Appendix A

BRAND GOAL PRACTICES

Here you will find a deeper discussion of principles that can help a community serve particular brand goals.

Innovation Community Practices

If you want your brand community to support innovation powerfully, you must heed these principles.

Make Exclusive Invitations

The innovation community is an inner ring. Not everyone in the world or even in a given fan community gets invited or has an equal voice in the innovation conversation. Helpful ideas can come from unexpected people, but too many voices all treated equally will overwhelm designers, leaders, and strategists. In addition, not everyone is equally knowledgeable or experienced in the challenges at hand. When it comes to product development, outdoor apparel company Patagonia should be listening to mountain climbers, not necessarily leadership book writers (even if we like and buy their fleeces).

When focusing a community to support innovation, selecting even fewer than twenty members into an inner ring to provide the most prominent voices can work great. This manageable number reduces the noise and distraction that comes with too many voices collaborating on a new project. These innerring voices may bring ideas from obscure corners when helpful. You may consider inviting only your most loyal, dedicated, and creative members.

Some brands have millions of people already connected to them. Where there are many voices that could be relevant to the early development of the platform, there should be clear criteria for who’s invited to codevelop. In the early stages, trying to create something that “is just right for everybody” typically leads to at best mediocre results (lowest common denominator) and at worst to paralysis. Choose whom the platform should best serve in the beginning and give yourself permission to develop it later with user feedback in time.

Offer Direct Contact with Elders

No one likes to share thoughtful feedback and then wonder whether it was heard, considered, or effective at all. This is especially true for the most insightful, knowledgeable, creative, and valuable members. Moreover, if innovation means understanding something in a new way or addressing challenges differently, participants will need to easily discuss nuance and questions with leadership.

Leaders must create a feedback channel with direct contact with community elders (authority). If you want your community to influence innovation because members have insight and perspective that helps, they must have direct access to the people who can use the help for real-world results. This may mean getting them in a room with product managers, vice presidents of community or chief executives, so that they see that their input goes where it makes a difference. Anything less and you risk looking, rightly or wrongly, as though your brand just doesn’t value their participation.

Make a Public or In-Community Acknowledgment

Whether they are paid or are volunteers, members participate because they care. Their internal motivation drives the relationship. Honor this by creating a way to acknowledge their work as a special contribution. There is an almost infinite number of ways to do this. Gifts, tokens, public recognition, special events, special access, shared meals, and retreats all count. Make sure you use at least one.

It is common to create a symbol or special title, or to provide a special token to represent their contribution and inner-ring membership. Yelp has its Yelp Elite, Twitch names Partners, and Harley-Davidson issues special patches for riders’ “colors” (emblems that typically get placed on leather riding vests and jackets).

Advocacy within the Organization

Organizational senior leadership could be overwhelmed with a long list of requests and changes coming from people they don’t know, even if those very people are closest to the brand’s needs and problems. We’ve learned that when a suggestion gets to brand decision-makers without context, the importance or priority rank of that suggestion can get lost in the communication. This means that brand community members must take in the innovation feedback from members and effectively (1) interpret it, (2) evaluate its relevance, and then (3) advocate for the innovation to those who have the authority to make change. If all else goes well but this last step fails, then most of the innovation support your brand community can offer will evaporate. No one likes to help think through changes if changes don’t get made.

Here we’ll share that in its early days, Salesforce offered a way for members to suggest and vote on requested features. This informed a priority list for managers. Further, executives ensured that a meaningful portion of all product releases were sourced from member requests. Speaking with members, noting the suggestions that garnered high votes, and reading comments among members informed executives even in the earliest stages of product development. Jennifer Sacks, a Salesforce executive, told us that the market-dominating products could never have been created without their user community’s contribution.

As Salesforce grew into a worldwide firm, the original suggestion and voting system became overwhelmed. Managers could not respond to or synthesize so much communication. In response, the company launched a world tour so that staff could listen to members directly before redesigning the IdeaExchange. After visiting twenty-two cities, twelve countries, and four continents, Jennifer Sacks brought back ideas and feedback gleaned from hundreds of conversations with members. She advocated for the most important needs directly to product managers. As a result, member contribution made the newest product rollout radically different than what managers predicted before asking the community. To date, Salesforce has sourced more than three thousand implemented features from IdeaExchange. The company continues as a world industry leader (personal communication with Jennifer Sacks, September, 2019).

