Notes from our Building a Community Business Case.
This is quite long overdue. This comes from what attendees jotted down as we talked around ideas of how to build a community business case and how we could potentially include some of these ideas in an in introductory community course.
Building a community business case
Previous sessions:
Who is in the room?
- Rosie Sherry
- James Cattell
- Melike Parlakkilic
- Bruno Winck
- Keely Dunn
- Venia Logan
- Elodie Roche
- Fabián Acuña
- Sian Amoy
- Erin O’Neill
- Sheryl Coe
- Kely S. Eljadue
- Jess Hobbs
- Anita Shervington
Topics of discussion
What is a good community business case?
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What is hard about building a case?
- What needs does it fill?
- Start with something that is not fulfilled?
- We need to know what is missing, what is the hole we are trying to fill?
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If you need to pitch the value, then you need to define what the value is, quickly, otherwise the default value is the monetary value.
- “Always add value, and bring a service mindset to work with you every single day. (Matt Saunders)”
- Offer a framework of value
- It’s hard to put it into numbers
- How can we focus on value
- We feel frustration with the constant focus on value
- Content does mean value
- Value is not the be and end all
- Is value the wrong word?
- How can we shift the word the words we use?
- People want something that is useful, that then is valuable, then comes relationships
- “The holy grail of community is self disclosure” - Suzy Nelson, Facebook
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Is self disclosure really the goal?
- What is does it mean? (a definition of what it means and how it can apply to different situations/communitieis)
- Being able to share what you don’t know
- Ask questions
- So that we can serve members needs and goals
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One that serves the whole business and also the members
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create sense of being together aside normal activities (BW)?
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increase collaboration across silos (BW, businesses)
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extract knowledge (BW)
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One that informs product development and roadmap
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Increases business revenue, decreases churn and increases retention.
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adding Fun and joy
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Incorporates metrics that can inform/indicate success/RFI
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What is good research for a case?
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What is in it for me? WIIFM
How do we pitch the business value of community?
- Define value (not only monetary), coming to terms, rephrase, what role it has (Venia)
- Show examples
- Data
- testimonials/stories of members
- What needs does it fills? It could go further but it starts from need (make people join)
- ​​One way to find the value is to ask what people would loose if the community stop existing (could be by asking members of a similar communities)
- What emotional connection can you make with the “decision maker(s)”?
- Show them pictures of what good community meetings or events look like
- Dashboards are number, don’t we need stories?
- Arguments
- Objections
- Stories
- Examples
- Experiences
- Emotional connection
- may be work on scenario of selling
- and then from scenario see if some general ideas emerge
- Need, Value => Join → Encourage > Meaningful (self disclosure) @Venia
- Consider this angle: well-being has 5 main dimensions, physical wellbeing, financial wellbeing, career wellbeing, social wellbeing and community wellbeing.
How do we plan, budget and estimate our community needs?
- Business plan as usual with projections of costs and incomes in $ and time.
- A great strategy is needed
- Can we break this down, for purposes of the course, into the “phases” of a community plan and fit them in to 101, 201, 301 and 401 framework?
- 401 builds on 301, which builds on 201, etc…
- Community is a muscle. The strategy should reflect that as well.
- Can we break this down, for purposes of the course, into the “phases” of a community plan and fit them in to 101, 201, 301 and 401 framework?
- a checklist
- Design Thinking, DT, process to prevent blind corners: what do we want to solve, bring by creating a community, do a prototype, get feednack, make the plan,
- Prepare for objections
- Start small - as lean as possible (Rosie):
- I want to be as efficient as possible
- I don’t want to waste anyone’s money
- I want to start with a headcount of 1
- Why should we hire a team?
- How are we going to organise a team?
- Be super considerate of how we use our time
- There’s a great article by Holly Firestone (Tiffany Oda extended on this)
- We need to guide people, not always go into detail upfront
- What are the traps we can help people avoid
- Its important to include a community discovery in the plan
What language should we use?
- Think about what language the business uses ( aka voice of customer bW, no)
- How can we keep it simple?
- Harkening back to the prior discussion, having freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior segments lets us avoid the weeds.
- I set mine up as follows. We could do something similar:
101: building a magnetic community brand
201: understanding and building platforms
301: Creating a scalable community charter
401: Measuring, Fostering, and navigating community
- I set mine up as follows. We could do something similar:
- Harkening back to the prior discussion, having freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior segments lets us avoid the weeds.
