For over a year, we’ve been collecting benchmarks for the community management industry to support our research and build our recommendation system. Our dataset includes several hundred communities of different sizes. While selecting communities for benchmarking, we noticed that about half of them never grew beyond 50 active users per month. And that’s only among those that haven’t shut down.
It looked so unusual that I decided to reach out to people who managed to grow their community successfully and learn about their approaches to community management. Here are my main takeaways from those conversations.
I want to pause here and thank everyone who participated in the interviews. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your knowledge.
How the interviews worked
I had a set of questions I planned to ask everyone. But the participants turned out to be incredibly different, with different communities of different sizes. So almost each interview quickly turned into free-form conversations.
Below are the main insights I gathered.
What I expected
I have a unique background. I grew my HashCode.ru community on my own with zero prior knowledge about online communities and later I worked on community growth at Stack Overflow with great colleagues and plenty of time to study the literature on the subject. Over those 14 years, I’ve learned that growing communities isn’t hard but the process is deeply counterintuitive. If you know the right approaches, you spend less time and start seeing opportunities you hadn’t noticed before.
Starting this research, I wanted to understand whether knowing the right approaches really matters. The result? Yes, those who successfully grow their communities know what they’re doing but there are some nuances.…
Key takeaways from the interviews
The most sociable employees end up running communities
In many cases, the people who run and lead the community are the most sociable and empathetic people in the company. As a result they grow the community not as community managers (i.e. by enabling other users), but as super active and authoritative users.
Even when these people understand what needs to be done to grow the community, in large companies with rigid role definitions, they often lack the freedom and resources to bring their ideas to life.
I’ve seen several examples where the same person, while working at a company, launched their own community as a hobby and that community was far more successful than their employer’s community. This is true even when that person is a co-founder of the company.
I think it’s fair to say that a successful community requires some budget, freedom to act, the ability to try and fail, and the willingness to do things that don’t scale.
Communities are treated as a “nice to have”
Companies understand the need for a community and want to have one. For most, the community is a way to communicate with existing users, generate innovative ideas, get feedback and sometimes retain users. Companies also often measure adoption of new features by how actively users discuss them in the community. The community is also a way to provide customers with the education they need to successfully use the company’s products.
At the same time, businesses see the community as a “good to have,” not a “must have.” Almost all respondents said: if a company has a good product, the community will be fine. The idea that a strong community could pull the product forward or that the community might be valuable in its own right felt foreign.
Community metrics aren’t business metrics
The businesses I spoke with focus on metrics at two stages:
- Marketing activities. Things like CTA on Instagram, X (Twitter), or TikTok posts.
- Number of product purchases.
In other words, they measure two critical points: the top of the funnel (where the company spends money) and the bottom of the funnel (where the company makes money). Meanwhile, the community sits somewhere to the side. This, in my view, explains why ROI for communities is hard to calculate for almost everything except ticket deflection and idea generation and it also explains the lack of focus on growing the community itself. This is true even for projects where the community is a critical core component, such as NFT-projects.
The primary way to learn is to see how others do the thing
When it came to a conversation about learning something new, the primary method for most participants of my interviews was participating in other communities and bringing successful approaches back to their own communities. Reading professional literature was the exception, not the rule.
The main way to plan is brainstorming
Among those who proactively grow their communities, the main planning approach is meeting with colleagues and brainstorming activities for the upcoming period.
Large companies use many channels and formats to host their communities
Large companies use many platforms and formats to engage with their communities: Slack, course platforms, blogs, forums, webinars, conferences, offline meetups, and much more. And some of these formats are run by community members themselves. For example, organizing local offline meetups is purely a volunteer initiative.
Once again, thank you so much to everyone who participated in the interviews for your time and experience! I hope the notes above are helpful to readers and that you’ll be able to improve something in your own approaches to community management.