Building a strong community culture is incredibly important for the long-term success of any community. Without a great culture, a community can start to scare off new members, harm existing members, and damage your brand. But “culture” is one of those things that seems so touchy-feely that it’s easy to wonder if you have any control over it.
Thankfully, over my 15+ years working with communities at companies like HubSpot and Reddit, I’ve uncovered some of the core building blocks of a strong community culture.
A Strong Cultural Vision
You can’t have a strong culture if you don’t know what you want it to be! Taking the time to think about what vibe you want for your community – and what vibe will allow you to please both members and business – is worthwhile. Are you creating a raucous nightclub or a quiet library? A messy fun run or a professional race? Writing this out will give you a north star to execute against.
Clear Guidelines
Correspondingly, it’s hard to enforce a culture if members don’t know what it’s supposed to be. Capturing the dos and don’ts of your community in a formal document will help guide your members and give you something to point to when you have to hand out punishments. The Coral Project has a great guide to building a code of conduct.
I recommend making your rules specific enough that they’re clear without having them be so targeted (“you can’t say words x, y, and z”) that you have to constantly amend them to factor in new, creative trolls. (And let me tell you, from 5 years at Reddit: they will always come up with new ways to be nasty.) And don’t forget to list them prominently – research has shown that this can decrease problematic posts.
What punishments you assign to transgressions will depend on your community and the level of transgression. In some cases you may want to consider a 3-strikes rule; in others, you may have zero tolerance.
Great Founding Members
The founding members of your community are going to set the vibe. Whatever content they post will be what the larger member base sees when they join. These are the village elders that newbies will look up to. So you absolutely must carefully screen your founding members to ensure that they both embody your cultural vision and that they’re committed to helping you deliver on it.
Staff That Model Behavior
Just as your members will look up to your founding members, they’ll look up to you and your staff. The moment that you break cultural norms, everyone will think it’s ok. Ensure that your team knows the rules and vibe and diligently stick to them.
Positive Reinforcement
Studies show that positive reinforcement tends to be more effective than negative reinforcement. Shout-out the members you see doing an amazing job living up to your values. Consider awards or surprise-and-delight budgets for these folks. But also consider positive reinforcement for problem children – if you rain praise down on someone when they make the right choice, they may lean away from all the wrong choices they had been making prior.
Consistency of Punishment
Even if it’s not as effective as positive reinforcement, we do need to enforce our rules. Importantly, consistency of punishment is shown to be more effective than severity of punishment; it’s hard to prove any decrease in crime from the death penalty, whereas studies have shown that hard-to-avoid DUI checkpoints are quite effective.
This means making it easy for members to report transgressions, setting up automation to catch troublemakers, and enforcing the same way every time. Even if someone has traditionally been a good member of the community, you have to treat them the same as everyone else.
Evolution of Culture as Necessary – WITH Your Community
Communities are living, breathing, evolving entities, and it’s rare that their culture will remain stagnant or a ruleset will cover all situations until the end of time. You will likely need to evolve your guidelines over time. To do this successfully, consider involving your community in the discussion and be default transparent about the changes.
The Secret Weapon
What makes a strong community culture can’t truly fit into a blog post; it’s the day-to-day work of community professionals nurturing, supporting, and enforcing in their communities. If your business hasn’t hired a community professional, that’s my cheat code for you: hire someone who is great at this.
There’s no denying it: Community teams are being hit very hard right now by layoffs. The tech industry is seeing revenue dry up and taking massive action to reassure stakeholders, largely by letting people go.
We could debate the intelligence of these decisions, the morality of the choice, the side effects they’ll have to deal with. But that’s neither here nor there for Community professionals who worry they are next.
The fact of the matter is: companies are cutting heads and functions that they don’t think will help drive or retain revenue over the next 12-24 months. And if they’re cutting Community teams, that means we didn’t do a sufficient enough job generating and retaining revenue and/or we didn’t do a sufficient job promoting our success.
With that in mind, here’s what I see as the name of the game for the next year or two…
👇 Get Focused– no superfluous activities.
Community teams need to figure out where they can be most valuable and laser-focus on that. No unnecessary campaigns. No flights of fancy. No expansion of scope because some other Community team is doing it and it looks cool. Do 1-2 things, and do them well.
🔬 Experiment & Iterate – don’t launch & hope.
There is too much at stake to do a big launch and hope it works. New community ideas should go through testing & iteration, much like new product ideas. Start small, measure results, expand and pivot as needed from there. Don’t stake your whole reputation on a big launch.
📈 Measure Results – get as specific and close to dollar value as possible.
