Proven (and Practical!) Strategies for Building Successful Communities
Elizabeth Kinsey shares about how to build a community that actually grows your business.
Developer communities often blossom in an instant and go on to die slow, painful, public deaths.
This leaves leadership with the choice to (1) shut down the community altogether, (2) leave it unattended, or (3) reluctantly hire a community manager with little hope of success.
Here’s how you can avoid this fate, and build a community that actually grows your business.
Elizabeth has built communities from the ground up at Branch, Slack, and is now the community lead at Braze, a customer engagement platform. Let’s give you a sense of what she’s done:
At Branch: grew community from 0 to 60,000 people globally.
At Slack: built Slack’s developer community with such success that she took over all of Slack’s community efforts which grew to over 100 chapters, 37.5k+ members and launched the Slack forum and companion Slack app.
At Braze: runs a community of 2,800+ marketers, brand leaders and product engagement leaders who work with Braze.
Elizabeth is the person I turn to when I’m working with a client who needs help reviving or starting a developer community. This content is a deep dive full of her proven strategies for success.
Don’t have time for a long read? Here’s a handy 1 pager version with take aways! Let’s dive in.
Community can mean different things, how would you define your work?
Ultimately my job is to help our brand listen to customers, to understand our customers deeply, and then to act on that understanding in a way that is connective and human, and that improves their use of our product. There are a lot of different tactics that I can use to do that, but at its core, it is really about helping the people who are buying our product to do so more efficiently and with a deeper sense of connection to the product and brand itself.
Practically this can be connecting people with other users, building places for them to ask questions, show off their expertise, learn more, or get certified in specific skills.
Can you paint a picture of a successful community? And, on the flip, what does a failed community look like?
It's really hard to define what a successful community is because the term community is nebulous. Regardless of the type of community you’re running, whether it’s a digital community or a user group, a LinkedIn or Facebook group, or a Discord etc - the thing that you're really aiming for is interaction. You can't have a community if it is one-sided. That is the failed state. Even if people are hitting the like button, if you're not moving them enough to comment or answer the question then you're really just broadcasting.
I think HubSpot has an amazing developer community. They do a fantastic job of providing a bunch of different ways for developers to find and interact with them. They speak the language of the developer and don’t shy away from the harder conversations - they’re authentic with their developers.
That’s a big part of it too – authenticity. If conversation is authentically coming from the people who are part of the community, and you're starting to see leaders emerge - that’s where you’ve hit something good. But if it's just quiet and one-sided then typically there's something that needs to be fixed.
Also, if all you're getting is complaints, that’s the other thing to watch out for. Sometimes executives get scared about having a community because they worry it will be a place where people are just mad and complaining all the time.
In that case - you haven’t done a good job of framing what the community is for. This can also often mean that things outside of community need to be fixed, especially when it is the highly dominant strain of conversation. It probably isn’t your community platform having an issue, it’s likely your product, docs, or support that need to be fixed. Community can be a signal that other things are broken.
Talk to me about community and support - should support and community go hand in hand or be separated?
You have to know what kind of community support are you encouraging. Are you encouraging a user-to-user support? This kind of interaction can be really positive and healthy, and very different from having users try to report and triage bugs with you in the #general channel. In the latter case you need to have a really clear escalation path.
Most people miss the fact that you don't have to answer support questions on your community channel if that's not what your community is for. Ideally you have a separate space for those questions to be answered, in which case you just need to have an escalation path for when this comes up in the community. It is important not to ignore support requests because then people get justifiably frustrated and feel that they should leave the space if they can’t get help.
Questions like the following should go to formal support:
Why did you charge me money?
I am clicking on the button and it opens an error message, what is going on?
Have a fast escalation path to whatever support path is best that you route straight to when this comes up. Don’t ignore these questions because people will feel frustrated and leave your community as a result.
Questions like these are great for the community to answer:
How should I set up my implementation?
How could I code xyz thing?
How do I get other team members to use the product?
