FeverBee - Community Consulting

Some exciting news to share - FeverBee is now an ISO27001 certified organisation. More details below 👇

Over the past six months, FeverBee has undertaken a detailed analysis of the top six community enterprise platforms to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. Our analysis showed one platform has gained a slight lead over the competition, one platform has fallen significantly behind, and three others have slightly differentiated offerings to appeal to the unique needs of different organisations. Perhaps most importantly, the gap between five of the top six vendors has narrowed. Today it’s less about selecting ‘the best’ platform than it is identifying the right platform for your unique needs. The basis of competition has shifted from a core feature set to services, integrations, pricing and information security concerts (all of which we evaluate in our report). We’ve created two distinct reports. Customer Satisfaction Analysis (free to download). https://lnkd.in/euH2uNiY FeverBee’s Detailed Technical Analysis ($1400 USD). https://lnkd.in/eBdgyg_K This report reveals the results of our survey of over a hundred community professionals concerning the platforms they use. We have provided both a summary score and results by each criterion including: - Breadth of features. - Quality of features. - Customisation/flexibility. - Integrations. - Data privacy and Security. - Services and Support team. - Ease of Use - Time To Value - Value for Money - Reports and Analytics. We’ve displayed the results both as a ranking of the most popular community platform and by each unique feature. ----------   FeverBee’s Technical Analysis ($1400 USD) How does each platform compare in our technical analysis? Selecting the right community platform is one of the biggest decisions any organisation will make when developing a community. Selecting the wrong platform will result in poor performance, high maintenance costs, and disappointing members. In this report, we have evaluated the top six community platforms against the same criteria we use for client RFPs to identify not only our current top community platform in the market today, but also which platforms are best suited for which purposes. In this Report - Identification of the top six enterprise community platform vendors.  - Overview of the current enterprise community platform market (including its size and trends). - A detailed criteria for creating an RFP and evaluating community platforms.  - Our detailed analysis of each of the top six enterprise community platforms. - Our summary of the top community platform on the market today. Before you invest hundreds of thousands of dollars on your next migration or platform purchase, I recommend you buy this report. It will ensure you avoid making a costly mistake and select the right platform for your unique needs.

Is Discourse the best community platform? Today we published our latest episode of community platform wars where we review each of the major community platforms and give our verdict. Discourse is certainly one of the most interesting platforms out there. In many ways, it's the last major independent platform vendor out there. It's one of the most advanced platforms out there, it has great functionality, and continues to be more innovative than almost any other major vendor. But there are also some flaws in the platform too. If you want to learn more, watch the video. If you want to find the rest of our reviews - visit our YouTube channel below

It's here. 🥳 This is community in 2024! Today we published our detailed breakdown of the past trends and what the future looks like for enterprise community professionals. https://buff.ly/3O89FU3 If you want to know who's doing community well today, what the major trends are, and how you need to adapt - this covers it all. Let me know if you have any questions! #cmgr

Wow. Over 600(!!!) of you registered for our webinar taking place in a few hours. 😱 This makes it the biggest webinar we've ever done 🥳. If you haven't signed up yet and still want to access all of the research and trends we're sharing in just a couple of hours - you can sign up using this link: https://buff.ly/3vr7lB2 I can't wait to see you all there!

The fun part of any strategy is the key programs and initiatives (and the must-win battles - MWBs). Key Programs and Initiatives ---------------------------------------------- This is where you list the key initiatives to achieve your goals. You don’t need to list the standard community activities you will undertake in every community here. That will come later. This is simply the place where you list the key initiatives which will make your community succeed. These should directly match everything above – especially the unique positioning you adopting in the community. You can find some examples of initiatives which match the positioning below: The key is to push this to the edge. If speed is the unique positioning you can’t just say it – you have to do it. This makes putting in place the programs and processes to ensure this is reflected in your community strategy. In this example, we’ve highlighted initiatives which are skewed towards trust and convenience with a group set up for newcomers, courses, and videos hosted on platforms which enable ease of use and several initiatives reflecting engagement with each other. You shouldn’t have too many initiatives here – just the main ones which will highlight how you will exemplify the unique positioning you’re creating. The number of initiatives should depend entirely on the resources available. What one person is capable of executing is very different from what a team of five are capable of executing. Must-Win Battles (MWBs) ---------------------------------------------- Must-win battles are the challenges you must overcome for this to be successful. The core purpose of the ‘must-win battles’ is to highlight the difficult part of the process. If it was easy, you probably would have already achieved your goal. But there is going to be some part of the project which isn’t going to be easy and it’s useful to focus resources and skills on them. You can see some examples here: A must-win battle entails unpredictability. It can’t simply be an output you completely control. It usually relates to some change you hope to make in the audience. These are the areas which require skill, and effort, and where the difference between good and great community professionals shines. MWB’s put strategy in the realm of probabilities rather than certainties. Common challenges relate to people, platforms, or processes. Often it’s a combination of changing minds and changing habits. At other times it’s about developing the right platforms and processes for capturing the results. This section can be optional, but it’s good to highlight them so everyone is aware of what the hard part of this process really is.

