Additionally, should we choose to track the wrong metrics, we run the risk of romanticizing numbers that sound good to executives but fail to truly align with the genuine impact driven. For example, caring more about size and scale than engagement and retention.
Let’s look at this through a lens that you have likely experienced firsthand.
When you turn on your phone and open your social networks, what are some of the first things you see at the top of your profile? Numbers.
Our world assigns numbers to people in an attempt to quantify their value. Followers, likes, and comments become the success metrics of modern relationships. These elements of our online personas become so inflated with value that we begin to obsess over vanity metrics rather than concentrating on what truly matters.
Every post becomes one more step in the race that we run for our worth and value. We create and curate our lives just to rank higher—rather than celebrating and cherishing the moments as they exist. With followers as a framework for earning influence, we focus our attention on counting and collecting people rather than understanding and valuing them as individuals. We constantly strive to find more friends rather than working to foster deeper connections with the ones we already have.
By prioritizing vanity metrics, we begin to overlook the qualities that truly matter. Attempting to quantify connection emphasizes the wrong things. We begin to prioritize incorrectly. We go off course.
As a result, we aim for:
Popularity over purpose
Quantity over quality
How things look over how things are
So herein lies the challenge. Community drives value—most would agree on that fact. Determining that ROI and understanding where impact is felt most strongly within the business is where we have to take a deeper look to ensure we aren’t underestimating or missing the mark.
A MEASUREMENT MODEL
Quantifying the impact of community is hard, but it’s certainly not impossible. I have spent more than five years professionally building and scaling communities both in person and online. Being data-driven is critical to monitoring the health of your community, understanding the success of your efforts, and communicating your impact cross-functionally to gain broader support.
While every professional community will set out to serve a different purpose, I generally recommend building your own measurement model that analyzes business impact across one or more of the following three sectors: growth, retention, and advocacy.
Additionally, whenever there is an opportunity to dive into the qualitative impact stories and member highlights that showcase the power of community in action, it is critical to do so. Not only does it provide color to the metrics you measure, but it often helps to connect other employees to the people that they serve, deepening their empathy and inspiring their work.
Growth
A thriving community is fuel to the fire when a company has product-market fit. From the power of a single testimonial, to the virality of social media, to the influence of user-generated content on buying behavior, a passionate community drives growth.
Thankfully, for professional community builders, growth is often the most enticing metric for executives when considering where to allocate budgets and build teams. (So, don’t shy away from measuring growth from the outset… especially if you want more resources to invest back into your community!)
Additionally, for start-ups still building their products or companies working to refine their offerings, community input can serve as the vehicle for feedback that increases conversion in the long run.
When you know your customer and you deeply understand their pains, you have a competitive advantage in the marketplace. From beta groups to customer surveys, engaged user communities can bubble up critical feedback that shifts the trajectory of the business and leads to long-term growth. It also provides insight on what your customers care about and how you can better serve them through product, content, or programming.
Metrics to consider:
• Percent of new users attributed to community channels
• Number of leads acquired through user-generated content/community initiatives
• Number of product ideas implemented from the community
• Engagement markers across community groups and channels
A word of wisdom: build data infrastructure that tracks multi-touch attribution. Just because someone purchases a product through a sales promotion or ad doesn’t mean they haven’t been nurtured by the community prior to hitting the buy button. Being able to track leads as they engage with community initiatives is critical to understanding overall impact.
Additionally, it isn’t uncommon for growth-related community impact to be misattributed to other channels, especially when initiatives intersect or platforms are shared. For instance, community groups hosted on Facebook are easily misattributed as inbounding from Facebook pages or hearing about the company from a marketing campaign rather than a community-led conversation. The battle for proper attribution will always be there within marketing and community teams. However, having visibility into various community touchpoints can make all the difference.
Retention
Customer retention is critical to the health of any business. Community can play a large role in improving activation and reducing churn by crowdsourcing product education and democratizing customer support in a way that drives positive sentiment and reduces costs to the company.
I’ve seen this especially evident in customer success communities. Customer support does not need to be limited to chatbots, help centers, and one-on-one concierge care. Empowering passionate users to share about the product, showcase creative ways they are using features, and answer other members’ questions creates more opportunities for swift resolution and user success. It can also reduce inbound support tickets and make members feel more supported and likely to stay.
