Live Q&A: How to Launch a Community

00:00:00:03 - 00:00:30:04 Joshua Zerkel Welcome everyone, and thanks for joining or for watching this recording. I'm Josh Zerkel, head of marketing and community here at gradual. I've spent about 20 years building community programs, including at places like Asana and Evernote, and I was actually a gradual customer before joining the team. If you are new to gradual, it's the all in one platform for community events and customer engagement, helping teams bring those experiences into a single place and build real customer context across the business.

00:00:30:06 - 00:00:54:01 Joshua Zerkel Today's session is a live Q&A focused on how to launch a community so things like what to launch first, how to structure it, how to get initial engagement, and so on. So this session is meant to be practical and interactive. So if you're joining us live, I encourage you to drop in questions. And for those of you who registered and aren't here live, you had the chance to submit questions beforehand when you are first registering.

00:00:54:01 - 00:01:19:25 Joshua Zerkel So I've grouped those into a few themes that we will walk through. I'll share how I would think about each one since the Q&A is with me, and we'll leave space at the end for any questions that come up live. All right, so let's dive in. First set of questions. A few of the first questions that we received were really versions of the same overall concern, which goes something like this.

00:01:19:27 - 00:01:55:03 Joshua Zerkel Launching a community feels overwhelming. There are so many things to think about, so many possible things that we could do. Where should we start? So in my experience, what's usually happening here is that teams are looking at everything that they could possibly build everything under the sun programmatically, goals, everything. So they're probably thinking about things like discussion forums, events, content onboarding, ambassadors, courses, integrations, reporting all of it, and trying to find solutions for how to get all of that stuff out the door before they even launch.

00:01:55:10 - 00:02:17:02 Joshua Zerkel And that is typically not a recipe for success. The reality is, most successful communities, including ones that I've built and ones that I have advised on and have seen from our own customers here at gradual, they don't start out as fully formed ecosystems. They start by solving a specific problem for a very specific group of people that connects to a specific business goal.

00:02:17:05 - 00:02:38:25 Joshua Zerkel They may evolve into something bigger, broader, with more elements as time goes on, but they're not trying to do everything from day one. So with that in mind, my recommendation to keep you from getting totally overwhelmed when you're launching your community is to start with a few decisions first, and this is probably the most important one, is not what do we build?

00:02:38:25 - 00:03:03:16 Joshua Zerkel But what business problem are we trying to solve? Via community. You have to get really clear on this. What are you trying to do? What is the community program in existence at your business or your organization for? Because once you answer that question, the rest of the programmatic elements often fall into place. So once you've figured out what business problem you're trying to solve, then you can say, who are we building this program for?

00:03:03:16 - 00:03:25:15 Joshua Zerkel Who are specific constituents? Who would participants be? What might they look like in terms of their interests? The types of things they want to talk about, the things they might want to participate in, engagement activities, and so on. What problem are we helping these specific people solve? If you don't know what problem you're going to be helping them solve, you can ask them.

00:03:25:15 - 00:03:46:06 Joshua Zerkel You could find people who fit the profile in your existing customer base. Let them know that you're building a community program and ask them. We're thinking of creating a community program. What sorts of elements would help you? What problems are you trying to solve in your day to day work or your life? Or what are the goals that you're trying to reach, that we might be able to assist you with those things all together?

00:03:46:07 - 00:04:06:17 Joshua Zerkel The business reason that you're there, the goals you're up to, the people you're building it for, their interests, creates these different circles. And in the center of that Venn diagram, where there's overlap between business goals and what you can reasonably achieve and do and build, and what people are interested in tells you where your program should probably start.

00:04:06:19 - 00:04:30:04 Joshua Zerkel And then from there you can ask yourself, what is the smallest launch experience that we can build that actually creates value? Once you can answer those questions, then you've already eliminated a lot of the complexity in building out your program. And the biggest mistake I see is companies are really excited about building your community program. You yourself, as a builder or a leader are probably really excited about it too.

00:04:30:04 - 00:04:49:22 Joshua Zerkel And you're excited about the vision that you're building towards. And so you try to launch with that full vision in mind. And what I see most often is launching the vision instead of launching the first version and treating your community program as something that you'll continually experiment on and build from, so you don't have to build the end at the beginning you're building.