Your support team doesn’t have all of the knowledge and wherewithal to provide strategies and frameworks for those types of questions, but your community often does!
There are times when questions fall in the gray area - in that case have conversations with people and figure it out, you’ll learn something either way.
I also suggest using a tool that integrates, or federates content, within your community - e.g. have automated search that populates documentation and help articles from your knowledge base alongside community content so that people can find answers quickly. Very often users are looking for a piece of documentation! Surfacing conversations, docs and a blog post about a topic is way more useful than just the community question asking alone.
I'm curious how much you like or dislike taking blog content and feeding that to the community vs letting the company’s content strategy be a separate focus.
The community discussions that take place around your content are gold, so I would definitely keep these linked, but would make sure that the goal around content + community is discussion. Content doesn’t work as the core driver of community, it’s not the point, so if that’s all you have to try to spark engagement you’re missing a broader strategy. To steal an analogy from Anna Pickard, content is the frosting, not the cake. If there's a natural community element and conversation to the content then link back, it helps your google rank, SEO etc and you can grow awareness in community which is super important.
How do you think about community growth as a goal? Especially if you’re starting from zero.
Well, I've done it a couple times. The biggest mistake is growing too fast without having solid cohorts of community elders, which is a term coined by Carrie Melissa Jones. I love that term because that's really what it is. If you grow too fast, you don't have the time to build the relationships you need with the people who are going to be your top contributors and who are going to help you grow and scale the community. Especially if you are a community team of one or two people, you cannot do it on your own.
The relationships you build with the elders are a big part of the value they gain from participating. If you neglect that step and you get too big too fast you end up with a lot of surface area, but not a lot of depth. In that situation it often just takes one thing going wrong to topple the whole community. So, Invest in those individuals, and let there be plateaus in growth. Don’t invite more people to the party until everyone who is already there is having a great time. Pursue incremental growth! Plateaus give you moments to fix the things that are not working.
There is also often a misconception, usually coming from leadership, that you are going to build trailblazers or Atlassian’s community straight out of the gates. There’s this assumption that you should have this infinite number of potential community members, but that is not true. In the same way that you need to know your addressable market for your product, you need to know how much of your TAM is going to be part of community, and not every single person using your product wants to be part of your community.
Understand your target persona that you want participating, along with the market size and what portion of that market you can likely capture for the community. After that, look at how fast your company adds customers - your company’s growth rate is a limiting factor to community growth, as well. I hear founders assuming they will capture everyone who, for instance, uses Javascript. That is so many people, not everyone who uses Javascript cares about your product - they likely won’t join your community, so you need to change your assumptions.
How much do you participate in adjacent communities versus trying to bring people into your own managed space? How do you develop a strategy across these options?
It's really important to pay attention to third party spaces that you don't own. They’ll help you uncover the value that your audience is seeking and finding from other communities - especially useful if you don’t have your own community in place yet. Use them to answer the questions: what are people already talking about, and who's in the conversation?
But you can’t rely on third party communities to be growth levers for your business or gardens from which to build your own community. For example - you’re not going to transfer the entire population of a subreddit into your community. Those people are getting what they need from that forum! You need to find the unique job to be done by your community. Trying to duplicate the purpose of a community generally doesn’t work if people are being served where they are already participating.
When we started the Forum at Slack we already had the Slack workspace. We didn’t shut down the Slack workspace in favor of the new forum - the workspace served an important purpose and people were actively engaging there. The forum was a new space, the goal wasn’t to convert people but to create a second space with a second, new job to be done.
Also, especially if you’re a software vendor, it can be a little skeezy to answer questions all the time in other community forums. People won’t trust you for repping your product all the time if you’re not a genuine participant. In third party communities be a participant, don’t try to be the leader or salesperson.
How do you measure success in community work?
There are two main categories of success: business impact and community health & engagement.
Community health and engagement metrics include:
Community growth rate
Community retention: how many people are signing up and sticking around vs signing up and abandoning the community?