Facebook communities are a common way for tech companies to cultivate relationships between customers and encourage them to share knowledge and best practices. Udemy, for example, has invested heavily in creating a Facebook group for its course creators. Community members advise one another, ask questions, and share what course ideas they are working on. After analyzing the impact of their Facebook community, Udemy found that instructors are four times more likely to create a course if they’re part of the Facebook group.5
Likewise, Sephora stands out in the highly competitive cosmetics space with a thriving community of people interested in beauty. From sharing makeup hauls to clean beauty favorites to advice for how to handle acne-prone skin, their in-product community is packed with engaging conversations and user-generated content. Sephora’s Beauty Insiders deeply humanizes the makeup giant and creates a deepened sense of loyalty among customers.6
How much loyalty? Sephora’s highest-engaged community members spent an average of 36.5 hours on Beauty Talk weekly and spent more than ten times at Sephora than the average customer.7
They are superfans for the long haul, and this has a deep impact on customer retention.
Metrics to consider:
• Customer satisfaction or Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Percentage of increased feature adoption with community-led education + content programming
• Percentage of community members engaging (contributing content/answering questions) in user groups
• Reduced number of support tickets; reduction in support costs due to community-led support
Advocacy
Passionate super-fans have the ability to generate an organic marketing engine that runs itself. We’ve all seen the impact of community-led virality and advocacy. Many of the products we’ve purchased have been recommended from friends or spotted in groups we’re a part of online. Referrals and recommendations matter.
A great example of community advocacy through referrals can be found in an email newsletter company called the Skimm.
The company lovingly named their community advocat
es Skimm’bassadors and has united members around a shared identity and love for the brand. Skimm’bassadors are equipped with a cheat sheet to maximize their effectiveness and have the opportunity to win swag for inviting others to join the newsletter. By exciting, nurturing, and mobilizing members with the tools they need to refer, the Skimm has directly turned the power of community into an advocacy engine.8
Although referral and affiliate programs are some of the most widely accepted ways of transferring community loyalty into business impact, it is certainly not the only way.
Advocacy can also be earned through extraordinary customer service that inspires a community to share about a brand in meaningful ways. One of my favorite examples of this is from a pet retailer called Chewy. Known for shipping pet products directly to your door, this company has built a cult following on how it serves its community.
When a mistake is made and an incorrect product ships, Chewy offers a refund and encourages its customers to donate the unwanted items to an animal shelter. When a longtime customer experiences the loss of their pet, Chewy employees are known to send flowers and heartfelt condolences. Neither of these actions is expected. However, they demonstrate a shared sense of core values between the brand and its customers.
Over the past decade, the company has become one of the most successful pet brands in the world. Founder Ryan Cohen launched the brand in 2011, then sold it to PetSmart six years later for $3.5 billion—noted as the largest e-commerce acquisition at that time. In the years since, their valuation has only continued to rise by billions and billions of dollars.
When talking about why the brand has had such tremendous success, Cohen notes: “When people shop at Chewy, they really understand we care about them, we care about their pets.”9
The effort required to earn someone’s trust will always be worth more than the practice of buying their attention. In business as it is in life, a personal recommendation carries a significant amount of weight, and when seeking to understand the impact of community, it is a vital thing to track.
Metrics to consider:
• Percentage of referrals (conversions or activations); percentage of referral links shared
• Conversion rate of referred customers versus organic inbounds
• Percentage of referring community members
• Percentage likelihood of a customer to refer based on being a community member
Additionally, I recommend monitoring brand sentiment and awareness indicators as part of understanding the power of community advocacy. Even if it is as simple as documenting anecdotes and qualitative input from community groups and social media platforms, it is critical to communicate the power of advocacy on brand and customer sentiment.
ROI EXPANDED
We’ve talked about building communities to fuel company growth, but what about looking within? When we set out to foster a deeper sense of belonging in our companies, neighborhoods, and organizations, what is the resulting impact?
You don’t have to be a professional community builder to contemplate these questions. Arguably, as actively engaged human beings, we should constantly evaluate whether our actions are contributing positively to our lives and to the lives of others. That includes our time spent engaging and investing in relationships.
Although difficult to quantify, it remains intuitively understood that what we take away from the spaces where we belong and the connections that we cultivate is significant.
When we are deeply connected, we are:
• Heard, seen, and valued
• A part of something greater than ourselves
• Supported physically and emotionally in our lives
• Consciously aware of the needs of others
• Empowered to reach our potential
Radha Agrawal argues in her book, Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life, that the importance of belonging is so critical to our existence that it is in fact a fundamental human need in the same category as food, water, touch, love, and shelter. In reconstructing Maslow’s original hierarchy of needs, Agrawal clarifies that “Without a community supporting you at each level, it’s nearly impossible to move up the hierarchy.”10
To rise and thrive, we need one another. As a result, we see connection woven into all aspects of those critical needs and our ability to move into higher levels of personal and professional development.
