The community silver bullet 🕊 - The Slack CM Newsletter Issue 8
Big community happenings in the last month.
A lot has happened in the community world over the last month.
Orbit let go of 40% of its staff and 3 high-profile Commsor employees announced their resignations on the same day.
Does this mean that the community bubble is bursting?
See what some legendary community builders are saying about this.
The conversation happened on Rosie's Village forum. It's the best place on the internet for any community discussions.
Talking to your members done right.
#1 Why member interviews are important
#2 Example time: Cheaper, faster, smarter
#3 How to ask the right questions
#4 Who to talk to
#5 What to avoid
#6 A low-effort way for continuous feedback
#1 Why member interviews are important
To create the best community you need to know your members' problems, wants, and needs.
Hell, you need to know their favorite music, toothpaste, and dog breed.
That's possible and easy when your community is small and you have a single member persona.
As your community grows, you'll attract different people with different problems.
Some of them might even be cat people.
Having more personas makes it harder for you to understand every type of member.
Your facts and knowledge about your community will slowly turn into assumptions and hypotheses.
And assumptions aren't bad, as long as you test them.
#2 Example time: Cheaper, faster, smarter.
Let's say that you think your community would enjoy events. That's an assumption.
To test that assumption, you come up with an event idea, get the budget, find a speaker, create marketing content, and host the event.
That takes you about a month.
Sadly only 1% of your community shows up. A month wasted and your manager's mad.
But at least now you know that your community doesn't want events. You've tested your assumption, but at what cost?
Here's what you could have done instead:
You reach out to 30 diverse members.
You ask them about the last time they've joined an event.
You ask them what events they've enjoyed in the past.
You ask them why they've joined events in the past.
And here's what you find out:
Even though your members aren't particularly busy people, they don't want to join any more events, because they feel zoom fatigue.
On top of that, your industry is really well-served with helpful content out there. Why join an event when you can just google something?
Done. You've tested your hypothesis.
You've saved yourself a ton of time and money. Plus, you met a few new members and that's always worth something.
It's a win-win-win.
Tl;dr = Member interviews are important because they help you test your hypotheses quickly and learn more about your members.
#3 How to ask the right questions
Here's where most of us fail. Asking the right questions in a feedback interview is an art form.
I highly recommend The Mom Test but it boils down to two things.
Asking the right questions (and getting the right answers) is hard because of these 3 things:
1 - People are generally (too) nice
Very few people want to crush your dreams.
If you tell a member that you've been working very hard on a new event series, they won't tell you that events suck.
They'll tell you that they're super excited about it. But 9 times out of 10, they won't show up.
People will give you the answer you want to hear, not their honest opinion.
2 - People know their problems, not their solutions.
Henry Ford (the dude who made cars) once said:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
We often know what our problems are, but we don't know how to solve them.
3 - We're bad at predicting our own future behavior
We don't know what we will want/need in 2 or 3 months from now.
It usually boils down to us being too optimistic about the future.
How to ask the right questions:
In summary, you need to avoid the 2 problems above when you want to ask the right feedback questions.
The easiest way to do that is to ask people about their past behaviors.
So instead of asking "Would you join my event series?" ask them "Have you joined an event series in the past? If no, why not?"
The first "would you..." question gives your member too much space to be too nice, and it also forces them to predict their future behavior.
The second "have you..." question forces your member to tell you a story about their past behavior.
The second question gives you facts and insights into the member's behavior. The first question gives you assumptions.
Going above and beyond by speaking about problems:
Let's take our previous example and make it even better.
We want to know if our members care about events.
Now, just because they've joined events in the past, doesn't mean they will join our event in the future.
So let's think about what problems an event can solve.
An event can either (a) educate a member about a topic they need to know more about or (b) help a member get to know more people and network.
Let's say that your goal is to create an educational event.
So what can we do to (1) avoid our members from being too nice to us (2) speak about a member's problems and not solutions and (3) avoid having to predict future behaviors?
Just say this "Tell me a story about the last time you wanted to learn more about a subject. What did you do?"
If they mention events - great. If they don't - figure out what helped them in the past.
Then just do that.
5 template questions I always ask:
1 - Can you tell me a story about the last time you had the problem [insert your problem here]?
2 - What was the hardest part of dealing with the problem?
3 - Why was that hard? (Sounds redundant, but trust me the answers are completely different)
4 - How do you solve the problem now?
5 - Why is your solution not perfect?
#4 Who to talk to
Don't worry, I'll keep it short from now on.
As we said in the beginning, member interviews become more important as your community grows and your members' needs start to differ.
You have to take this into account when it comes to who you go to for feedback.
Each one of the problems you want to solve (or assumptions you have) should be targeted at one member persona.
If you ask 20 different people about the same problem, you will get 20 responses.
Keep your assumptions tight and stay focused.
Focus each round of interviews on 1 persona.
#5 What to avoid
I learned these the hard way.
Avoid being too strict
A feedback interview is not a survey with strict pre-defined questions.
Don't get me wrong. Always have a list of questions to ask, but don't be too married to them.
If you feel like you've randomly discovered an interesting problem, dig deeper. You never know what you might find.
Let your members tell their stories. You will discover some gold sometimes.
Avoid making it a feature fest
While you're doing interviews, you and your member will always discover new cool things to do for your community.
If you're not careful, you'll end up with a list of 50 requests from your members. You won't be able to do everything.
A feedback interview should feel like a feedback interview, not like a brainstorming session.
Let your member know that while all ideas are cool, you need to stay focused and you won't be able to do everything.
Don't ignore your member once the interview is done
Feedback interviews are powerful because they make your members feel heard.
If you do discover some gold together, make sure to keep your member in the loop.
Let them know if there are any updates, and always leave room for another feedback session to dig deeper.
#6 A low-effort way for continuous feedback
You know how much I love actionable advice.
Most community builders don't have the time and resources to have 20 feedback sessions a week.
It's unsustainable and will lead to you burning out.
But the truth is that learning about your members is a marathon, not a sprint.
Do as many feedback sessions as you can, but here's my take on it:
1 interview per week is good enough.
Because acting on a little bit of information always beats acting on zero information.
Find the flow that works best for you.
Keep it sustainable, keep it doable, keep it fun.
More community content
How To Reactivate Inactive Community Members
How to be a Good Community Manager: Tips to Kickstart Your Career
4 Steps To Building Member Personas For Online Communities (Better Than Your Marketing Team)
This week's goodbye 👋
I don't know about you, but I'm excited to see what else will happen in the community software space.
Now that the community hype is slowly becoming less extreme, we'll start seeing who the real community-led companies are.
This might not be as interesting to you, but as someone who's building community software myself, I'm so so so excited.
Anyhow - at my core, the community builders and managers are the ones that have my heart.
As always, thank you for what you're doing ❤️
See you next time!
- Kourosh The Waves Guy 🌊