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Hi Elijah

Here''s an important lesson from our consultancy work. 

Almost everyone has a bias towards ''big projects'' over improving their engagement skills.

Yet we''ve consistently found we can increase participation in most communities simply by improving how we engage members in that community. 

We cover this in depth as part of our Psychology of Community course (launching Oct 19), but I want to show (with data) why this is so important. 

How You Respond Has A Big Impact Too!

If you want people to participate more in the community, you have to take every interaction as an opportunity to improve how they feel about the community.

This means delivering the best possible respond to every single question (and setting these as standards for your team and superusers). 

This is one video from our course explaining some core ideas here. 

The Kind of Questions That Matter 

There are countless other easy wins to increase engagement right now. 

Let''s imagine you''re trying to get more responses to discussions. 

As you can see here, posting the discussion as a question in the subject line has a clear impact. 

Enroll in the Psychology of Community Course

On October 19th, we''re relaunching the Psychology of Community Course. 

This video explains a little more about the course:

• Access to our video library of course lessons. 
• Live sessions hosted once a week.
• Weekly assignments to apply the principles of psychology to your community (and get feedback!)
• Access to a private community of peers. 
• Access to the community accelerator. 
• Direct feedback and support on your community efforts. 

Most importantly, you''ll learn (with others) the principles you can apply to create the best possible experience for your community members. 

You can click here to sign up for the Psychology of Community Course (or sign up for both this and Strategic Community Management at a 35% discount!)

Thanks,

Hi Elijah
 

(note: This is the final week to sign up for our Community Management courses). 

What Makes A Community Indispensable?

Indispensable means 'absolutely necessary'.

It means that if your community did not exist, your members would suffer. 

To be indispensable, you need to offer members value they would suffer without and they can only gain from your community. 

To be indispensable, you need to see your community for what it really is and not what you hope (or hoped) it would be. 

To be indispensable, you usually need to focus on one value that matters (you can expand later). 

I wrote an entire book about this two years ago. You can find a summary in this video:

4 Types of Indispensable Value

Indispensable value comes in one of four flavours:

1) Mutual Support

If people have lots of questions, your community can be the place to get answers.

But answers alone isn''t indispensable. People can find answers via search engines, asking friends, or reading the documentation.

To be indispensable, your community needs to be the best place in the world to get answers. 

This usually means delivering better, quicker, or more empathetic answers. 

Sure, you can try and do all three. But it's usually best to pick which your members cares most about and focus on that. 

2) Exploration 

Learning and sharing with others can be indispensable (if it''s done well).

In these communities, people proactively share what they're doing to help (and get feedback from) others. Communities of practice, customer success, ideation, and most hobbyist groups are often good examples.

In these communities you need to push into the cutting edge of your field and establish truth.

You need to find a way for people to easily document what they learn and for others to easily discover these learnings. 

4) Belonging 

Finding a group of people where you can truly be yourself, express how you really feel, and know others accept you for being exactly who you are is indispensable. 

Very few communities truly create a powerful sense of community. But when it happens, it provides a feeling that we can't get from anywhere elsewhere. 

* * *
If you're not getting the level of participation you want, there is a good chance you haven''t uncovered what your members find indispensable.

Creating The Indispensable Community

The next step is to align everything to match.

If your indispensable value is support, you might work to get more staff involved in answering questions, nurture superusers to reduce response time, train volunteers to deliver empathetic responses, and highlight questions which need responses. 

If it's exploration, you might nudge people to share their recent discoveries, encourage others to give feedback, prune the bad material and drive more attention to the best. 

If it's influence, you might work internally to give members a say in how decisions are made, provide direct feedback and access to staff members, and create opportunities for members to have rising levels of access and permissions. 

If it's belonging, you host plenty of real-time events and activities, encourage off-topic discussions, create a shared history and work on integrating newcomers quickly. 

This is a simplistic summary, but you get the idea.

Whatever your indispensable value is, you need to commit the majority of your time and resources to delivering it. 

That''s what a great community strategy helps you to do. 