Community Positioning -------------------------------------- A community should be positioned along two axes. One axis should relate to the primary value members want from the community (belonging, support, learning/exploration, influence). This is a broad approach, you can be far more specific than this in practice with what members need (e.g. latest sales templates, up-to-date news, good case studies etc…). The other axis should relate to how they will get this value better from the community than any other channel. This is what makes the community unique. It could be speed of response, quality of response, trustworthiness, exclusivity etc…). This is usually where we want to summarise how the community will compare against existing places where members will get that value and ensure the community has its own uniqueness. It’s important everyone understands how the community delivers unique value to members and all future actions reinforce this. This information is sourced from research and needs and desires analysis. You can see an example below. Messaging -------------------------------------- Once you have the positioning, you can develop the right messaging to match the positioning. The messaging should generally include: 1) Name. Is it simply [brand] community? Or will the community have a distinct name? As a general rule, support-only communities can adopt the [brand] community as it’s better for search traffic. Any other kind of community will usually benefit from having a distinct name and identity. 2) Tagline (one sentence). This is a simple one-sentence value statement to members who are joining and participating in the community. It should be used on both the website and in all communications describing the unique value to members. Often this is in the form of: 3) The [unique benefit] way to [desired action][value]. E.g. The quickest way to get your questions answered. One paragraph. This is where you outline the full benefits and value of the community in a paragraph. 4) Key Messages. This is where you highlight the key messages you can distribute about the community. If you do this well, each of these can be its own mini-promotional campaign.

Target Audience(s) and Behaviors ------------------------------------------------------ An important section of any strategy is to specify the target audience (duh!) You will usually be able to identify multiple different groups. This might mean segmenting them by: > Demographics. > Behaviors. > Psychographics. The key rule is if you’re segmenting an audience in a particular way, it should be practical (i.e. you should be able to segment and communicate to them differently). This is often hard to do with psychographics. Most platforms, for example, don’t easily let you split your detractors from your promoters and send different messages to each. So whichever means you have of segmenting the audience should be practical in how you can identify them and communicate differently with each of them. You might have multiple groups here and you can use persona templates if you wish. I’m less of a fan of persona templates than I used to be. I increasingly find a simple list of needs and desires is fine in most situations. If you have multiple audiences (location, job roles, needs, relevant demographics), you might wish to have a unique slide for each of these. The goal is to be clear about the needs, the severity of each need, the frequency of each need, how that need is satisfied today and why not the community. The outcome is a list of needs for each segment which looks like the below. This should give you a clear list of needs prioritised by severity and frequency – which you can then also use to guide how you communicate and position the community later. Listing The Critical Behaviors ----------------------------------------------- If the goals from this aren’t obvious (or you’re concerned they won’t be supported), you can then host a workshop (ideally in real-time, but asynchronous is possible) to connect the goals to desired member behaviours and then rank goals by their importance to the organisation and feasibility to members. You can do this via the workshop format as shown below. Feasibility here is based on whether members have stated they want to do this and whether there is fierce competition for that behaviour. If you have multiple audiences you can color-code the responses by type of audience. Slide each behaviour along the horizontal axis to determine the feasibility of the behaviour. This should help you prioritise goals which are at the top-right.

Let's talk about the goals and vision. The Community Vision ------------------------------------- The vision is the desired outcome if everything goes well. Some people like to have a mission, vision, goals, and values statement. That’s totally fine but we prefer to take a slightly different approach. The first part is simply to define the broad vision for the community. Some examples might include: “Build a thriving community of advocates who help us and each other achieve our goals.” “Create powerful, authentic, content which puts our diverse clients at the beating heart of our marketing efforts” “Use the power of community to equip every customer with the skills, knowledge, and resources to thrive” “Foster a work environment where every team member’s individuality is celebrated and harnessed to create a collaborative, innovative, and inclusive workplace” The language of this should serve as a rallying cry that you’re happy to share with members and stakeholders. This should be based on interviews with stakeholders, members, and past experience. You can come up with several different messages if you like and test which seems to resonate most strongly with the key audiences if you wish. If you message 20 members for their feedback, you should see one option emerging above others. Prioritised List Of Goals ------------------------------------- The next step is a prioritised list of goals. These are the top two to three things stakeholders want to achieve. This should be clear and specific. The goal here is to relentlessly clarify what the outcome will look like if the community is a success. How will they know the community is a success? The goals should clearly link to the vision as you can see here. These should be sourced from your stakeholder interviews and the result of connecting your community goals to desired member behaviours. You should complete this section after you have undertaken the target audience analysis below.

I think it's good to outline the guiding principles too. The guiding principles should add clarity to the vision. 👉 Which audience(s) are you targeting? Who is the community for and who is it not for? The community can’t be for everyone – so create some boundaries. You can even clearly specify who it’s not for if you wish. 👉 What is the unique benefit of the community to the organization? What does the community offer to the organization it couldn’t get from elsewhere? This is a simpler ROI question. It should be clear what the broad goal of the community is and why the community achieves this better (cheaper, quicker, more effectively) than any other channel. 👉 What is the unique value to members? What will members get from this community that they can’t get from anywhere else? This is a positioning question. Is it speed/quality of responses? Unique connections? 👉 What is your unique advantage? What is the unique value you or your organisation brings to the table that no one else building a similar community can match? Why couldn’t this be a fan-hosted subreddit or Facebook group? What can only you provide? (e.g. access, verified sources of information, scale/resources, or influence etc..) 👉 How will the community thrive in a changing environment? This is where we flag the trends to watch out for and how we will adapt to them over time. This often outlines the platform, people, or goals which might need to change as the environment changes. 👉 What is the key challenge which must be overcome? Most communities have a key challenge they must overcome to succeed. It might be getting questions, competing for experts, or budget issues. What is yours and how will it be tackled? Every principle should be built on solid research – not remarkable bursts of creativity. Here is an example of a set of guiding principles here: