The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

How can I use our community to empower members?

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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.

Using Gamification to Increase Engagement In Online Communities

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Heifer International is a global nonprofit with a mission to end hunger and poverty while caring for the Earth. For 75 years, they have provided resources and training to improve the lives of those who struggle daily for reliable sources of food and income.

To celebrate their 75th anniversary, they launched a points and status gamification feature within their digital workplace. Over 1,100 global employees were encouraged to:

  • INTERACT with the community platform by updating their profile information and adding a photo.
  • LEARN about the features and functionalities of the digital workplace.
  • COLLABORATE and share information across global teams.
  • INSPIRE each other to live the core value, “Passing on the Gift” by giving another colleague a chance to win a prize.

Download the Case Study

Heifer International Case Study Online Community - Gamification to Increase Engagement

Download the Case Study

Using ROI to Gain Executive Support

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Element14 is an online community of over half a million engineers, makers, educators, and students where members can connect, learn, create, and inspire.

The element14 team sought to provide tangible ROI to help executives understand the financial value the community provides to drive revenue.

In this case study, Dianne Kibbey, Global Head of Community and Social Media shares how the element14 team used ROI to successfully gain executive support for their community, and secure additional financial resources for community-led programs.

Download the element14 case study.

Nurturing Super Users to Cultivate Success

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Many community managers don’t want to overburden their most active members with extra duties that could make them feel used or make them less active in the community. They don’t have the budget or authorization to provide needed training and resources for advocates (or superusers, power users, top contributors, champions, etc.) to be effective in leadership roles. Or they feel like they don’t have the bandwidth themselves to give structure to an advocacy program on top of the rest of their own duties.

But engaging your advocates to take on more leadership responsibilities can be a mutually beneficial relationship for you and your community members.

Community Management Case Study- Nurturing Super Users

Empowering your advocates by giving them real opportunities not only helps you, but it also helps them grow and ultimately provides greater benefits to your organization. It’s an untapped investment that can reap real rewards for both your organization and your key members.

The Mimecaster Central “Legends” Program rewards the most active community champions who continue to offer Legendary assistance to their peers in their support community.

Learn how the Mimecast community team nurtures these super users to cultivate customer success and increase member satisfaction in this case study. Download the Mimecast case study.

Driving Community Participation and Engagement With Gamification

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Electronic Arts Inc., a leading global interactive entertainment software company, delivers games, content and online services for Internet-connected consoles, personal computers, mobile phones and tablets to hundreds of millions of players worldwide.

With an online gaming network that is home to dedicated global players, EA sought to drive down support costs while also providing enhanced interactive rewards.

Learn how EA built a gamification-based support hub and a two-tiered super-user program that increased traffic, converted lurkers and deflected contacts from Live Support channels.

Download the Electronic Arts case study.

community case study
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The Social Executive Research: UBM Case Study

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As the business world continues to innovate and move faster, social technologies are changing the way businesses communicate and engage with internal and external constituencies. This dramatic change alters both the structure of organizations and the opportunities they choose to pursue.  A critical factor in whether companies will succeed in this new networked age is the way in which executives support, invest in and adopt social technologies themselves.  While a great deal of progress has been made, executives still vary widely in their perspectives, expectations and use of social tools, making progress inconsistent and unpredictable across organizations.

We launched The Social Executive research initiative to help community and social business leaders better articulate the executive journey and identify what resources and experiences would best help executives progress at each stage.

Over the last three months I have had the pleasure of interviewing an incredibly diverse range of executives – heads of learning, HR, IT, marketing, as well as CEOs – and heard first hand about the opportunities and challenges they see for their business and how social approaches are contributing (or not) to that challenge.

One of the first areas we explored with executives was how they connected the use of social technologies in their organizations to business needs and opportunities. What we found were three primary drivers for adoption:

  1. The Need to Innovate
  2. Solving an Execution Challenge
  3. Fear of Falling Behind

We then asked about their personal journey, they ranged from very little use of social technologies to individuals who developed their usage as the technologies emerged. Here are three insights I found particularly interesting:

  • Some of the executives leading the most successful online communities had little interest in participating on public social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
  • There was virtually no shared sources of expertise on the social technology or social business trend. Learning about how to use these technologies and what they could do for organizations was extremely sporadic.
  • Innovation was happening in the most surprising places. Yes, there were some more expected places where innovation was found (see the UBM case study below), but some of the most interesting innovation was happening in places I had never been exposed to – in the government, manufacturing and agriculture sectors.

We are very excited to deliver The Social Executive research to the market and our first installment, a case study of UBM, which illustrates one company’s journey in establishing an internal social network. This case study looks at the highlights of their implementation, the perspectives of key senior executives and some of the groundbreaking innovation made possible by a more networked communications structure.  It illustrates the importance of both executive leadership and engagement, covering CEO David Levin’s early decisions and his personal use of social tools and how those decisions helped to unify company culture and made collaboration and employee engagement easier and more prevalent ultimately leading to innovations that would not have been possible otherwise.

We hope this case study is useful in understanding how one organization has become a social business and how the involvement of executives impacts the organizations’ ability to adapt. We encourage you to share this internally with your own stakeholders.
Look for more research to come:

If you are interested in partnering or participating in our research, please contact us.