Upgrade Your Community Strategy Skills

Being strategic means cutting out most of these tasks and only working on the few which have the potential to drive results - the kind which make your community indispensable. 

During our Strategic Community Management Course, we're going help you identify what your members find indispensable and select the handful of tactics to match.

These courses will give you the systems, strategies, approach, tactics, and the exact resources/templates we've used to help 280+ organisations launch and scale successful communities. 

These courses will help you:

• Develop your community strategy from scratch.

• Ensure your community delivers maximum value. 

• Align all stakeholders to the common goal.

• Build a technology roadmap, budget your community, and overcome risks. 

• Give you the exact languages and templates to develop your community.

• Build member personas and onboarding journeys.

• Engage members in an advanced, persuasive, way. 

After training community professionals for almost 9 years, I truly believe every community needs a highly trained professional to thrive - and training is the best investments you can ever make in your community. 

Signups for Strategic Community Management & Psychology of Community are open now for $750 each. 

You can also sign up for both courses for $1100 USD. 

Thanks,

Quick reminder. You have until the end of the week to sign up for our Strategic Community Management course, Psychology of Community course, (or both) at a 15% discount! (use the code '1week'). 

Why Are Most Community Strategies So Bad?

I've spent the last decade working with many of the world's largest communities on their community strategies (including Facebook, SAP, Sephora and many others).

So, I feel fairly qualified to say this next sentence:

Most community strategies are terrible!

Most community strategies fall into at least one of four categories: 

1. They pluck goals at random from the sky. This is often something like 'let's increase engagement by 25%!'. That's not strategic, that's a failure to identify what really matters. 

2. They don't properly identify the challenge and instead use fill in blank templates like "List your goals..now list your objectives...now list your tactics"'. Eugh!

3. They lack a logical series of actions to achieve their goals. They include a collection of tactics - often the same tactics everyone else is doing. 

4. They don't make the tough decisions. The strategy is simply 'let's keep doing everything we're already doing..but even better!' A good strategy presents a series of options and forces decisions between painful tradeoffs. 

As a result, communities drift somewhat aimlessly trying different tactics to boost engagement until someone questions the point of community. In The Indispensable Community, I called this judgement day. 

More annoyingly, many community managers place such low priority on community strategy that they don't even see the lack of one (or having a bad one) as a problem!

In this email, I want to share a couple of key insights that we cover as part of our Strategic Community Management course. 

Strategies Should Address The Real Problem

It's really hard to identify and address the real problem(s). 

It's a lot easier to find a superficial layer and zero in on that (usually without much success).

But superficial layers are not the real problem. 

Declining engagement is not the problem.

A lack of internal support is not the problem.

Members misbehaving is not the problem. 

A failure to nurture MVPs is not the problem.

These are symptoms of a deeper problem you need to solve. 

Real problems are often things like:

• Failing to properly identify what members need and desire (and keep up with changing habits).

• An organisation which simply hasn't identified and broadly accepted the value of community nor created the setup to nurture and benefit from one. 

• A failure to align what members desire with how members can benefit from the community.

• A community team which lacks the right abilities to achieve its goals. 

• etc...

Every minute invested at this stage pays off many times over. 

Part of this is analyzing community data to find the root cause of problems: 

Commit Everything To Doing A Few Things Extremely Well

Good strategies are ruthless. 

The real magic in the strategy is first identifying the handful of things that really matter and then committing every possible resource at your disposal to doing it extremely well.

The things that matter are what make your community indispensable to your organisation and your members. 

Trust me, it's never 'lots of engagement!'

What value can only the community provide? Is that value so important that members and the organisation would deeply suffer without it? 

For your organisation, that might be profound, game-changing, insights. It might be building an army of passionate advocates to create reviews and testimonials. It might be locking in your best customers for life. 

For members, that might be getting fantastic responses within minutes. It might be feeling like they belong and are respected. It might be being able to discover and learn more about a topic than they ever thought possible. 

You need to be ruthless in identifying the real game-changers at the expense of everything else. 