Fairly straightforward. We need to be measuring the value we’re providing, and tying it as closely as possible to driving or retaining revenue. Satisfaction scores and social reach are not going to do the job.
🤝 Build Connections – make community an invaluable partner for other teams.
Along these lines, the most defensible teams are the ones other teams want to defend! Don’t build off in a corner – find other teams that have challenges you can assist with. Become their hero, and they’ll become yours.
📣 Promote The Work – make sure nobody is unaware.
Community builders are givers, which often means they’re bad at self-promotion. You need to stuff that humble instinct in a trunk and lock it during this time. Every win you land should go to your boss, and possibly your boss’s boss, and possibly many other people in the company. You should be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Reorgs and layoffs often, sadly, happen through gut executive understanding of what’s working. Don’t wait for them to ask if things are working – make it impossible for them not to know.
👩🔧 Share Stories – make sure people FEEL what the community has done.
“Evan, didn’t you just say metrics and dollars are the most important? What is this storytelling nonsense?” Yes, the numbers are the crucial thing. But storytelling is very powerful, and community generates amazing stories. Let the impact of your work be seen in the metrics and felt in the human stories you tell.
None of this is any guarantee you or your team won’t face cuts, of course. But these are the table stakes. Any Community teams not taking the above actions are at high risk until we get out of these dark waters. Stay vigilant, stay true to yourself, and hang in there – we will get out the other side, but it’s going to be rocky for a bit.
Nearly every week, I curate three of the best links about community building for my newsletter, Community Manager Breakfast. I scour the web, reading sometimes dozens of articles a week to find the cream of the crop. For the end of the year, I thought I’d take that curation even further and take a look at which of the roughly 140 links I’ve shared this year got the most clicks. Here are your favorites for the year!
Ian Vanagas, one of my favorite new community writers of the last few years, provides a great framing for two approaches to consider for onboarding your community members.
This framework from the folks at Burb falls into the “I wish I had written it” category for me. They provide a clear way of thinking about how to explore and discover the right community for your organization. It maps extremely well to how I think about the topic!
Jenny Weigle, one of Community Manager Breakfast’s biggest cheerleaders, blessed us all with a five-part series on yearly strategy planning. (Scroll down to the bottom to find the other entries.) In-depth, thoughtful, and immediately actionable.
Sometimes you just need a list. Jenny Weigle lands two spots in a row here, this time with her inspiration-provoking list of methods to reward advocates.
Many of the links above focus on how to launch a community and achieve success…but how do you achieve scale, and what challenges do you face once you hit it? Gareth Wilson has some answers.
Common Room took advantage of their massive dataset to give us all an early holiday present, covering a plethora of topics including: does the initial surge of chat community activity drop off? Do communities contribute to lead generation and conversion? How responsive are community members? Great stuff.
Carrie Melissa Jones returns to the list, this time using a campfire analogy to help us think about how we create crucial intimacy in community experiences, even at scale.
Georgi Todorov, who also frequently showed up in the runner-up links, takes member experience back to fundamentals by reminding us to think through who we’re serving and why they’re present, then building from there.
And coming in at #1 is Martha Essien not with a cheat sheet of engagement tactics, but with sage advice to take a breath, assess the situation, and get to work. Good advice for all of us.
If you found any of these links useful, why not get them in your inbox every Monday? Subscribe to Community Manager Breakfast below to get 3 curated links and a dose of inspiration from me delivered directly to you every week.
Measuring the value your community is providing to members is incredibly important. Without value, people won’t stick around, contribute, or spread the word.
So how do you measure this?
No One Metric to Rule Them All
First, a caveat: you should never rely on a single metric for anything. Single metrics give you one angle of a situation that is complex. You should always compliment your primary metric with other viewpoints.
For example, if someone says that the community provides them value but you see incredibly low contributor rates, that could mean your community is riskily balanced on the backs of a very small number of contributors. Or you see great contributor rates, but when you review the quality, 90% are spam.
Choose the most useful primary metric, then supplement with other viewpoints.
The Case Against NetPromoter Score
NetPromoter Score (or NPS) asks what seems like a simple question:
“How likely is it that you would recommend [Organization/Product/Service/Community] to a friend or colleague?”
Members then answer by choosing a number between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely).
You then break members into different groups based on their score:
0-6: Detractors
7-8: Passives
9-10: Promoters
You then subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters to get your score.
NPS is rampant across the business world. It’s ubiquity suggests that it simply must be a high quality, useful metric. And although I’ve used it before, I have come to the conclusion that it’s generally problematic, and specifically a bad fit for communities.
0-10 Scales Are Confusing
Quick, tell me what a 6 out of 10 likelihood to recommend to a friend means!
Hard, right? The 0-10 scale for NPS is overwhelming for both customer and analyst. Research validates this: one study showed that a 5- or 7-point scale was better.
(They also found that there wasn’t a single best predictor, and that different question response combos resulted in different results – see my point above about looking at more than one metric.)
It’s Not Entirely Clear There Is Sound Logic Behind the Calculation
This piece nicely illustrates exactly how wacky this calculation can be:
“Let’s say we’re having a bad day and 10 respondents give us all zeroes: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, and 0. The average of these ten numbers is a 0. (Makes sense.) NPS is -100. That’s the worst it can get.
Now, let’s say the team works really hard. They make the product so much better. After all this hard work, we get all sixes: 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, and 6. The average of these ten numbers is 6. But NPS is still -100.”
This is not only depressing, not only confusing, but also doesn’t give you good directional feedback. You just increased likelihood to recommend by a massive amount…yet your score says you made no progress. This could lead your team to abandon the work that got you those 6’s and go back to the drawing board, even though you were on the right track.
There Are Reasons Someone Might Not Recommend A Community They Love
This last point comes from personal experience. I’ve used NPS many times in my career. And every time I dig into the details of the responses, I see oddities based on the exact phrasing of the question. Common ones:
“I wouldn’t recommend this to my friends because I have no friends.”
“I wouldn’t recommend this I don’t ever recommend products.”
“My friends don’t want me to bug them with product recommendations.”
With communities, it becomes even more interesting:
“I wouldn’t recommend this community to my friends because I don’t want them to know what I’m posting here.”
“I wouldn’t recommend this community because my friends aren’t into this topic.”
So your member could be experiencing your community as the brightest point in their life, the reason they get out of bed in the morning, and yet they’d give you a bad NPS. Again – this is not helpful directionally.
The Case for Product-Market Fit
The Product-Market Fit (PMF) survey asks:
“How would you feel if you could no longer use [Organization/Product/Service/Community]? A) Very disappointed B) Somewhat disappointed C) Not disappointed”
Then you simply report on the % of members that fall into each category.
Now, to be clear, I’m not 100% sure PMF is the right solution, and I have limited personal data points. But on the surface, it feels like a better fit.
It’s Simpler
Three options. Worded in a human way. Far easier for the member to determine, and far easier for you to interpret; “Hey, most folks would not be disappointed if we shut this community down” is a pretty definitive statement.
It Focuses on the Member
Rather than focusing on recommendations, which I’ve already demonstrated are highly complex things, this question focuses purely on the member’s experience with your community.
It’s Encompasses Value and Emotion
Especially with communities, you want to provide value but ALSO be eliciting a strong emotion. Someone might find a community useful but not be passionate enough about it to contribute. This question nicely straddles the usefulness of the community and how strongly the member feels about it.
It’s a Familiar Term for Most Startup Leaders
The hardest thing about moving away from NPS is that everyone seems to use it, so you’ll get skepticism when you say you want to try something new.
Thankfully, entrepreneurs talk about product-market fit constantly – so you’ll still be speaking their language.
The Magic is in the Responses
Regardless of which survey you use, be sure to include a “Why did you give that score?” write-in question after the numerical rating. Yes, having a score and being able to look at which way you’re trending is valuable. But more valuable is knowing WHY people feel this way. This is what you can spin into gold. This is what is really bugging or delighting people.
So even if you’re stuck with NPS, make sure you get those write-ins. Ultimately, what your members say is more valuable than any number.
Keep Experimenting
My goal here isn’t to get you to adopt PMF, but rather to carefully consider the value of NPS for your community and to explore alternatives.
As mentioned above, no one metric will serve all your needs.
No community is the same, and you may have unique aspects that you should measure. Don’t get bullied into using others’ metrics unless they’re actually valuable for you.
Try different things. Try validating them – do you actually see recommendation actions from high scorers? Increased contributions? Or are people saying one thing and doing another? And lastly, please share – we’re all traversing these challenges together, so I’d love to hear from you about what worked for you!
One of the most fundamental ways companies can build trust is to listen to their customers (and act on what they hear). But this can often be easier said than done. There’s SO much feedback out there, there can be a lot of aggressive negativity, sharing roadmaps feels like handing intel to your competitors, etc.
One of the best tools for building this trust while avoiding many of the concerns above is an advisory council: a private, limited group of customers who give you insight and feedback. A successful advisory council becomes the bridge between company and audience and drives true co-creation.