Talent Recruitment and Retention Recruitment Practices

You can refer to The Art of Community for a deep dive into principles that support the feeling of belonging in community. Here we highlight four critical practices to keep people connected.

Exhibit and Present Explicit Core Values

We all want to believe that our work is important and makes a difference. We know that people in community want to be connected and to progress in becoming who they want to be. So you need to ensure that there are opportunities for members to make a difference according to values that inspire them together. This includes offering training, opportunities for action, and enriching discussion connected to inspiring real (not pretend) values.

The Patagonia outdoor clothing company is among our favorite examples of a company that has invested in making the brand values explicit and then offering its staff opportunities to make a difference accordingly. The company’s mission statement is “We’re in business to save our home planet.”

Patagonia makes its environmental protection values present in many ways. For example, the company uses its retail stores regularly as venues for environmental protection nonprofits and individuals to hold events such as film screenings, speaker events, and trainings. In addition, the company took headquarters employees outside to smell and touch cotton fields and dirt so all could understand the importance of shifting production to organic cotton. And each store has a grants budget to support nonprofits of its choosing.

Vincent Stanley, Patagonia’s director of philosophy, said that the staff feel ownership of their work and the responsibility to make products safer and less environmentally destructive. When asked about recruiting talent, he laughed. Attracting talent has never been a problem, in part because people come and stay to share the company’s real values. He said, “Applications are astronomical” (personal communication with Vincent Stanley, June 2019).

Celebrate

Celebration is a way to acknowledge how we change, grow, and succeed. If others see us as people (and not just as our service), they notice (and acknowledge) how we change and matter.

If you’re not scheduling significant time and resources to celebrating, (1) people will notice, and (2) you’ll get results that are entirely consistent with your inattention.

You may not need to call your best friend on every holiday and their birthday, but if you’re calling them on none of those occasions, they’ll notice. The neglect will also radically change your relationship with them.

The most important celebrations within communities are campfire events, discussed earlier in this book. There’s nothing wrong with big spectacle events. They may even provide fantastic memories to share for years. But campfire events should be far more numerous. The members acknowledged must see that the people who know and care about them notice how they’re changing and growing.

Tell and Invite Stories

The stories principle is so important that Charles wrote a whole book (Storytelling for Leadership) about how leaders can and should tell stories that matter. For the stories principle to work, leadership must create opportunities for members to both share and learn stories about experiences that formed or shaped them. These don’t have to revolve around professional development or the most profound experiences. Members in community want to be accepted for their whole selves. We all have stories about how we formed our familial, career, philanthropic, spiritual, athletic, academic, and civic selves. If members don’t have a venue, the time, and permission to share stories, then they likely aren’t sharing them, and the potential to share identification and belonging is wasted.

Stories can be shared and learned in person or online. Which is better? Both.

Extend Opportunities to Grow (How Members Want to Grow)

No one remains committed to a community if it doesn’t help them grow into who they want to be. If you want your critical people to stick around, you must ensure that they have a way to grow.

The inner rings in a mature community reflect a member’s growth. In other words, you can’t join an inner ring for mountain-crossing cyclists until you’ve grown strong enough to join cyclists crossing a mountain range.

Leadership must ensure that there are inner rings for members to aspire to join, and elders willing and available to support the journey. If you don’t provide both, members will look for someone (or something) that can.

Customer Retention Practices

To ensure meaningful engagement, apply the following three principles in your community.

Hold Regular and Accessible Real-World Gatherings

Regular gatherings provide an opportunity for groups to grow intimate connections and feel supported close to home.

There is no substitute for bringing people together to meet one another and experience a space with shared values and purpose. This is so important that even Twitch, with more than 150 million online users each month, still gathers members in over forty cities each year for in-person meetings. Airbnb, with more than two million hosts, creates over one hundred gathering events each year around the world. It hosts large summits (paramount events) on three continents each year.

Invite Participation in Two Ways

1. Ensure that there is a venue where participants are invited to share about themselves in a safe place. There they must experience being accepted for who they are and for their shared values.

2. Ensure that there is a venue where participants can contribute to (support) others within the community if they choose. Members often look for a way to “give back” or “make a difference.” If you don’t give them that opportunity, they’ll experience pain. Some (or many) will seek a better way to contribute—outside your community.

