Communities are behavior change-makers.

August 7, 2023 By Jim Storer

Communities are behavior change-makers. When you give people a faster, easier, or more effective way to do something, they typically adopt this new approach. Our 2023 State of Community Management research showed that external-facing communities continue to grow across nearly all behaviors we index. Best-in-class communities show dramatic improvement in three areas:

Faster response to support questions
Growing % of support handled in the community
Increased product usage

Legendary management guru Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and while he didn’t mean to minimize the importance of a good strategy, he firmly believed a strong culture could be a surer route to organizational success. The same is true with community programs. We’re interested in how they’re viewed within organizations and how they act as behavior change-makers.

For the first time in this research’s history, no respondents reported that their organization’s culture “is toxic to” community.

We see this as a promising trend! At the other end of the spectrum notice that best-in-class programs see their organizations “reward” community approaches at more than twice the rate of the survey average. Perhaps ironically, we see this as even more evidence that you need to push your program to adopt more advanced strategies in order to influence what your organization’s culture values and supports.

Behavior change-makers in action.

External communities also continue to report that they “reduce the sales cycle” at an accelerating rate. But it’s still a relatively small percentage of the overall sample, so we hesitate to give it too much weight just yet.

Not surprisingly, 75% of respondents report that their communities are at least “moderately effective” at facilitating behavior or culture change, consistent with the 2022 sample (74%). This is uplifting news, but compare those figures with this years best-in-class sample (94%) and you might be inspired to conduct a gap analysis to figure out what you need to level-up your community program.

Download the State of Community Management 2023 to learn more about how you can leverage communities as effective behavior change-makers at your orgs.

Behavior Modeling: Setting a Good Example in Your Community

April 24, 2023 By Jim Storer

What is behavior modeling and how does this affect sentiment in communities?

First, let’s explore behavior mirroring. Do you ever notice how some of us tend to take on the quirks and mannerisms of others – or mimic each others words? This behavior is known as mirroring in which we subconsciously imitate expressions, speech, or actions of others. It is a thoroughly studied psychological concept, so we know that such behavior often manifests as a way to learn vicariously, build rapport and facilitate interactions in unfamiliar environments. Essentially, we are acting as chameleons – blending into our environment to observe, increase our relatability and keep safe. (Chartrand and Bargh, 1999)

Behavior Modeling: Setting a Good Example in Your Community

Given that this behavior can be found in abundance in all sorts of daily interactions, it comes as no surprise that the “chameleon effect” is observed in online interactions as well. For example, we see mimicking in social networks with the rapid adoption of jargon as participants use hashtags and acronyms. It explains why acronyms such as “bae” (before anyone else), “smh” (shake my head), and #tbt (throwback Thursday) quickly spread and are adopted as common expressions with unprecedented speed online.

Communities also see mirroring, but the effect is more subtle. Have you noticed that once one person starts ranting, it feels like the rest of a group joins in? Or when one person posts a complaint, suddenly a dozen more appear? It is mirroring, and it becomes a feedback loop. The more people exhibit a behavior, the more it is copied.

How can you use behavior mirroring to your advantage? Become a model for the behavior you wish to see.

Encourage community staff and other employees to interact with members in a positive way use the “mirror” to engage in behavior modeling – exhibiting the positive behaviors you wish to see in the community.

Here are three simple behavior modeling techniques:

Post in the tone you want to see from others. This means maintaining a positive and neutral tone whenever possible even when the conversation is frustrating or confusing. Use the type of language you want to see in the community.
Say thanks. If you see a member posting a great question or providing an answer, let them know you appreciate it. Say “thank you” for good contributions to the community.
Freely giving likes to those who deserve it. Thrilled to see a “thank you” or “that helped”? Like it. See a great answer provided by a peer or customer? Like it.

The techniques proved to be good practice for community staff, but more importantly, they set a good example for members. Once you actively engage in behavior modeling techniques, you’ll start to see more and more positive member interactions with community staff, which in turn led to more positive interactions by employees. Instead of a negative feedback loop, we created a positive one.

This advice was published in our community case study Improving Community Sentiment. You can download your own copy here.

Powering Behavior Change Through Community

July 11, 2022 By Jim Storer

The Conference Board planned a big community launch for April 2020.

One thing they didn’t plan on was a global pandemic.

Learn how the community team at The Conference Board leveraged their new community to drive increased member retention and improve the member experience, effectively powering behavior change through community.

Download Powering Behavior Change Through Community

About The Conference Board

Founded in 1916, The Conference Board is the member-driven think tank that delivers trusted insights for what’s ahead. Our mission is simple: To help leaders navigate the biggest issues impacting business and better serve society.

We believe in innovative approaches that make you think- and act- differently. And everything we do reflects the input of our members and their real-world challenges. We do this by delivering business insights. We connect senior executives across industries and geographies to share ideas, and our experts create fact-based research and consensus-driven policy statements to help leaders address their most important business issues.

Because we are independent, non-partisan, and non-profit our work is trusted. If you learned it at The Conference Board you can count on it.

Re ad more Community Case Studies

Interested in more online community management case studies like this one on powering behavior change through community? Learn how top community programs at organizations like Aetna, The Pragmatic Institute, Heifer International, The World Bank Group, and more use community-led programs to increase engagement, boost customer loyalty, improve the employee experience, encourage innovation, and more.