- Typically in Marketing or UX we do interviews, surveys (bring back to DT) (BW)
- Need to think about the target audience for the course
- Use language that we use everyday to explain things
- James - this reminds me of how we design content for GOV.UK, which anyone from aged 11 up and should be able to understand
- Avoid acronyms, at least until you’ve explained them for the first time
- Be neutral - try not to have bias
- Beware common language - could it mean different things to different people?
- Problems with academia, for explain, is the complex language
- Build a shared community codex
- not a glossary, but as we have discussions about things, make sure we record of why we come to this decision to use this language
- Venia has an example of a codex
- Jargon has a reason to exist, because its precise
- Keep repeating definitions of jargon until they’re internalised
- In terms of selling community, maybe avoid the jargon - use their language instead
- Each of the groups of people we interact with, will have their own language
- If the customer is the CEO, use her language
- Some resources:
How max QDA treats codes:
https://www.maxqda.com/help-mx20/codes-2/overview-of-codes
What does management look for?
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Good use of money
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Good use of time (even if volunteer based, cuz it has to overall burden) (BW)
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Effective solution, best solution to expected benefits (BW)
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Insight
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Tangible, clean results/metrics
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Research and Development
- Who’s in contact with customers everyday? (bw: Add to stakeholders people who are in content with prospective members, not only members)
- Should we add a section specifically on the semi-structured interview processes and how that relates to survey questions?
- How does it tie into the industry you’re in?
- We should be able to spot things and connect it with people inside the business
- It’s also about breaking down the silos and explaining the value of talking to people
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What about business transformation?
- Not just how the community can benefit
- How can the wider business benefit from community
- How does the community facilitate this?
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Internal community managers often don’t have that as their named role
- James has loooaadds to say on this from a civil service POV
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Maybe community should start with internal community managers, get it right internally first, then get it right externally
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Ideally, everyone would understand why they can benefit from community
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We can’t build community in silo
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If businesses are built with that community focus, peo
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Sustainability, not being too dependent of enthusiasm of creators but will find relays and promoters inside the org (BW)
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risks: what are the risk and how are they mitigated ( social, interpresonnal risks)
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A guide from google: Write inclusive documentation | Google developer documentation style guide | Google for Developers
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staged deployment (prototype, small groups, etc) => see what they commit to as it is built (BW)
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A clean organizational system to make chaos more organized:
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Ease of implementation and integration
- Shifting from a reactive (reactive to leadership needs/questions/misunderstandings) to proactive (Community leaders driving the converstation and bringing management along)
- When you centre community this is what happens
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We need to take hold of the conversation with management
- Stop them from focusing on a particular metric
- Stop reacting to their needs
- Focus them on the real thing / value / benefit
- We hit red tape every step of the way
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Beware silos reporting individually “up the chain”
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Maybe a section to explain how to sell your job to HR/Managers
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Also shifting the focus ROI. What other indicators show the health and vibrancy of community. Example: Vibrancy indicators developed by the ArtPlace Grant. How could we create this for community?
Examples, case studies or Scenarios of selling
- What are the different sectors or types of communities out there?
- Community Coach Carmen has great web3 and tech communities
- LearnLinuxTV’s Jay is really great with non-organizational projects
- Budget Light Forum is a GREAT case study for tons of them
- David DeWald could probably provide dozens based on his work
- Obviously we have to mention “my life as a night elf priest”
- https://www.huddlecraft.com
- Some failures too?
- cough Twitter cough cough (laughing blue)
- Can we talk about the Linode Disapora XD
- The failure of several YouTuber communities comes to mind
- The SSL open-source project’s rather high-place failure
- Selling in a small public service org (town)
- Timothy Courtney
- It’s worth looking at the work that Martin Carcasson is doing as well:
Ep 91: Martin Carcasson | Solving our most wicked problems together at the local level — Michael Ashford | Speaker, Podcaster, Coach
- Selling inside a big organisation
- Jono Bacon’s great for the open source organizations
- Michelle Knight Suzi Nelson and Justina Fenberg are great resources
- Salesforce’s HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL terrible community product
- selling for customer group/organization
- Pivoting for communities
- Need to make fast failure okay
- Do management get this?
- “Mistakes are information” and “Behavior is Communication”
- “Co-design” and “test and trial”
- Use language that’s acceptable
- Several more good examples courtesy of the Communication Cache:
Articles - Erin Staples has this awesome article database she updates too:
Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. - Example to look to Open Sources Contributors Covenant
Perhaps for another meeting:
- We need to explore the bloated and vague job roles of community professionals.
- We are building something that may create the groundwork for institutional trust. We are building something that will impact peoples’ long-term careers for potentially 4 to 8 years and they need to continue to come back.
- We need to discuss the undue burdens that organizations are placing on community professionals: the 7 burdens of Community Growth