Advisory councils have been one of our most crucial tools for rebuilding trust at Reddit. And many of the harder decisions we’ve made have been informed by our Moderator Council. You can see that in action in the public notes we shared from our Council discussion on implementing a hate speech policy.
Today I want to outline the crucial ingredients for a successful advisory council.
A Clear Mission
If you’re not explicit about what your goals are, your audience may see the council as simply lip service – or use it in ways you didn’t expect. Craft your mission statement before you do outreach and be sure to feature it prominently both during that phase and within the council itself.
You’ll also want to explicitly define what the council is not. For us, we had to clarify a few months in that this was not a channel to escalate support issues. We didn’t want to give unfair advantage to our council members and these escalations tended to distract from the core topics. Make sure when identifying these non-topics that you carefully explain why (and what their alternative channels are) so the council doesn’t feel silenced.
Constructive Criticism
A successful council will give you the feedback you need to hear, but not feel antagonistic. If it’s too antagonistic your staff won’t want to attend, but if you just fill the council with yes-people you won’t actually get what you need.
The right people
Choosing the right people for your council is one of the most crucial steps. As with any community, your core members will define the culture and vibe of your council. We specifically looked for people who had criticized us before but tended to be civil and open to discussion. This was relatively easy for us because we do public feature announcements on our platform and get lots of feedback in the comments. If you don’t have that to pull from, you can do some introductory calls before extending a formal invite.
Sales staff, community staff, customer support staff, and your audience itself will also have great suggestions for additions. Just be careful that nobody is getting added as a way to help close a sale – you should have final say on whether you accept a nominated member.
Rules and norms
Like any community, you want to establish rules and norms within your council space. This may be fairly personal based on your company, the area your business is in, the stomach your staff have for conflict, etc. For us, a few things were important: council members needed to actually try to attend calls and get context if they were going to give criticism, to treat others like humans and avoid ad hominem attacks, and to ensure they’re not dominating the conversation.
Confidentiality
It’s very important that you’re clear with invitees up front what level of confidentiality you expect. Some members may not be comfortable keeping things private, and you don’t want to put them in a tough position. Nobody should have to guess what they can share – make it explicitly clear when something is early and confidential (i.e. don’t freak out the larger community with this half-baked idea) vs something you’d love for them to evangelize.
On the other hand, make it clear whether their participation in and/or contributions to the council will be publicly shared.
Enforcement
Rules don’t work without enforcement. It might feel especially painful to punish someone in such an intimate and important community, but if you don’t then nobody will take the rules seriously. Establish a plan for how many strikes someone gets and then apply consistently. We’ve been lucky to have to remove very few folks from the councils, but our warnings and occasional removals have been effective in showing that we’re not messing around.
Positive reinforcement
On the flip side, make sure that every time you see someone with a really great contribution you give them a shout-out. Be sure to emphasize why it’s great so others know how to emulate – call out if it was particularly insightful, or critical without being antagonistic, or whatever other norm you want to entrench.
Diverse Membership
The insights from your council will be ineffective unless it’s successfully representing a diverse group of people.
Diverse recruitment
This is an opportunity to hear from the folks who may not be the loudest voices in the room, but are still affected (sometimes, even more dramatically) by your decisions. Be sure to carefully curate people across a range of attributes, like:
Account size
Account age
Location
Race
Identity
Product usage
Obviously, be sure to follow all relevant laws and be transparent about any data collection or usage.
Term limits
A permanent advisory council is bad for a number of reasons:
You don’t get a diversity of voices
Over time, members may lose their outsider perspective
The larger audience may not feel represented by this “cabal”
You may discover someone isn’t a great fit but you don’t want to “fire” them
I highly recommend creating limited, pre-determined terms for your members. You can consider a one-time extension for especially fantastic members. (We also hired one of our best council members!) This gives you a nice rotating cast of people and an easy out if someone isn’t a great fit.
Internal Participation
The council will only work if you’re actually engaging with it regularly. This means that you have to drive internal participation.
Getting internal buy-in
This can be hard – internal folks may feel too busy, or may be scared of being yelled at. The best long-term solution for this is just to make sure that, per the above, council conversations are constructive. The short-term solution may be less elegant: call in favors, plop council meetings onto people’s calendars without asking, find a friendly (even if they’re not the team leader) to come present, get their bosses to pressure them, etc. Get the wheel turning and, if you’ve truly created a collaborative environment, folks will want to come back and will spread the good word.