Unclogging Bottlenecks with Janet Stiles

July 7, 2022 By Jim Storer

Lessons from The NEW Community Manager Handbook is a limited-run podcast series, featuring the 21 community leaders showcased in the Handbook in conversation with Anne Mbugua.

Episode Five features Janet Stiles, Sr. Director of Member Engagement at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

She and Anne discuss how a thoughtfully designed and managed community program can unclog institutional bottlenecks. Janet shares how community-led programs became critical components of the AAMC member experience, how to manage “voluntolds” at your organization, and effective tactics for enabling organization-wide cultural change via community.

If you haven’t downloaded your free copy of The NEW Community Manager Handbook you can get it here.

Listing to Unclogging Bottlenecks with Janet Stiles

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About the Association of American Medical Colleges

The AAMC’s strong sense of community and professionalism fosters an environment that supports the career and personal goals of its staff. Through development opportunities, employee support and activity groups, and other resources, employees can work in an environment where innovation and new ideas are encouraged. The AAMC serves a vital purpose as the nation’s voice for America’s medical schools and teaching hospitals. These institutions play a crucial role in our nation’s health care by training the next generation of doctors, discovering new medical knowledge, and providing superior clinical care. The work of the AAMC and its employees leads and serves our member institutions and constituents.

About The NEW Community Manager Handbook

The NEW Community Manager Handbook features 21 profiles of community leaders sharing advice and ideas on everything from accessibility, hiring, strategy, gamification, defining the digital workplace, technology, and more. Each profile is paired with research from the State of Community Management reports and includes tactical advice for implementing what you’ve learned.

Learn from community management experts at Easterseals, Glencore, Microsoft, UKG, the World Bank Group, Analog Devices, Inc., AAMC, Zapier, Doctors Without Borders, and more.

Download the New Community Manager Handbook

You can find more resources for enabling cultural change through community-led programs here.

How can I use our community to empower members?

May 7, 2020 By Jim Storer

empowering members in your online community

When individuals are inspired, engaged, and empowered they fuel a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop.

Success breeds success because people see engagement rewarded, which in turn increases how comfortable they are engaging in the community themselves. People live up or down to the expectations set by those around them – and their imaginations and ambitions are limited or expanded based on what they can see in their communities.

Empowerment Challenge: How many processes can you move out of email or off of paper to your community?

Have a question? Start archived FAQs in your community, and make sure there is a way for members to post new questions (and get new answers from SMEs).
Need support? Have your members submit support tickets in your community. Share the answers back to the community (when applicable) to create transparency and avoid duplicate work in the future.
Soliciting customer or employee evaluations from a program in operations? Have customers provide real-time feedback in a community and encourage product managers to follow along and participate when appropriate.
Want to reward and recognize brand champions? Use member spotlights and AMAs to highlight outstanding people in your community.

By moving these workflows to your community, you can increase efficiency, but more significantly you can improve customer/member satisfaction. Our research shows that members feel better about their contributions when they have a clear path to follow.

Check out this community case study from Christopher Detzel at Imperva to see how they used an online community program to reduce their support caseload and empower their customers to help them make better products.

Ashleigh Brookshaw and Meghan Bates on Change Management

April 21, 2020 By Jim Storer

Conversations with Community Managers - Ashleigh Brookshaw and Meghan Bates

Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI and more.

Episode #68 features Ashleigh Brookshaw, ASSP and Meghan Bates, Personify.

In this episode of the podcast, Ashleigh and Megan share their perspective on the intersection of change management and community management, how to thrive as a mighty team of one, and how community champion programs can increase engagement and member satisfaction.

Listen Now:

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Find more episodes of Conversations with Community Managers.

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

If you run a community, don’t think like a website on metrics

April 30, 2015 By Ted McEnroe

By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable

As we continue to slice and dice the data from more than 200 communities for the State of Community Management 2015, we know that one of the most viewed pieces of the report will be the engagement profiles – the percentage of members who are lurking, contributing, creating and collaborating in the community. It’s a natural thing, especially for new communities, to want to look at engagement and growth metrics early as a way to show to people the success of the community.

Is this constructive engagement?

When you focus on engagement and growth, though, it defines your tactics in ways that may not benefit the long-term health of the community. In the recently published Community Manager Handbook: 20 Lessons from Community Superheroes, we highlighted some alternatives to basic engagement and growth metrics we are drawn toward – the kinds of metrics that might get more effectively at how your community will perform long term.

Think about these kinds of metrics:

Engagement depth – Can you demonstrate that members asking good questions and having real discussions? Many “engagement tactics” lead to one-and-done kinds of engagement, which boost your numbers now, but will come back to haunt you later.

Member satisfaction – Satisfied members are much more likely to come back than those who come, engage, and depart unsatisfied. Surprisingly, new communities often don’t prioritize finding out if members are satisfied. You shouldn’t reshape your strategy for every complaint and question, but knowing how people are feeling about the community is crucial in moving forward.

Membership referrals and renewals – If your members are renewing and referring new members – they must like what you do. If your members are becoming advocates – you’re doing something right! Getting member referrals and renewals tells you that your members don’t just have to be there, they want to be there.

Signs of changing behavior – By the time you begin, you should have a sense of the behaviors you expect from members. Are they moving toward your behavioral goals? If not, it’s easier to change behaviors in a small community than a large one, so now is the time.

These metrics are sometimes more difficult to measure, but using your community goals to drive the metrics you use, rather than just “doing the basics” can help ensure you’re looking at what defines a valuable community, as opposed to a popular website.