00:04:49:29 - 00:05:10:01 Joshua Zerkel That's the key point there. You're building the community program, and so you launch with what you can realistically build that helps ladder up to the goals and serves the needs of your members. For most teams, I would much rather see a simple community serving one audience really, really well. Then a complex community trying to serve everyone but actually not serving anyone particularly well.

00:05:10:04 - 00:05:38:09 Joshua Zerkel So, for example, instead of launching a community with everything discussions, events, resources, office hours, courses, networking, gamification start with just one experience that's likely to create value, get some learnings from it, and then grow and build from there. So that was the first set of questions like this is overwhelming. Where do I start? And once you've decided where to start, the next question becomes whether people will care enough to join.

00:05:38:10 - 00:06:03:14 Joshua Zerkel And this leads into our next type of questions which was there are communities everywhere. There's lots of places for people to spend their time. How do we stand out with what we're building in our community? So what I've seen is usually happening under the hood here is community building. Teams often assume that they're competing against other communities, but most of the time you're not.

00:06:03:15 - 00:06:33:22 Joshua Zerkel You're competing against everything else, all the limited attention that people have, limited time, existing habits and other ways they could be spending their time. So people don't join a community just because it exists. They join because they think they're going to get value from being part of that community, whether that's directly from the people who are inside of the community, or maybe it's from the information that's available to them inside of the community, or maybe the experiences they'll get as being part of the community.

00:06:33:24 - 00:07:01:18 Joshua Zerkel So think about it from the member's perspective. What do you want them to take away from being part of the community? What value, what relevance? I'd really focus on relevance. Think about solving a specific problem for a specific audience, like we talked about a little bit earlier, whether it's maybe creating specific opportunities for truly meaningful, useful connection. What is it that's going to make participation feel worthwhile?

00:07:01:24 - 00:07:33:00 Joshua Zerkel You're asking of people's time. So you have to really think about what would make it worth it for them to be there, and what would make it worth it for them to come back to me. The communities that stand out aren't typically the biggest ones. They're the ones that are most useful regardless of size. I've seen communities with just a few hundred really highly engaged members outperform communities in terms of the value they're creating with thousands of passive members, because they've created a stronger sense of relevance, better belonging and more value.

00:07:33:02 - 00:07:57:10 Joshua Zerkel And so community, it's easy to measure based on size, but I think it's more important, perhaps, to measure it based on our people getting value out of this and thereby creating value for the business of the organization that's hosting the community. People don't typically come back just because you have more content, although content is something that may draw them to the community, they typically come back because they're consistently finding something valuable.

00:07:57:17 - 00:08:32:00 Joshua Zerkel What that value is varies from community community because each organization is different. But it's really up to you to figure out what that value is and create it so that people want to come to your community and want to return to it. So, for example, a community for customer marketing marketers at a high growth SaaS company could be more compelling than a generic just customer community because members understand who it's for, it's for customer marketers rather than it's for just general people who are part of affinity group or topic.

00:08:32:01 - 00:08:43:25 Joshua Zerkel People need to understand why they need to be there, why they belong, and what they can get out of it. So once people really get that, then they're going to want to be part of it. If they see that there's value there for them.

00:08:43:28 - 00:09:08:23 Joshua Zerkel So the next set of question came up around structure. So once people understand why they should join, your next challenge is making it easy for them to navigate the community and understand how to find their way within it. So the question that came up a couple of times was, how should we organize our community so that it's clear and easy to use?

00:09:08:25 - 00:09:40:03 Joshua Zerkel So what's usually happening here, in my experience, is teams who are building community one, they get really excited about putting everything into the community. We talked about launching with everything. Don't do that. But also whatever they do have, they're trying to map every possible use case, every edge case into the community's structural design. So they'll create lots of spaces, groups, categories, channels, tags, etc. before they actually see how people want to engage.

00:09:40:06 - 00:10:02:11 Joshua Zerkel And so what usually happens is creating a lot of complexity instead of clarity. And I myself have been guilty of this. I am a super hyper organized person, and so I naturally think in terms of structure and categories. Yes, I realize it's a problem. So in a community that I launched, I over tagged it. I created too much tag structure which made it difficult to navigate.

