Business Case

A business case captures the reasoning for initiating a project or task.

Common areas of value many organizations are looking for when they build out their community programs: Customer and User Growth. Better Support for Customers and/or Users. Improved Marketing and Brand Recognition. Technology/Product Production and Enhancement. Recruiting and Services.

Access to Audience

• Access to a Growing, Globally Connected Audience - engage with them, build relationships, and generate and share value together.

Understand Audience

• It provides a structured way in which to define your audience, understand how to serve them efficiently and effectively, deliver the right tools to help them succeed, better support them, channel their feedback to improve your product, and thus reduce the risk of frustration and people leaving.

• Communities also provide a wealth of user experience and insight. This expertise and insight can help you with product design, development, and delivery. Communities are a place where prospective customers can evaluate your product or service in more detail.

Communicate with Audience

• Immediate Delivery of Broad Information and Expertise

Content Generation

• Communities can provide a powerful vehicle for building buzz and awareness about your product, service, and brand. The idea is simple: if you don’t have a community, you are fully dependent on your marketing and PR teams, which might be just a handful of people.

• These members won’t just support and promote your brand, they can generate content that will increase your search engine performance, increase your social media presence, promote the community at local events and global conferences, and open up opportunities with future potential customers, partners, and other engagements.

Community Advocacy

• With the birth of crowdfunding on platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, community advocacy and promotion has similarly played a pivotal role. Some of the most funded campaigns, such as the Pebble Smartwatch (raising $20 million for their $500k goal) and Exploding Kittens game (raising nearly $9 million for their $10k goal), used community advocacy as a means to reach these goals.

Education & Support

• Education and support can be expensive and time consuming, with most companies producing a library of documentation and videos and providing a support email address. This immediately becomes a cost center, and companies tend to reluctantly invest in it, despite the importance in security for customers.

• Communities can be a godsend here. Enthusiastic users of your product or service will often produce guides, documentation, videos, how-tos, and more, all which help to seal this education gap.

• Community members will often provide on-tap help and support where prospective and existing customers can ask questions and get help.

Engage with Audience

• Customer success and delight builds retention and brand loyalty, and it is a critical way to separate yourself from those wannabes who call themselves your competitors.

• A community provides a shared environment where members can build relationships with the company, consume and contribute additional value, and see this value being consumed by other members. This builds goodwill. It creates trust. It builds brand loyalty.

Collaborate with Audience

• Diversified Methods of Online Collaboration

Product & Technical Development

• Open code means you can attract new contributors who produce features, fix bugs, and improve the overall security of a product. Freely available access makes it easier for people to try technologies, and many companies run a successful open-core model where they have the free open-source version (the gateway drug) and an enterprise version with additional paid features.

• Throughout all of this, your brand, technology, and team has a much broader potential audience due to the lower barrier to entry.

• Other communities have also formed to create additions that sit on top of existing platforms.

• If you provide a clear way to map a community member’s skills to delivering meaningful work, it is incredible what results you can generate.

Recruitment & Business Capabilities

• If you don’t have an environment that shares similar principles to a collaborative community (cross-team collaboration, career development, social engagement, etc.), you are going to struggle to hire.

• Building and engaging with a community doesn’t just integrate these skills into your organization, it also provides a funnel of potential candidates. Many of my clients hire a significant number of people from their communities. This doesn’t just make recruitment easier, but the employees also come prebaked with relevant experience and context. For many of these members, their dream job is working for the company. It is a win-win situation.