Provide Opportunities to Grow

Ensure that there is both opportunity and invitation for members to grow in some way they want. This can include teaching technical skills or, even better, supporting internal maturation. Often this can mean offering access to elders who can create experiences and share hard-won wisdom. Brand communities are extremely varied. Any way that your participants want to grow and you support them counts. In time, they’ll be happy to tell you what makes a difference so that you can offer more of it.

This principle also means that we must be intentional in telling members that there are opportunities to grow more. A common way is to offer advanced classes, workshops, trips, or meetups that allow members to connect with more advanced practitioners once they have achieved a required level.

For example, Airbnb’s “experiences community leaders” get special access to executives, research, and trainings that help them be better hosts and community leaders in life. Trainings are offered live online on topics including creating events and rituals, research techniques, and video production.

Marketing Practices for Community

To protect and grow a community, two strategies effectively promote success.

Offer Privileges to Community Members (Actual Members)

Actual members who have passed through a visitor stage and been approved by gatekeepers receive reserved privileges connected to the community purpose and values. These privileges can take almost any form. Special access is nearly always popular. This may include access to decision-makers within the brand, to inner rings inside the community, and to special help when they need it.

Fun examples we know of include HOG leaders visiting with Harley engineers and family of the founders at Harley Officers’ Training. Similarly, Yelp Elite members are invited to many secret events at hot new venues.

These privileges are never, never transactional. They’re offered as a privilege of membership, in recognition of contribution to the community, or as acknowledgment of shared values. The privileges honor members for who they are as people and members, not strictly for what they’ve done or how much they’ve bought.

Name Brand Ambassadors

Brand ambassadors constitute an inner ring within both the organization and the community. (See The Art of Community chapter on inner rings for the role of inner rings in communities.) There can be several types of inner rings— for example, for high-performing (elite), new, or specialized members. Other participants are told that the ambassadors are special (because they are).

One way to communicate ambassadors’ special status is by bestowing a title. You don’t have to call these members ambassadors, as Lululemon does. You can use any term that indicates specialness, such as partner (Twitch), council member (Fitbit), or MVP (Salesforce). Regardless of their title, the actual ambassador community members demonstrate with action the core values of their respective greater brand communities.

As part of their privileges, brand ambassadors typically receive access to others like them and, importantly, to leaders within the organization whom they admire. This means that when someone meets a brand ambassador, they’re also meeting a member who can presumably influence brand leadership. This is part of what makes privileged membership special.

The best brand ambassadors can and do directly communicate with one another. They do so because they’re part of both the greater community and an inner ring within it. Leadership can facilitate this connection through introductions and by creating shared intimate experiences.

One of the privileges of ambassadorship is invitations to restricted shared experiences. The events help ambassadors connect to support one another and help them feel that they’re special to the brand and the community. Patagonia brings ambassadors to its California coast headquarters to connect with senior brand leadership and recreate together over fun meals.

As with any welcome into a special group, providing tokens makes a big difference. Ambassadors should get at least one kind of token that is available only to their inner ring.

Measure Marketing with Community

There are a number of metrics often used to measure whether a community is in fact serving brand marketing (promotion). Note that marketing efforts without community bonds can often deliver good promotion. An example is rewarding customers for referrals (which promotes, but doesn’t support relationships). This means that marketing metrics don’t necessarily tell us whether the internal community is strong. We recommend that you consider the metrics we discuss here.

Track Referrals from Brand Ambassadors (When Possible)

Not all new customers referred from brand ambassadors will get credited to the ambassadors. This may be because the ambassadors are representing the brand community everywhere they go. Explore how you can learn when sales or growth can be credited to specific ambassadors. Some organizations do this by creating special referral links for ambassadors to share. Some track customer growth and product use after ambassador-hosted events. As long as the ambassadors attract attention, serve members, and represent the brand’s values, they play an important role in making an authentic community effective.

Said differently, as long as ambassadors are offering your kind of water to thirsty rhinos, they’re doing their work.

Measure Content Created by Members

As we’ve said, not all content strengthens a community. Measure only the content that you know serves members’ needs and growth and that supports participants’ connecting. (Solving problems counts; vacation photos usually don’t.) Meaningful and helpful member-created content is your watering-hole water. Anyone who makes your watering hole more attractive is helping your brand reach the people important for success.

