Hello everyone,

I’ve been furiously building groups in our GameChanger community over the past few months.

While we continue to nurture them, I thought I’d share some key aspects that stood out to me.

Hoping to open a discussion on this & learn your best tactics from your experiences with groups as well.

Ownership:

• It’s vital to have subject experts really take the reins when it comes to interest groups. We have who we like to call - Group Champions from within the organization, leading these groups as it falls easily within their expertise.

• Side note - This honestly also means it becomes more fun for me as a CM, we get a double brain-storming time 😄

Discoverability: 

• As CMs, we are bound to know the community page like the back of our hands. Where I’m going with this, is how key it is to use that knowledge & place plug-ins of these groups across primary category posts, as & when opportunities arise. This helps increase discoverability organically. 

• Another important question to answer is - how to make it easy to convince new group members to actually click that ‘join + subscribe’ button. Keeping an eye on factors like changing up featured articles on the group to place the high engagement/high value posts, pinning important and recent discussions to the top, ensuring there is a response to every recent comment on a post. This showcases that the group has high activity in the recent past as well.

• In the future, we aim to install Gainsight PX on community, which would let us guide users towards important parts of the community interface

Content Calendar:

• One of the key drivers that helped groups take off well for us has been the focus on having a content plan ahead of launching the group + maintaining it.

• We’ve had a mix of minimum 2 weekly posts from the Group Champions -  a series for sharing knowledge, fun trivia engagement opportunities, member spotlights like these…

• This has resulted in members engaging with each other or coming forward with their own posts

Promotion:

• Another interesting learning for me has been about using different platform opportunities within your reach to drive the right members to the group. Some examples that have worked well for us are:

  • Mailers promoting the group to customer cohorts

  • Social announcements from the company handle or leadership handles

  • Making it a part of the company’s newsletters etc

I’m really curious to hear how you have been nurturing community groups at your company. 

• Do you have a process that you follow before launching a group?

• How often do you engage the group and what kind of engagement tactics have worked for you?

• As a community manager, how much are you involved in driving the group’s content or do you also have someone like GCs to lead this effort along with you?

• Any tips on how you have scaled a group in your community?

Looking forward to hearing from you all! 🙂