Visitor conversion to member conversion
How many solutions are being provided to questions being asked
NPS / value analytics surveys for community
Business impact depends on what outcomes you’re trying to drive via community. If you’re trying to improve your product, then you’re looking at how many members are contributing to an idea board, or voting on features. If your goal is product adoption, when a new feature is released I want to find that people in the community adopt the feature faster and are more likely to spend more money with us.
Business goals are harder to measure because they require so much cross functional partnership and challenging, backend tooling work. You usually need to connect with sales, revenue ops, marketing ops, all of the people that deal with data architecture in order for you to truly measure impact. This is harder than normal data ops because in community users show up as their internet social personas - you don’t know that this is Joe who works at the fruit company. It’s just Joe at Gmail.
Truly being able to track business impact is costly and hard, and so companies usually skip it and say they’ll deal with it in 6-12 months, but if you work in community it is essential that you can measure business outcomes. Especially if you’re launching a new community. You need to be able to measure how you affect business - if you can’t, then it’s likely your community efforts won't last or will be hard to fund over time.
One of the things that I have done at least most recently with is to take the company’s core OKRs and align my team’s community efforts to them. For example - my team might want to get more community members involved in customer award submissions - so what cross functional team would be invested there? Probably customer success - so I go look at their goals and align to them. We then ladder that as far up as possible. Don’t create a brand new metric that you think is important to the business! Figure out the highest priority goals for your company and make sure that community serves those.
If you’re really serious about community, you might need to have community ops in place. Having someone who understands your team and can help make those connections between the different systems that you're using that are business critical is so valuable.
What is your preferred stack of community tools?
I use different tools to serve different functions.
For events and user groups: Bevy. I love Bevy. It does a great job permission-ing and being flexible. Gives chapters autonomy, relieving the burden for the community manager. Especially if you’re working with hundreds of chapters - it’s very scalable, lets you put guardrails and guidelines and permissions in place. They’ve built it out really nicely.
For digital platforms it really depends on what kind of communication you’re looking for. I’m always going to be partial to Slack, and I have a lot of spicy feelings about Slack and community. Being owned by Salesforce might make Slack better for communities in the long run. I still think it is one of the best tools for synchronous community.
For analytics you can bring in a tool like Common Room, Commsor and Orbit - it lets you see the impact of what’s happening in your Slack workspace - it’s a good compliment to help you moderate Slack which is not built for community work. Common Room has done a good job at helping you understand where the value is. Especially when integrated with Salesforce - they can help you understand how community members and sales intersect.
I like Khoros a lot as a community platform - especially for web-based forums and the ability to integrate with lots of different tools.
Let’s talk about identity - you did such a great job at Slack of capturing the community’s desire to identify WITH Slack. How do you develop community identity and encourage people to become promoters of your brand without being icky and weird?
At Slack, it was all about involving the people who were already part of the community and wanted to take on the identity and the brand. Even when we were only focused on the developer community - we spoke with people a lot to understand what they wanted to be called! Like, do you even think of yourself as a Slack developer or are you a developer who happens to build on Slack? It’s all about understanding how people see themselves and paying attention to those cues. (I will still die on the hill that they wanted to be called slackers, our brand team wouldn’t buy it, I lost that battle).
When we moved from managing the developer community to growing the broader Slack community, it was important to preserve some of the aspects of that original identity without alienating newcomers. And so we put together, along with the amazing and very creative design team, a core council of 16 folks - we had them look at all of our potential new community brand assets - they gave us detailed feedback and we had in-depth discussions about what they loved and hated. We got to go through this deeply collaborative process of developing the community identity (and…we had to turn down some ideas like turning Slackbot into a plushie).
People often think that the community identity is the name and the logo - but at Slack the community identity started with the mission. We then determined the values that supported the mission - and the four values informed our iconography and the rest of the brand identity. This gave the identity staying power.
You had a core community council at Slack - how do you think about the different levels of engagement across community members? How do you get someone into the core, and do people graduate out of the core council?