Measure Traffic to Member-Created Content

If we want to know whether our watering hole is attractive and delivering lifegiving water, then we want to see who and how many are coming for the water. When you’ve got many members contributing, you may have different flavors of water (in a good way). You can measure the traffic to the water offered.

BuzzFeed is an online news and entertainment outlet that has been ranked in the top three hundred web traffic sites.¹ Among the drivers for visitors are the entertaining quizzes, which invite players to answer fun questions about themselves. The company organized a social media group called BuzzFeed Contributors, a community of volunteer writers, many of them still in school. BuzzFeed learned that a single teen contributor in the community was the second-highest driver of traffic for BuzzFeed worldwide. By that contributor’s count, she created 692 quizzes in one year alone.²

BuzzFeed made many regrettable business and staffing choices that eventually led to the layoff of hundreds of employees and significant visitor loss. We also think it’s disgraceful for a for-profit brand to rely on volunteer labor for all (or nearly all) offered content. That said, the success of the BuzzFeed Contributor community in bringing in traffic highlights how dramatically a supported community can provide resources that draw others. Leaders can measure the draw of community-produced content to note one way that the community serves brand goals.

Measure Membership Purchasing

Last, we can measure whether, when, and how much members purchase. For many organizations, this can validate the investment to build a community. For example, earlier we mentioned that Sephora’s research revealed that its online community members spent twice as much as the average Sephora customer. Sephora online community “superfans” spend ten times more than the average.

Remember that marketing is only one area in which communities can support an organization and that the selling can never usurp the service to members. Otherwise the effort will collapse.

Practices for a Support Community

There are several principles that particularly help support-focused brand communities succeed.

Build a Strong Online Platform that Facilitates In-Person Gathering

By facilitating an online venue for engagement and connection, you enable members to participate and grow anywhere and anytime. We see this in the robust online platforms set up by global tech companies such as Salesforce, Apple, and Dropbox. Customers can go to online brand platforms to find each other and offer volunteer help around the world.

That said, the rule that in-person meetings enrich a community still applies. If you believe that your brand-support community is valuable, then investing in physical meetups can strengthen everything created online. As we’ve mentioned, Harley-Davidson sells vehicles, Yelp hosts online reviews, and both sponsor in-person events in many time zones. Spotify, among the biggest music-streaming brands with more than one hundred million subscribers, flies its top community “Rockstars” to Sweden once a year to connect with one another and with the company CEO.³

Provide a Forum for Help Requests and Responses

You must create a forum where those seeking help can get help! Passing out a contact list is never enough. (Unfortunately, we see this all the time.) As always, at least one elder keeps the forum space safe for all activities and participants.

Acknowledge and Appreciate Contributors

There must be regular and meaningful acknowledgment and appreciation from elders in a way that both protects and honors contributing participants’ internal motivation. Anything that commodifies the relationship is toxic.

Connect Community Contribution with Official Brand Staff

The support experience must be integrated so that the brand’s staff can monitor how well the community serves members’ needs. The staff must respond when support goes poorly, and acknowledge when it goes well. A build-it-and-forget-it model never works over the long term.

Weekly or (at least) monthly “share-back” meetings are necessary. Each side—both brand leadership and community leadership—can share how evolution and purpose progress.

Provide a Venue for Sharing More Widely (Off Topic)

Offer opportunities (with both space and time) where participants can share about experiences, identities, concerns, and interests outside the strict brand experience. Without this, you will create a mirage community.

Focus on as Few Metrics as Possible

An intense focus on what matters to your community—for example, average time to first response and average time to receiving help or a solution—helps leadership get relevant feedback on program success. We like the way Adrian Speyer, who leads community at online community software provider Vanilla Forums, put it: “If your community is focused on supporting your customers, you want to focus on metrics relevant to support. Don’t measure how many puppy photos get shared. Choose a core metric that reflects actual community impact for your organization. A good example is measuring how quickly community members get the right answers they need. Everything else is a distraction” (personal communication with Adrian Speyer, April 2019).

Keep It Current and Relevant

Past community conversations become antiquated and unhelpful quickly, as products, uses, and users change. Leadership teams must keep support documentation relevant and current. The resources can and should be offered as a reference for customers so that members can avoid having to answer repeat questions.

Although it’s the fantasy of nearly every CEO to inspire millions of customers to handle customer service, please know that this community goal just isn’t a good fit for many brands. If you fail to make this work, it could be that you’re asking a turtle to run a marathon for which you’re unwilling to train either the turtle or yourself. (In other words, customers can’t do it just because you don’t want to invest appropriately.)