Be sure to also be conscious about how you’re pitching the council. When pitching, this isn’t about “listening to our users” or “doing the right thing” – those aren’t the primary motivators for everyone (unfortunately). Instead, frame it in a way that aligns with the parties’ goals. For product managers it might be about making their launches more successful, for policy folks it might be about avoiding potential blowback, etc.
Hearing All Voices
If the point of a council is to hear viewpoints you might normally miss, that means being intentional about hearing those voices.
Limit call size
After about 10 council participants, a call tends to gets too messy to handle and people can’t speak up. Make sure to limit – you can always release notes from the call and have a larger asynchronous discussion after.
Wait before you try to solve
It can be easy to hear someone explain a problem or make a suggestion and immediately leap on it because you have thoughts or want to try to fix it. But that one person might not represent the group. Make time for other voices; ideally, a gap long enough it feels awkward and the most timid people can work up the courage. Actively ask “Is this how everyone feels? Are there any other perspectives?”
Raise people’s voices
If someone’s quiet that doesn’t mean they don’t have an opinion. Make sure to call on people you haven’t heard from.
Follow up after
Some people aren’t great live, and sometimes people think of new angles or better articulate their thoughts after a call. Create an asynchronous written space for his conversation.
Respect time limits
Hearing all voices does not mean going over time. Some people have hard stops and can’t attend past the end time – continuing is putting them in a tough spot and potentially excluding them. Plus, having more to talk about probably means you’ve just found some juicy topics, which is great! You can always schedule a more focused follow-up call (frankly, that may be more productive than trying to solve something in the last 10 minutes of a call) or, again, take it to an asynchronous conversation.
Theme your calls
There will always be topics that are more urgent, but not always more important (see the Eisenhower Matrix). For this reason, it’s good to have different themed calls to ensure that you touch on everything important at some point. For some constant topics you’ll want to have a recurring call; others can be ad hoc.
Act on feedback
Listening without taking action can sometimes be worse than asking in the first place. It gives the sense that a council is merely for show.
Bring things to your council early
The biggest issue we ran into is that teams would be so heads-down on work that they wouldn’t bring products to our council until they were nearly finished. This doesn’t work; even if you get some truly great and valid feedback, you don’t have time to implement it.
Set an internal goal for how early teams are to bring items to councils, measure it, and address problem teams. Be sure to remind them why this is in their best interest!
Either do it or say why not
Some feedback will be worth acting on, some won’t. Some will align with business interests, some won’t. But even if you don’t plan to act on feedback, you should acknowledge it. Explain why and set clear expectations as to whether you’ll revisit the decision. (Try to avoid platitudes like “thanks for the feedback, we’ll consider it” – people can see right through this.) Often, this is the difference between a community member feeling you’re ignoring them and them grudgingly accepting your decision.
Reply
Even if you don’t have anything actionable to say in response to feedback, you should appreciate that person for going out of their way to give you something valuable. Try to reply to or at least socially respond to (like, award, etc) every contribution.
Appreciation
Hopefully it goes without saying, but people like appreciation and you should appreciate your council. A few ways to do so:
Thank them every chance you get (publicly and in the private council space)
Point out where their work had an impact – the more specific you can be, the more they’ll feel it
Give them unique swag that emphasizes their unique effort
Give them access to high levels of the company
Give them digital badges or trophies to display
Loop them in early when something big is happening
On that last point, we specifically found that during crises (when we tended to be heads down) our council felt painfully ignored. When we started to loop them in – even with a “hey, we ARE working on this but we don’t have any details yet” – they were happier, gave us more constructive feedback, and tended to publicly support us more.
Amplifying to the Larger Audience
Simply running a council doesn’t mean all your users feel connected to what you’re doing. An advisory council shouldn’t exist in a vacuum – it should be combined with other methods of gathering feedback, conversing with your audience, and building trust.
It’s important to amplify the work you’re doing with your council. This can look like:
Noting in launch announcements that the council weighed in on a feature
Calling out improvements that were specifically identified by the council
Creating ways for the broader community to apply to join or nominate others
Evolve
Our first councils were vertically focused (sports, gaming, beauty, etc). We then combined them into one mega council because we didn’t have the bandwidth to run so many individual calls. We’re now looking at some potential ideas around splitting them out again. That’s ok: plans, situations, and capabilities change.
Every council is going to be different, and it’s going to evolve with your capacity, company goals, etc. Don’t lock yourself into one format. But, crucially: be sure to get feedback from your council before you change said council!
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Advisory councils are not a small amount of work, but they can be one of the biggest bangs for your buck in building customer insight and trust. If you choose to create an advisory council, be sure to sufficiently invest in it. And lastly – have fun! Getting to connect intimately with your audience can be incredibly rewarding.