When you look at a successful individual and ask “How did they do it?” the world is quick to point to their individual accomplishments and personality traits: their degrees, the hours they spent honing their skills, their resilient mindsets, inherent intelligence, et cetera.
However, in my experience, the community infrastructure around the individual is just as important as the work they put into their own trajectory.
Who affirmed their self-esteem and built their confidence?
Who nurtured their resilience and modeled perseverance in their life?
Who sacrificed for them? Who still sacrifices for them?
Behind every successful human being is a person or people who introduced them to their power and potential. Connection and collaboration are the keys to developing into the people we were always meant to be.
The same truth applies to our companies and organizations. When we look at a successful brand, our world places far too much value on the actions of top-level executives in the C-suite without taking into account the impact that company is making on the ground floor.
Do employees feel deeply connected to the brand mission, its leaders, and one another?
Do the customers feel supported, valued, and well served?
Is the company connection centric in all aspects?
Google spent two years analyzing what made a successful team and found that the most important dynamic to fuel progress was psychological safety. In order for a team to be successful, members must feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable with one another. It didn’t matter how many Rhodes Scholars and brilliant engineers they could cram into the same room if none of them felt safe to bring their entire selves to work. A sense of connection to people and values is critical.
Two other important team dynamics that Google found in its analysis included employees feeling a sense of meaning in their work and fundamentally believing that the work they do matters.11 In many companies, this also ties to the power of community. Having the ability to connect with the customers you serve and see how your daily contributions positively impact their lives transforms the way you think about work.
Part of my role as head of community at HoneyBook is to serve as the bridge between our members and our employees. Sharing impact stories, highlighting “customer love,” and showcasing the way our product is transforming businesses and livelihoods is important. When an engineer knows that a new feature has the ability to save a single mother two hours a week on a task she previously was doing manually in her business, it turns lines of code into a clear vision of a life transformed.
Community is not a buzzword to drive employer branding campaigns or recruit new hires. It must be a lived value for companies that desire to build high-performing teams of deeply fulfilled employees. Feeling profoundly connected to the work that we do and the people who are a part of our professional lives is important.
Investing in community and connection within an organization cannot be a quick strategy or a one-off effort. It cannot be an afterthought. It must be knit into the fabric of our company cultures just as it is knit into the fabric of our DNA.
A shout into the void.
What does a group of entrepreneurs, a Canadian Bachelorette contestant, and a wedding have in common? One of my favorite lighthearted stories about the power of community showcases just how unifying our willingness to help one another can be.
A few years ago, a random post in the Rising Tide Society Facebook group turned our entire community upside down. I’m talking zero to sixty, pedal to the floorboards, all business as usual cease
d in a matter of minutes.
It is important to note that in groups of this size, it isn’t entirely uncommon that a conversation will go viral.… However, it was the first time we had experienced anything of this magnitude.
Rising Tide member and Texas photographer Stephanie Nelson was desperate to find a date to an upcoming wedding. Not sure where else to look, she took to social media and started searching for the perfect partner.
“Are there any handsome single guys that live in the Austin or San Antonio area and are free this Saturday? My wedding date bailed,” she posted.
Oh, and that wasn’t all.… This wasn’t just an ordinary wedding. The stakes were particularly high for this event. Why might that be?
“It’s my EX-BOYFRIEND’S wedding,” she wrote. “I can’t show up without a date and let his family see me all single and alone.”
As if in unison, the entire community responded to the tune of: Oh, heck no! We aren’t going to let that happen. There is no way you are going to that wedding alone. Not on our watch!
Stephanie’s words became a passionate call to arms—within minutes an army of other business owners came rushing to her aid. They started calling friends and family members, reaching out to anyone and everyone to see who would be available on such short notice. The wedding was a few days away, and therefore searching for the perfect date became the community’s primary goal.
We were going to find Stephanie someone incredible to take to this wedding. No matter what.
Ten comments…
Fifty comments…
One hundred comments…
One thousand comments…
It wasn’t long before this particular post was being reshared in industry groups all across social media. My entire newsfeed became an amalgamation of separate conversations instructing people to go into the Rising Tide group and join our collective search to find Stephanie a date.
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