00:10:02:11 - 00:10:23:17 Joshua Zerkel So I had to end up pulling a lot of that tagging back and simplify things to make it easier for me to manage and easier for members to find their way. So your goal is to have things just structured enough, just organized enough that it's easy to understand for a new participant in under a minute. Organize things around what your members actually need.

00:10:23:18 - 00:10:52:01 Joshua Zerkel Keep the navigation as simple as possible. Make it really clear what people should do first, where they should go to find value, what they should do to participate so that they don't have to wonder, what do I do now that I'm in here? Then once you have people actually taking action in your community, see what sort of patterns are emerging, see what things are resonating with them by looking at data on the back end, like where people are going in the community, what resources they're accessing and which ones they're not.

00:10:52:06 - 00:11:13:13 Joshua Zerkel Then you can start reshaping things. You can expand your structure if needed, or maybe contract it if that makes more sense. I think a helpful way to think about it is if a new member came into your community right now, today, would they immediately know where to go? Would they understand how to get started? Would they feel welcomed?

00:11:13:13 - 00:11:37:21 Joshua Zerkel Would they be able to figure out how to navigate your community so that they got value? If you can't answer affirmatively for all of that, then it's probably worth taking a step back and thinking through what your community structure is so that you can make it easier for people to find value. You're not doing anyone a favor by making your community structure so complex that people can't find their navigation through it, it's not helpful.

00:11:37:24 - 00:12:01:03 Joshua Zerkel So community structure should mirror how your members think, not how your company is organized. I've seen a lot of communities organized around the org structure. So, you know, in a community space, sometimes there's parts of it that are managed by customer education, parts of it that are managed by community, maybe customer marketing and so on. And so you'll see some of those structures emerge in the community itself.

00:12:01:09 - 00:12:24:08 Joshua Zerkel That's not helpful for your members. Think about what a member needs to experience, not about how your org is structured. Because once people find their way around, then they want to participate more. But that can be a challenge. That leads us to our next question, which was, let me read this one. How do we create member experiences that encourage engagement and participation?

00:12:24:09 - 00:12:45:19 Joshua Zerkel This is a great question, and one that I think all of us who lead community programs are perpetually trying to answer. This is the tough answer is it depends. There's no one right way to do this. But a lens to look at this through is at least what I've seen is teams sometimes think about engagement is something that happens after we launch the program.

00:12:45:19 - 00:13:09:12 Joshua Zerkel But or maybe it happens after they've been in the program for a while. But in reality, engagement starts from the moment someone decides to join your community. What happens during those first few moments when a member is interacting with your program, really sets the stage for how they view your program, how they view the community and other participants within it, and how they perceive value.

00:13:09:12 - 00:13:30:27 Joshua Zerkel And all of that together helps impact whether they decide to come back or not. So this kind of ties back to what I was speaking about a little bit earlier. You have to really be intentional about how you want people to experience those early moments in your community. So this is where it's all about making it very clear what people should do first.

00:13:30:28 - 00:13:50:19 Joshua Zerkel Once they've joined the community. Is it fill out their profile? Why would they want to do that? What's in it for them? Is it read a specific TLDR how to guide what is it that you want them to do first, and make that first thing very obvious? Make sure that people are welcomed into the experience. I think I've seen this lately via automated welcome messages.

00:13:50:19 - 00:14:14:27 Joshua Zerkel I think people get that these are automated. They're not really coming from a person, but if it's well written and acknowledges that, you know they're there to meet people, show them how to do that, that sort of welcome, whether it's from you and automation or community member, whatever it might be, makes people feel like, hey, there's other people here that have taken notice that I'm around and that might make them want to participate more.

00:14:14:29 - 00:14:37:13 Joshua Zerkel Also, make it very clear and easy for them to contribute in really small and easy ways as they're getting started. You're not going to ask people for them to write a blog post or do a huge challenge, just as they're joining the community. What's an easy thing that they could do? What's a quick win that they could get that lets them know there are different ways to participate in different levels of participation, and ways that they can contribute to the community and add value right away.

00:14:37:15 - 00:15:02:26 Joshua Zerkel In addition to them receiving value from the community, if members send you a message or they make a post in the form or anything like that, make sure you respond quickly and consistently. This doesn't mean you have to respond instantly, but if you're going to have a place where people can ask questions or share their thoughts, nothing's worth worse than posting something and having can just go out into the internet ether.

