Setting better community goals 🔑- The Slack CM Newsletter Issue 9

Kourosh Ghaffari

Nov 01, 2022

This week’s words of encouragement

Have you ever thought about doing less?

It's easy to become overwhelmed and want to do a million things at once, especially when you're managing a community.

My friend Max Pete wrote an amazing piece on how to do less but do better as a community manager.

I encourage you to do less, do better, and take care of yourself ❤️

Setting the right goals for your community

Being a 'good' community manager comes down to two things:

1 - Are your members getting the value you promised them?

2 - Is your business getting the value they hired you for?

Number 1 is often measured through NPS or engagement (ew).

Number 2 comes down to the goals you set with your manager.

It's simple.

Set the wrong goals, and you will miss them, regardless of how hard you work.

Set the right goals, and you will reach them, because of how hard you work.

Of course, there are some great managers out there who will help you set the right goals.

But community is unexplored and growing, and you can't expect every manager to be an expert on the topic.

This makes it even more important that you know exactly what you're doing when it comes to setting goals.

We'll look at these ingredients for setting up great goals:

Valuable - No vanity metrics

Measurable - Can you really measure success?

Control - Is it really up to you?

Specific - What's the action plan

Valuable - No vanity metrics

What the f*ck is engagement?

Everyone thinks of it differently, everyone measures it differently, and everyone hopes it will do different things.

It's also the first thing that's brought up when talking about goals for a better community experience.

But in itself, engagement is not valuable. It's not a goal, but a symptom of a goal.

We want to raise engagement to push for more word-of-mouth referrals, faster response times, or more community-generated content.

So when it comes to setting goals, make sure you're not looking to achieve symptoms, you're looking to achieve valuable outcomes.

If your manager asks for more engagement or for more members, ask why.

Find out what the underlying goal is and focus on that.

But this opens up a whole other can of worms, which brings us to the next ingredient.

Measurable - Can you really measure success?

When we say that a goal has to be measurable, we usually mean assigning a certain number or percentage to that goal.

Like doubling engagement, increasing community size by 30%, or answering support questions 50% faster.

But there's more to it in the community case.

Let's continue with our engagement example:

The benefit of measuring engagement?

Easy - it CAN be measured.

Underlying goals often can't.

Let's say that the underlying goal of more engagement is to identify more leads in the community for your sales team.

As far as I know, there are no community tools out there that can accurately find all leads in your community.

So when you do find valuable goals, make sure you have the capabilities to accurately measure your efforts.

For example, if your goal is to raise the word of mouth referrals from community members, make sure you have a way to find out which members came in through referrals.

Most community tools are either too expensive or not sophisticated enough to do that.

To get an accurate result, you will often have to collaborate with other teams in your company.

And that brings me to the next section.

Control - Is it really up to you?

This is the one that inspired this issue.

Let's say that your manager asks you to grow your community's size by 50% in the next quarter.

Sounds sensible, right?

A good community experience leads to more word-of-mouth, which then leads to new members.

But there are a dozen other growth channels that are outside of your control as a community manager.

What if most of your members join your community after they sign up for your product, or they come through your marketing website?

If no new people sign up for your product or no one visits your website, you won't be able to reach your target.

Reaching your goal doesn't just depend on you, it depends on a bunch of other teams doing good work.

Of course, you can't play the blame game with your manager and tell them that it's someone else's fault.

You also can't avoid cooperating with other teams within your company.

But to avoid these traps, you'll need to do your homework and be an expert on the happenings in and outside of your community.

So before committing to your goals, it always makes sense to do research and make sure that your goals depend on only you and your team.

S - Specific

You should already know your action plan for reaching a goal BEFORE you set it.

This is where specificity comes in.

A good goal already answers these questions:

What valuable outcome do we want to reach?

Who's in control for reaching those outcomes?

How are we going to measure it?

What specific steps are we going to take to reach it?

Now you can't always know the exact steps you want to take to reach a goal, especially if you're setting a yearly goal.

But this approach has helped me get on the same page as my manager for quarterly and monthly goals.

When you and your manager decide on a certain goal, you will already have some ideas on how you want to reach it.

Here's an example of a good, but not perfect goal:

What's missing here is the action plan.

There are a dozen different ways of achieving this goal, but you and your manager might not have the same action plans in mind.

Discuss your ideas for reaching the goal and include them in your goal.

This helps you be on the same page with my manager and ensure that I have the required buy-in to go after my targets.

So let's add a layer of specificity to our goal:

"The community team wants to increase the number of community-qualified sales leads by 30%. We will measure this by integrating our community with Salesforce and creating a process to better capture those leads. We will achieve this by encouraging and starting discussions within the community around our products, our superusers, and the different use cases for our products."

And that's it!

I hope this proves to be useful to you.

Setting better goals and reaching them lay the foundation for more investments into your community department and spreading the love for community❤️

This week's goodbye👋

I can't believe it's already November.

The winter months can be a quieter time for many communities. It's also a great time to sit down and reflect on your past year and everything you've accomplished.

Take this time to be proud of your work, and decide what's in store for you and your community efforts in the new year.

Rooting for you as always,

Kourosh - The Waves guy🌊

The Slack Community Manager Newsletter

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