Online Community Success Kit AN ASSOCIATION EXECUTIVES GUIDE

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1 Online Community Success Kit AN ASSOCIATION EXECUTIVES GUIDE

2 COMMUNITY GUIDE: ASSOCIATION EXECUTIVES Association Leaders Need to Guide the Member Experience How is your organization evolving? Are you harnessing your members activities taking place more than a one-way exchange of information will deliver value far beyond expectations. It s still important to maintain priority on member loyalty and retention, no matter your organization or industry. Those interactions are all distinct and valuable, whether in the form of positive tweets about your brand, blog posts and comments about your latest Here s our breakdown for providing outcomes of a successful member community: Leadership Buy-in Membership Growth Measure & Report with KPIs New Revenue Streams We ve taken the guesswork out of building a community, no matter which department takes the lead or set of values you deem important to your organization. This guide will help you discover how you can measure what matters and create a successful community. Leadership Buy-In and success can be maximized by online communities, but that growth will plateau if leaders do not adjust their participation habits. Associations have strong leaders and leadership programs, and they also have engaging and robust online communities but the two aren t always working together. Attendance may be required for conference calls or annual meetings, but a leader s social media presence or participation in a member community is rarely regulated or even expected. Consider what kind of message that sends to members. Leader attendance and networking at annual meetings is practically mandatory it s a selling point for attendees to listen to keynotes given by the President, or have their voices heard by leaders at the Town Hall meeting. That type of leader engagement can be just as valuable within a member community.

3 According to The Community Roundtable s 2015 State of Community Management Report, executive participation directly impacts success, and correlates with improvements in engagement, a dedicated budget and the ability to measure value. increase in renewal rates from members engaging with their community, Collaborate. The opportunity to engage with other members and subsequently renew membership cannot be understated. The 2015 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report from Marketing General found lack of engagement with an organization was the top reason for not renewing membership in The overall goal is not to continually achieve more engagement it s to achieve the right level of engagement. How can leadership strike the right balance? Every organization doesn t need to rush out and integrate the most popular marketing automation system: online community platforms provide similar capabilities. If your online community is already up and running, what better system to use than the very place where members are already collaborating, networking and connecting on a daily basis? When it comes right down to it, the function of an online community is all about giving people a place to engage, no matter their interests or industries. There are a number of cases that point to the bottom line results of having an engaged community. We believe the basics of better engagement comes down to three actions: make it easy, often and fun. How We Can Help Interestingly, while hundreds of associations have successfully launched private communities, the governance structure that exists for other parts of the association is still primarily absent from the community. Leaders should be champions of the platform, maintaining an active presence both in the community and at face-to-face events where they can encourage members who aren t yet involved in the community. Take control of both content for the online community and cross- pollinating community content across other communication vehicles, both inside and outside of the association. Some of the best (and easiest) participation tactics include: Advocacy or volunteer MVPs beta test new features Help with development of new community content and inform the platform s future direction Attend special MVP events for dedicated community members Membership Growth Increasing engagement is key to sustaining and growing your member base. An online Engage easily task they are trying to complete if the site is not optimized for mobile use. So making impact on their level of engagement and how much value they get out of it. Engage often Provide as many opportunities for engagement as possible. Does this mean add more engagement programs? The answer is all of the above. You want to make sure people can engage the way they want to engage, whether it s on mobile devices, , smart watches or a desktop. We call this frictionless engagement.

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5 Engage in a fun way Ideal interactions are enthusiastic and detailed. The community should feel good to use and being recognized for contributions. It s fun to be a part of a community they were searching for all along. How We Can Help If your community addresses these engagement tactics, the activity of engagement will produce great content. One of Higher Logic s clients has produced almost 150,000 pieces of content in their community over the last six years. This is all produced by the members, for the members. Not only is that an impressive amount, taken together it s a great resource, a true knowledge base for all members. Before members are creating great content, where do they start? Onboarding communications are a great place. This type of outreach can be governed by automation, not manual labor, and lift the burden from membership and community management. dynamically generated using automation tools. With these rules, community managers and admins can provide greetings, rewards, compliments and alerts without labor-intensive automation is just as important as creating it. Measure & Report with KPIs indicators (KPIs). It s no surprise the measures of success for an internal community within an organizaor customer support community. Instead, your approach to measuring the success for your community needs to grow from how you measure success for your organization as a whole, and the shared purpose and value of your community for the According to Higher Logic s 2014 Community Benchmarking Report, the top quartile Create Actionable Formulas Once your organization is clear on its key performance indicators, apply these to community performance. We recommend focusing on total metrics like discussion posts and threads, logins, contributors, members versus active users and library downloads. Remember that member behavior and engagement will serve for better reporting in the long run, rather than just tracking for growth. After establishing your basic benchmarks, you can measure and readjust a variety of KPIs, as well as compare with other similar organizations. Based on survey data from the Benchmarking Report, leading organizations checked the following: REACH: Ratio of Subscribers to Members The engagement Reach helps organizations recognize other organizations with a larger percentage of their members subscribed to at least one discussion group. QUANTITY: Ratio of Messages to Members The Quantity relates to group messages and is one of the most visible metrics of discussion-related engagement. QUALITY: Ratio of Responses per Thread The Quality relates to number of responses per thread. SPREAD: Ratio of Unique Authors to Group Messages The Spread calculates ratios of authors to messages over a one-year period. The temptation is to pin your success on growth, but in the long run growing from 50 to 500 members is far less important to your community s future than what members activity and changes for the group you have. It makes sense to design your indicators of performance early, to highlight how behaviors are changing, and couple the numbers with stories to help illustrate the possibilities. success should change as well. Higher Logic s Community Benchmarking Report is an initiative encompassing all industries involved in community and community management. It sets out to establish best practice to identify common metrics that provide organization leaders with basic benchmarks they can use to measure how their communities are performing compared to others. ingredient for all. This requires a commitment on the part of the association, to clearly How We Can Help The key to engaging members is through building a private community over which your - ship over your data.