Your community efforts should be 100% committed to creating value which no-one else can create but is absolutely indispensable. 

Most communities are simply trying to do far too many things at once - and none of them at a truly exceptional level. 

Align Everything Else To These Areas

This is the real magic in strategy. 

It's Work Worth Doing

It's time-consuming work. Many of the organisation's who hire FeverBee simply don't have someone who has the time to do this.

Making It Happen

You need a terrific community strategy.

My recommendation is either you get help to do it or you get training to do it.

On October 19th we'll be relaunching our Strategy Community Management course to guide you through the principles of developing a game-changing community strategy. 

If you sign up this week using the code '1week' you can even get a 15% discount! 

I hope to see some of you on the inside.

Thanks,

Hi Elijah

Let''s start with some core FeverBee beliefs:

1. Community is a precious skill. 


2. Communities need talented community managers to thrive. 


3. Mediocre community management holds back too many communities. 

The Difference Between Mediocre and Great Community Managers

I''m about to share three examples of mediocre and great community managers.

Be warned, once you know what to look for you will see examples of mediocre community management everywhere you look. 

Hopefully you may also see how to increase the skill of you and your team. 

Example 1: Telling Really Persuasive Stories

In my experience, mediocre community managers struggle to tell persuasive stories to motivate members. 

Many years ago, I sat in on a webinar on the launch of a superuser program.

My heart sank when the host literally said:

"We can't afford to pay you anything, but we can give you badges to display on your profile and you will get a Christmas card from the CEO each year" 

"Everyone of you here today is here because we have identified you as having unique skills, knowledge, or commitment to the community. All of our members have helped make the community, but you''ve risen even beyond that. 

In the coming weeks, we're opening up a small number of opportunities to contribute more to the community's mission. We don''t have enough roles for everyone. So be quick! For those who get one of these new roles, we''re going to throw all of our support behind you!"

I''ve never seen a junior staff member or part-time do anything close to this. 

Example 2: Pretending Every Member Is Your Best Friend

The obvious tell-tale sign of a mediocre community manager is a response to a question like:

"Farah,

You can change this setting in the app''s navigation menu" 

"Farah,

Welcome back to our community!

I haven''t seen you in months. How have things been since (previous question detail)?

Thanks for telling us about the difficulty changing settings. I''ll pass that feedback onto our engineers this week and hopefully make it easy. 

If you look at the screenshot below, just click on that option in the navigation menu and you should be able to fix this quickly! 

[screenshot]

By the way, you may want to connect with @SarahLin, @SSTee, and @RichMillington who have written some great guides on setting this up at an advanced level. 

What are you working on next? I''d love to know more. 

Can you let me know if this helped?

With a mediocre community manager, that wouldn''t have happened.

This is why investing in community staff matters. It makes all the difference. 

You can see more about what we mean in this course video:

Example 3 - Creating The Most Valuable Content

I visit too many communities with a content section filled with announcements or mundane changes which attract no search traffic or engagement. 

Some lack even the cornerstone content almost all communities should have.

This includes: 

• Topic newcomer guides.
• Equipment and resource lists.
• Recommended people to learn from / books to read. 
• Email journeys for newcomers and advanced members. 
• Documentation of the gamification or superuser programs etc...

Don''t Settle For Mediocre

There are plenty more examples which show the difference between mediocre and great community management.

Please don''t settle for mediocre. 

Community is a precious skills and the difference in having your community managed by someone with experience and someone without is typically the difference between success and failure. 

There are just far too many communities today being managed by people expected to learn on the job (or while doing another job!)

We''ve seen what happens here. 

I know recruiting and training these community managers isn''t easy. 

This is why we''ve recently begun managing communities on behalf of clients.

We want to make it easy for you to access exceptional community managers. 

And if you simply want to raise the game of your current team, sign them up for our Strategic Community Management and Psychology of Community course (or both!)

If you want your community to be a legacy you leave behind at your organisation, take the skill it takes to grow and manage one seriously. 

Thanks,