In the beginning you really have to focus on those core people. Pay so much attention to who's contributing. If people are actively engaging without your prodding, who are they, why are they doing this and where are they from?
Your community members are doing a lot of free labor for you - figure out what is motivating them. Then, back those characteristics into growing a pool of people that could be part of the core.
As your community grows and breaks into subgroups you’re naturally going to lose elders and leaders. So you always have to be pulling in new ones. So, over time you shift from focusing on serving that core to figuring out who looks like the core and will replace them someday.
Are you minting new leaders or is it more of a garden where they grow up and you can pick them?
Some companies have an application process to become a community leader or council member - which is a more formal way to bring people in. This creates focus and a regulars graduation and matriculation process. I think this works well when you have a lot of different ways for people to engage with you - it’s harder when you’re building an MVP community or only have one program.
While you’re still early it really depends on watching the community activity - I like the gardening metaphor in this case. You can see people emerge and reach out to them to deepen their engagement.
How do you think about influencers/tastemakers - do you want them to be part of the community or not?
When brands and communities do this right there is alignment between that tastemaker and the mission of the community. When it doesn't feel good is when someone is brought in just because they have a big following and you can feel that they don’t use the product or understand what they are talking about (this happens at events often).
What are the biggest faux pas you see committed in building community?
Comparing your communities to communities that have been around for a really long time! The number of times I have heard other community professionals say, “ugh, my company wants me to be just like Salesforce.” … Salesforce has a 21 year old community and was built on a totally different company trajectory! Benchmark your community against yourself - every community is different. You don’t have the same product, marketing strategy, resources and availability. So, your community will look different. Take inspiration from the success stories, but know you are building something else.
Growing too fast. Being hyper focused on the size of community misses the point - a community can be impressive without having thousands of members.
Not checking in with your community members regularly. You have to come back to community the way that you come back to a product and constantly improve it. You need to have a vision. You need to have a roadmap for your community. You need to understand where you want it to grow in three months, one year, and five years! it's not something that you can just turn on and assume will automatically keep working. It requires people and strategy.
Does community need to have a full time manager in order to succeed? I’ve seen a lot of developer companies start communities, grow them too large, and then have them topple over and eventually shut down because they can’t figure out how to maintain community in a way that is useful to the business.
Yes, if you don't have the budget to support a person to manage it, then the community is not going to be sustainable.
What are the qualities of a great community manager?
You have to be really good at tools.
You also have to be great at managing upwards and downwards.
You have to be a strong story teller.
You have to understand motivational psychology. And apply it to the programs you implement.
You have to be really good at saying no because people across your organization will want to take from the community. If it is not part of your primary job to protect that, then the community’s value will quickly be destroyed.
It's important to have a person whose job is at least 75% focused on community.
To wrap, I'm really curious to hear about the communities that you look to and admire most?
I think Atlassian does a really good job at community. I really admire how the community feels deeply validated in their expertise of the product, because Atlassian elevates them. They feel that they can go to their boss and ask for a raise because Atlassian has given them a stamp of approval.
For communities I participate in: I love the Discogs community. It’s all about records and the vibe is excellent. There’s some interaction from moderators but it overall feels very organic, and it’s such a different community from the ones that I run.
I also admire Sephora as a B2C community. I am not a makeup person, but I like to go read their forums and watch the interactions to see how the community members want to help each other by sharing tips and tutorials.
There are a bunch of individual creators with amazing communities - during the height of the pandemic I got very into Twitch sing, which is essentially karaoke, but they decided to shut down the product and the whole group moved over to Smule, another karaoke app. Smule invested in developing sub-communities and it’s amazing to watch some of the tight-knit relationships that form around people having fun and singing badly with autotune! I loved seeing how they fostered that space and saw the opportunity when Twitch sing shut down - I admired that.
The last one that is worth checking out if you like to geek out on community is Lego - what they have built is truly next level, with tons of different on ramps, community activities and levels of participation.
Huge thanks to Elizabeth for this interview! You can follow her on LinkedIn and see what she’s up to building the Braze Bonfire community!