6 Our communities make it easy to stay on top of performance trends, measure ROI and adjust member engagement strategy as you go. Community administrators can produce reports on benchmarks like visits, discussions and library items the data can be sliced, diced and exported for use as an external tool, for everything from member acquisition to engagement for the community. A few general tips for leading the charge in community engagement: Start with organization goals build your community goals from there. Growth and engagement numbers make sense, but aren t the ultimate goal. Mature communities: bring together stakeholders to choose the best, not easiest, measures. Tell stories with your numbers and make your reports teachable moments. Take advantage of executives interest in the numbers. New Revenue Streams The ROI of your community is important to track. Are your community activity and member engagement strategies in line with your organizational goals? Just as leadership participation helps to bridge the gap between association and membership, so should the online community. According to recent Gallup polling, customers and clients who are happily engaged with a brand spend an average of 18 percent more than customers and clients who aren t. Any community can use advertising, vendors, events Every online community manager needs to be prepared for the day when the powersthat-be ask What s the ROI of our community? says Ben Martin, CAE, from Online and cents on the balance sheet than replying with social media dogma like What s the ROI of your mother? a real answer given at a conference by a famous social media guru. This kind of answer won t impress the powers-that-be. Start tracking your ROI now. Several Higher Logic clients are getting creative with their online communities as a successful platform for generating additional revenue. The platform is naturally advantageous ads, sponsor relationships and revenue opportunities around events and conferences. Promote Vendors with Banner Ads Because it is the go-to place for members to interact and share knowledge, vendors were eager to get in front of members on the community. Banner advertising seemed to be the

7 most obvious and best option. They have been so productive with allocating banner ads that the revenue will help pay for their annual software license for the community. Beyond the success we ve seen for our members, we realized we could supplement costs by introducing ads directly on our community site, says Laura Brook, head of community community site. At this point into the year, we are right on track to meet that goal. also did not have that bandwidth, but wanted to take advantage of relevant advertising for work for them. a way to make up for that lost revenue. We chose a digital advertising network, and our association now collects monthly revenue. The network also sells any leftover inventory that we have available on our website, says Nina Corbut, OSBA s director of publications. Early on, Dynamic Communities realized its CRMUG community would be a great vehicle to promote conferences and events and drive better attendance. They receive ten times more registrations coming from the online Higher Logic community to their annual conference, Summit, than any other source. Since launching, Summit has seen 33 percent growth in attendance year over year at its annual conference, which has added to strong revenue growth. Summit is our annual conference that comprises 60 percent of our revenue derived it s by far our biggest event of the year. Being a major driving force, the annual conference relies on the success and growth of CRMUG Collaborate to drive revenue and membership in so many meaningful ways, says Andy Hafer, CEO of Dynamic Communities, Inc. To leverage the impact the community has had, CRMUG also decided to combine their website and community site. This recent site redesign aimed to put more focused for membership revenue growth. Feature Sponsors Through s and managed by the advertising partner, and are targeted for the organization s audiences. manage digital ads, with the added bonus of being able to secure national advertising. Sell More Products and Services The American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) has seen membership to on the site. Membership to their SIGs is an additional fee from standard association dues, 22 percent since When surveyed, SIG respondents cited the exclusive online highly valuable. ASHA members are more inclined to join a SIG because there is a tool for them to interact and communicate with others that have the same interest, says Jill Straniero, online collaboration manager at ASHA. Our community also has revenue streams through advertising of the discussions and a primary sponsor. Drive Event Registration traditional print advertising and new digital channels are both revenue generating. But they wanted to optimize banner ads with their already popular community discussion communications. Their sponsorship program began in May 2013, and the 30-day contracts have been in high demand and worked well for locking in advertising year-round. Community discussion group s sponsorships were booked for the majority of 2014 and We ve seen great success with the daily discussion group sponsorships, says per month, this spot has been booked up all year long, and is completely booked for the entire 2015 year. sponsorships include an ad in the online discussion within the community, further increasing exposure. Going forward, Greg and his team hope to implement additional ad revenue streams, using a similar model for sponsored blogs and home page leaderboard anchors on sponsors, who can post as many individual blogs in the featured section as they want. How We Can Help another every day. Dynamic Communities is made up of several user groups independent from Microsoft but focused on learning and sharing knowledge for members using Dynamics products and platforms. Online communities are inherently useful outlets for growth and increased revenue. Not only the go-to hubs for members to interact and share knowledge, they are also great platforms for generating new revenue streams. It s a valuable resource for improving both member satisfaction and returns on investment.

8 YOUR COMMUNITY IS OUT THERE They re your members, your customers, your enthusiasts. They re the people who care that you exist and are passionate about it they re the ones who want to know more and be more connected. By giving them a home where they can meet, share ideas, answer questions and stay energized, you re empowering them to be a part of your success. There s no denying the power of community, by fostering its growth, you open up a world of possibility. Bring your people and their ideas together in a dynamic online community.

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