Scalable engagement models

קהילה Enterprise
1

We have been experimenting with a few different formats for engaging with our customers/members this year thanks to @danielle’s amazing work at How We’re Organizing Webinars & Office Hours. These kinds of formats are infinitely scalable because a few hours of Danielle’s time benefits multitudes of future consumers. Office hours are particularly valuable because they bridge the gap between direct and async communication—people with direct questions can ask them live, while others can benefit later from the curated discussion.

I’m curious to hear what other types of one to many engagement models work well for others.

9 לייקים
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Another little pattern that I see working well for us is to have people who are closest to a particular change making announcement topics about that change.

To some degree, this was probably a natural outgrowth of Discourse being an open source project. At the same time, I think we’ve continued to be intentional about this as we’ve scaled and added people in different roles.

For example, our feature announcements are usually made by someone who actually worked on that feature (whether an engineer, designer, or product manager).

This allows people to start conversations about something they know something about in a way that hooks pretty well into the process of building the product.

It gives the community a place to engage directly with the people building a particular feature.

And it also allows the people building it a way to continue to engage in feedback from the community about that thing without having to watch everything across the community or come up with sophisticated triage or tagging systems.

I’ve seen others do similar things elsewhere pretty effectively too, even if some of the details differ.

7 לייקים
3

One thing we tried but weren’t successful with was having periodic discussions (just like this) to ask people’s thoughts about different elements in the product—almost like bite-sized feedback.

Currently, our categories all require something specific:

  • Ask/answer questions, but this requires either having something wrong or knowing the product knowledge to provide an answer
  • Share a guide, but this requires some product expertise that no one else has shared and/or the docs don’t cover
  • Submit a feature request, but this requires coming up with an idea that no one else has thought of

But having a “how do you handle ABC” or “what are your thoughts on XYZ” allows people who aren’t product experts to share their input. Unfortunately, our community is still pretty inactive, so it only converted a couple of lurkers to contributors, but I still think there’s merit to the tactic.

Also, kudos to the meetings that Danielle has put on! I sign up for all of them and try my hardest to attend :stuck_out_tongue:

3 לייקים
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Out of curiosity, what was the end goal? Did you want/need the feedback from people or were you trying to stimulate engagement for some other purpose?

לייק 1
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I’d say it was 80% trying to stimulate engagement and 20% PM trying to gather feedback. The end goal was to give non-experts (aka general users of the products) a safe space to join in the conversation.

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Now I’m even more curious. If they are not from your team, what is the reason that you want to encourage them to engage if they don’t have natural questions of their own?

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Anything that logs data is scalable. In this sense, conversations are data.

A forum post is scalable, for example, to not only who it reaches, but also how that information can serve the org, people or ecosystem in other ways.

We can think of this data in how it serves people too. So an external webinar serves the presenter well, in general, it’s a form of credibility. Of course it serves those who learn from it too. However, all too often it’s left to a select few. Often leading to the same voices being heard time and time again.

One thing we’ve been doing is inviting people to 1-to-1 video recorded conversations on a topic of their choosing. It’s been unscripted, we ask them to bring a topic that is top of mind. We’ve done 50, in the past 6 months or so, mostly 1:1, a handful of group sessions. Mostly led by our community lead (no big team here, hah). A huge majority of these people are newbies to contributing for the first time in this format. Most of them have long felt like they could never be that person who has anything good to share, but put them in a room with an encouraging person, and it becomes valuable for all involved.

Imho, because it is valuable, it is scalable. At the moment it is 1:1 with a member from our team, but in time we envision we can enable it 1:1 with out our team directly involved. Or it becomes a bit more scalable when it becomes a group (roundtable style). Everything is experimental and always evolves into something better.

But also, it becomes scalable because we hold the data, it’s not just about the conversation and measuring it on the views, it’s also about the insights that come with it. Which we then seek to do other things with. I find what can fit into a 30-45 minute conversation is such a deep source of knowledge that often gets missed in forums.

I’m so inspired by it, tbh, people are generally fearful of the public speaking aspect, but many have come back for seconds and thirds.

2 לייקים
8

I love this! What kinds of things are people sharing?

לייק 1
9

All sorts of things, and the cool thing is that it’s mostly what is top of mind for them at that point in time.

The best way to show is to point you towards the titles of each conversation here, the actual content is behind a paywall. You can also easily see (visually) who came back for me, hah.

לייק 1