00:15:02:29 - 00:15:21:16 Joshua Zerkel Make sure that people get a response and do it consistently so that people feel like there's a voice on the other end, and then you want to make sure that you give people a reason to come back, whether that's new events that are happening that are directly relevant to what they've said that they're interested in, or new pieces of content that will help them do their jobs more effectively.

00:15:21:19 - 00:15:45:17 Joshua Zerkel People won't just come back for the sake of coming back. There has to be something there for them that makes it compelling. And so that's up to you to think about what it is for your community, but make sure that there are compelling reasons to not just come in the first place, but to come back. One thing that I often tell teams in my own advising is that communities don't become engaging because members create engagement.

00:15:45:19 - 00:16:08:22 Joshua Zerkel They become engaging because the builders us create the conditions for engagement. In the early days of your community program, yes, you will have to work a little bit harder, sometimes a lot harder. Depending on your community. To build that momentum, you have to manufacture it, so you'll likely need to see the discussions, ask the questions, introduce people to one another, and actively participate yourself.

00:16:08:22 - 00:16:36:15 Joshua Zerkel As the momentum is building, you're setting the stage, the conditions for future engagement. So you may think about launching your program with a planned set of discussion prompts that you dole out, or a number of days or weeks, or maybe of a dedicated welcome email sequence or pop up messaging. Or maybe you ask internal teammates to participate regularly to help keep things more alive.

00:16:36:16 - 00:16:44:24 Joshua Zerkel This also helps establish norms and create early momentum so that people feel like the community is lively.

00:16:44:26 - 00:17:14:00 Joshua Zerkel All right. One other question that came up was about internal alignment. This is another perpetual one. How do we get our team aligned before launch? This is obviously critically important. Making sure your team is ready before you invite members in is super important. You want to make sure your internal teams understand what's happening, that something customer facing is happening, and the ways that they can participate or not, depending on how you're structuring the program.

00:17:14:02 - 00:17:34:25 Joshua Zerkel So what I've seen is this as a community builder myself, I get very excited about the community program that I'm building. I get excited about what we're creating for members and for the business, but it's easy to spend a lot of time in there planning the external launch, planning the program. But easy to forget about planning the internal launch.

00:17:35:02 - 00:18:05:27 Joshua Zerkel But your employees, the teammates, the stakeholders that you have in your own organization is often your very first community members, and they're the ones who will help you build the momentum. They can help. Questions, welcome new members, create content with you, and reinforce the community experience. I call this building Your Coalition of the willing internally, because these are people who are willing to help you build the community program, because they understand the value of connecting directly with customers and connecting customers to one another.

00:18:05:29 - 00:18:37:23 Joshua Zerkel So I would encourage you to think about internal readiness stakeholder preparation as part of your community program launch. This is where you have to do what we as community builders often have to do, which is an internal roadshow to explain to stakeholder teams what's happening, aligning on goals, sharing with them who owns the community program and what the different swim lanes are, clarifying expectations around what the community will and won't be, what it will and won't do, and how they can get involved.

00:18:37:24 - 00:19:00:18 Joshua Zerkel Each stakeholder should really understand the role community plays in their work, and how they can get involved in participating in it. So all of this means you probably need to think through one a general, broad, company wide way to communicate about all of this. This could be something posted on your internal message board. Maybe you have an opportunity to speak at your company.

00:19:00:18 - 00:19:22:13 Joshua Zerkel All hands, but team by team, you probably also want to create a communication plan because each team needs something different. Their focus areas and their goals are different. Ideally, as you're creating the community program, you've already done some stakeholder listening to align on goals and understand what their needs are. This would be another version of that that's happening as you're getting ready to launch the program.

00:19:22:15 - 00:19:59:05 Joshua Zerkel Ideally, a community programs launch. Even though it's your program, it shouldn't feel like the community team's initiative on its own. It should feel like it's part of this greater whole, and that there's been input and buy in from these other teams. The launch process is just an outgrowth of you already establishing relationships with these other teams, so it really should feel like a shared effort that supports customers, supports learning relationships, and above all, in a business context, that the community launch is designed to support business goals.

