and relevant content, to come back to your community.

8.5

Create and host live events

Create and host live events for your community members to attend. Create events dedicated to product releases, one-of-a-kind company announcements, and events around other customer or company-specific topics. Besides that, you should also host niche and interest-based events that speak to your entire audience and their daily activities, instead of only your customers.

8.6

Get influencers to participate

Reach out to influencers in your niche and ask them to participate in your community by sharing/posting their best practices, knowledge, and other valuable content.

8.7

Communicate with your super users

Continuously be in touch with your super users and most engaged community members. Ask them to respond to posts that have not yet been answered, but also ask them for feedback and let them perform ideal behaviour by letting them post news and hot topics from your industry. You can even provide them with scripts for what you want them to post. This is about showing your other members ideal behaviour - behaviour that you want them to adopt as well, for which they get rewarded through gamification and more prominence. Down the line, you have to be in a never-ending conversation with your most engaged community members.

Top tip: Consider organizing 1:1 meetings with your top contributors to find out what incentivizes them to be active users and get feedback on the current state of your community as well as advice for possible improvements. Also, creating a private channel or sub-community for your top contributors would be a great incentive to bring your super users closer to your company’s brand and drive engagement and communication.

8.8

Provide recognition to active users

While growing your community you need to provide recognition to your active members. Of course, your gamification system in your community already provides this through different member levels and increased upvoting weight for the higher levels, but also create posts dedicated to one or multiple specific users, where you tag them and thank/congratulate them while mentioning their valuable contributions to the community.

8.9

Look for potential moderators

There will be members within your online community that will be making truly outstanding contributions and are constantly trying to turn it into a productive, enjoyable environment for everyone involved (most likely these are going to be the members with the highest gamification levels). Keep an eye out for them and eventually involve them in the community moderation team.

Top tip: Remember, the top contributors of your community can also help in many other ways besides solely post moderation. Consider things like answering forum questions, speaking at events, hosting trainings and workshops, writing user guides, sharing best practices around the product, leading certain channels, etc. Having 1:1 meetings with your community’s top contributors is a very helpful way to get effective feedback on how top contributors might be incentivized or willing to get involved. Every customer community audience works differently in that regard so your task is to find out what makes your top contributors tick.

Step 9: Communicating the impact of your community

Many community professionals and teams struggle to communicate the effect of the community on organizational level goals (and therefore the fruits of their labor) to their peers and to leadership.

However, according to this guide and its previous steps, you hopefully have already determined what your main objectives are per timeframe and which organizational level goals it influences. You are starting to find out what type of community member behavior is needed to reach those objectives, and you know how you are quantifying the effect of that member behavior with success metrics.

Also, you have already communicated to leadership and to the different departments what to expect in different lifecycle stages of the community and that it takes time to actually experience the measurable impact of this customer community initiative. We will be taking this scenario as our starting point for step 9 and continue from here on.

9.1

Who are you communicating the performance of your community too?

9.2

How often do I have to communicate the impact of the community initiative?

Note that with the stakeholders from all the different departments you will always be in a continuous conversation to manage the cooperation of their involved processes in the community, however, having a dedicated conversation about the impact of the community initiative should happen at least once every month. Likewise, you want to communicate the impact of the community initiative to leadership at a minimum, once every month. Especially in the early stages, this is key to getting leadership on your side and making sure that they understand the lifecycle of this initiative. Remember, you don’t want them to die down on you halfway.

9.3

The first 3-6 months after launch

In this stage, you will mainly be reporting and communicating on actual member behavior. Since it is too early to actually measure the effect of the community on organisational level goals or specific department objectives, focus on your own set goals for this stage and the member behavior that was needed to achieve this goal.

Report what type of behavior your community members are performing, whether this is in line with your expected behavior and if this behavior led to reaching your set goal that is being quantified with your chosen success metrics. If not, cover what needs to change in your members’ behavior and how you are going to make sure that this member behavior will change.

Remember, in this stage, it is more about the stickiness of your community with members, than member growth. The stickier your community, the more it indicates that your community environment will affect key strategic business goals and department objectives as it matures. Therefore, it might already be relevant to report on success metrics such as active members, unanswered posts and member retention. Communicate this to leadership as well as the involved stakeholders that represent each involved department.

9.4

After the inception stage

By now your community has established itself. The number of members has grown and the community is sticky enough to keep existing members engaged and active. From this stage on you will probably be able to start measuring the effect of the community on organizational-level goals or specific department objectives.

So, first, start by communicating the performance of each involved process from different departments and how it impacted their objectives and metrics. Note that this will not just be something that you as the community manager report on, but which should be covered in an open dialogue with the stakeholders from the department, where some of the described inputs come from your side and others come from the departments’ side.

The examples and inputs stated below, are completely dependent on the specific department’s goals and the processes of theirs that are involved with the community initiative, so carefully look at your specific scenario and determine what you guys are going to cover:

Now you have a clear understanding of the performance of the community and how it impacted all the involved departments of the company. The next step is to communicate this to leadership. Bundle all your findings from your conversations with the stakeholders from the specific departments. Cover each involved department’s processes and the performance of that process in your community, as well as the success metrics and department objectives that it has impacted. You are aware of the company's organizational-level goals and the main incentive behind launching this community initiative.

While communicating the impact of the community initiative to leadership, it is important to cover how their prioritized organizational-level goals have been influenced. Usually, this is easier than it sounds. For example, if leadership is focused on reducing customer churn, focus more on your findings from your conversations with customer success and the product team, so you can directly display how the community efforts have influenced customer satisfaction, customer lifetime value, daily or monthly active users, session duration, and most importantly the change in the customer churn rate.

It is a case of prioritizing the parts of your conversations and findings with the different departments, that leadership is focused on most at the moment, and displaying that as clearly as possible.

Now..... that's it. Congrats on finishing this launching guide. By now your customer community should be up and running and you should have all the tools and knowledge needed to start reaching your set goals!

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