We know of two different finance companies we’ll refer to collectively as Moneybirds. They tried to set up an online community so that customers would help one another with investment, administrative, and legal advice related to money. No surprise to many of us, their customers didn’t want to sit at home and coach others about money confusion, frustration, and ignorance. As Shira Levine, who has grown many brand communities, put it simply, “Financial services are difficult. People don’t want to help other novices figure out their money problems for free” (personal communication with Shira Levine, April 2019).

Practices for Supporting Movement Communities

Segmenting refers to finding different ways that participants can contribute and then providing inner-ring experiences so that they can connect and collaborate within their specialized segment. In other words, programmers want to connect with programmers, and event producers with event producers.

Segmentation is not a tool for manipulation. It allows participants with specific shared skills and values to connect more intimately and to together explore the ways that help them grow. This is particularly important in advocacy movements because the work may (almost certainly) go on for years. To develop the competency of volunteers and partners in their contributing skills, and to ensure that they feel connected over an extended time, it is imperative that they get connected with a segment that is relevant to their growth and intimate enough for developing friendships.

It is also both important and necessary that segmented members are invited and included in more-general events. Inner rings live inside a community boundary, not separate from it.

Participants can get segmented into more than one segment. Charles, for example, can easily get segmented into both writer and event-producing inner rings. Carrie will fit in both entrepreneur and organizational strategist segments.

The segments aren’t used to separate people for the sake of separation. They’re used to support participants in finding others in the movement with whom they share even greater similarities and to enable the development of more intimate experiences with a smaller group.

Segmentation must also remain dynamic. This means that once a member is in a segment (say, a wine-drinkers segment), they can change to another segment (say, iced-tea drinkers). Just as people’s changing lives may make them want to find a new community (or leave an old one), so their lives may lead them to want to move from one segment to another.

There is no magic formula for segmenting. You’ll have to explore what will work best for your members. In a political campaigning community, for example, there are several kinds of segments to consider.

• Location. Participants are physically near one another.
• Issue. Members collaborate on a focused issue.
• Identity. Members who identify in a particular way (as immigrants, lawyers, survivors, etc.) are together.
• Overall leadership. This is a group of those who will train others.

Grow Segment Leaders

All growing communities need elders, and each segment will need some sort of leadership (formal or informal). Jeremy Heimans, cofounder of Purpose, and his coauthor Henry Timms, CEO of the 92nd Street Y, recommend inviting new leaders to ascend in cohorts.⁴ This means that as new leaders begin their training, they grow together with peers as opposed to learning alongside others at very different levels. This approach enables them to experience training at an appropriate level for them at the right time. Senior trainees forced to unnecessarily revisit fundamentals can become bored (and might grow disruptive). Forcing new people to go through material that is over their head only overwhelms them.

When appropriate, you can eventually invite mature leaders to train future leaders. This creates a self-sustaining organization that supports leadership development after having invested in foundational training.

Once you have sufficient numbers of trained leaders, then segment your member-filled inner rings in whatever way works best so that each is led by a leader, subleaders, and moderators.

Create a Platform with Necessary Opportunities

A platform to connect participants works best if it can accommodate several needs. If it misses any of the needs we’ve listed here, then the platform is at risk of failure because participants will seek a solution outside the community spaces. In other words, the following opportunities must be available on the platform.

• Create endless segments and subgroups. Segments help members find intimate experiences and develop deeper connections not possible if every experience is in a big crowd or filled with new introductions.
• Elect leaders. There must be a way for members to step forward and take on more responsibility. This is their way of contributing. Most movements need leadership to come forward at least for moderation, event planning, content creating, and outreach.
• Organize events. Without events, there’s little fun and few invitations to gather. Make sure there are many fun events!
• Offer public recognition of leadership (e.g., badges). This alerts new members whom to seek out for guidance and training. Without leadership designations, finding a way to participate remains confusing and time intensive. Members will wonder who’s in charge of creating, leading, and managing teams.
• Track member and volunteer retention. If you don’t know who is remaining, then you don’t know whom you can count on and whom you’re losing. In every movement we’ve looked at, getting membership to show up when needed is critical for success. Learn who your real members are. Just a list of email addresses never counts.