00:19:59:10 - 00:20:32:11 Joshua Zerkel If it doesn't, then you probably want to rethink some of what you're doing in the community program. So in my own experience, some of the most successful community program launches that I've been part of have involved an array of internal champions from across customer success, marketing, product support and sales. All the customer facing teams who were actively participating in both the design of the community program, connecting it to their goals, and then them actively getting excited about it, participating in and sharing in the launch.

00:20:32:11 - 00:21:03:18 Joshua Zerkel So it wasn't just me or my team. It was us together launching this program. Because as it turns out, everyone cares about customers just through different lenses, and this is a way for them to help build alignment. So stepping back, we had a lot of really great questions that came in. Thank you everyone who submitted them. We talked about where to start, how to not get completely overwhelmed, how to structure the community, how to drive engagement, how to build alignment amongst your team.

00:21:03:19 - 00:21:31:11 Joshua Zerkel Very, very important. What is interesting to me is that none of those challenges are really about the technology behind building community. It's about making some decisions early, building alignment early, and creating an experience that people want to participate in. The strongest companies that have communities aren't the ones that just launch their community with the most features, or the most places that people can build community experiences in.

00:21:31:13 - 00:21:57:06 Joshua Zerkel It's the ones that launch with the most clarity. What are they there to do or drive? Who should be participating in it, and what do those people get out of it? That's clarity, and that's something that I encourage you to think about as you're building your community programs. So if I had to summon up a few key takeaways from today, start with a specific business goal, a specific audience, and a specific purpose for those people to participate.

00:21:57:09 - 00:22:25:24 Joshua Zerkel Focus on creating value and relevance. Before you try to scale your program, make sure that it's actually meaningful for your members and that it's driving value for your business. Don't worry about having everything under the sun in your community. Think about creating clarity rather than a completeness of experience. You can build towards your vision, but you don't need to launch with your vision on day one as you are building your program design really intentionally for your members first experience in the program, make sure that they feel welcome.

00:22:25:27 - 00:22:48:20 Joshua Zerkel They understand and navigate that they know where to go to participate, that they want to come back. Remember, you are not just launching your program externally, you're also launching it internally. Part of your launch is internal alignment. So build that in from day one. And then above all, it's okay to start small. You don't have to build everything on day one.

00:22:48:23 - 00:23:15:19 Joshua Zerkel Use community as a place to experiment and test things. Start smaller than you think you probably should. Get learnings and then build. As you get more experience and you understand what's working. Community is an ongoing process. It's not a one time project. It's not something you finish building and then you launch and then you're done. It's constant iteration based on what's working for your community members, what your business needs and what changes over time.

00:23:15:19 - 00:23:34:01 Joshua Zerkel And lots of things will change over time. So just expect that going in, and that means you get to experiment and grow along the way, and your program can adapt and change to community is something you launch, you learn from, and you just continuously improve it over time.

00:23:34:03 - 00:23:57:14 Joshua Zerkel All right, I will stop there. I hope this was helpful in thinking through approaching how to launch a community, whether you're just getting started or if you're finding something that's already in motion, it's never too late to continue refining what you're building. Of course, we'll send out the follow up to everyone who registered, along with a few additional resources that go deeper in some of the topics that we covered today.

00:23:57:16 - 00:24:26:05 Joshua Zerkel If you are continuing to think through your own community strategy, I encourage you to join the conversation in the gradual community where we talk about this all the time. At community, it's a place where community leaders, customer marketers, and other folks from across go to market are sharing what's working. Asking questions and learning from one another. As I said, I think one of the most important things you can do as a community builder is here from your stakeholders, and that's what you can do directly in the gradual community.

00:24:26:07 - 00:24:47:17 Joshua Zerkel And if you'd like to see how teams are actually putting some of these ideas into practice, we also run live demos where we walk through how organizations are bringing community events, customer engagement and more together inside of gradual. And I can say as a former customer myself, it's pretty awesome. So with that, I want to say thank you everyone for checking out this recording.

00:24:47:17 - 00:25:00:03 Joshua Zerkel Or if you attended live and just were a little bit quiet, that's okay too. Good luck with your community launches. I'm super excited to see what we be building, and I look forward to seeing you in the gradual community. Thank you so much.