This is part 2 of Zapnito's "The Complete Community Launch Playbook". Please follow the links below for the whole series:

• Introduction
• Launch
• Post Launch

Check The Complete Community Launch Deck, with a week-by-week guide.

Pre-Launch 

• Strategy - 2 weeks

To get community-led growth right, you need to guide your community members through the right knowledge and connections, at the right time. To create these engaging and effective Pathways and bring your whole organization on board, its vital that your community is built with a clear brief.

Completing each of the strategic foundations in this step-by-step guide will help get up and running faster and ensure you focus your time and energy on impact. Need help? Use our Strategy Generator to quickly create a 9 page inspiration document and leap from blank page to plan of action.

1. Define customer lifecycle impact priorities

Community projects have the greatest long-term success when they seens as integral to your company’s overarching strategy and mission. Narrowing down which stages in the customer lifecycle need optimization will make sure your community creates the right experience for the right people. A successful community can support the full customer lifecycle, so it’s important to begin by selecting where impact will be most valued by the rest of your business before building out an end-to-end experience.

Desired business outcomes

• Increased brand awareness - Acquisition
• New sales pipeline - Acquisition
• Increased product activation - Adoption
• Support ticket deflection - Adoption / Retention
• Increased customer retention - Retention
• Increased customer upsells - Retention
• Improved product feedback - Retention  / Advocacy
• Improved product ideation - Retention  / Advocacy
• Increased NPS - Retention / Advocacy
• Increased referrals - Advocacy

2. Define community purpose - practice / product

Selecting customer lifecycle impact priorities should identify who your initial community strategy will be designed around, e.g. prospects, new customers, existing customers, superusers or partners. This will also prescribe whether your desired impact will come from members sharing knowledge about your product or about a specific area of interest. 

Community of Product: 

Moving away from traditional support forums, FAQs, and knowledge bases, many modern customer communities aim to enhance customer retention. These communities offer a platform for customers to exchange product tips, celebrate their successes, and provide feedback to shape future product improvements. This not only alleviates support challenges but also fosters valuable knowledge sharing and connections among customers, which they might not find elsewhere.

Community of Practice:

In addition to helping customers maximize their product use, many brands are now building communities focused on sharing professional insights or interests related to their brand. Offering a platform for ongoing personal or professional development can set your brand apart from competitors and open doors to potential upselling opportunities, such as exclusive content or access to expert advice.

3. Define community size

The size of your online community has a significant impact on how it functions, its reach, and the level of engagement it can achieve. To estimate the ideal size for your initial community, it's important to think about your goals, available resources, and the potential value of having groups for different stages of your customer journey interact and share knowledge. The size of your community will grow over time, but we recommend starting by focussing on your most responsive and engaged customers or partners first. This will create examples of ideal community behaviors that new members can follow. Here are some essential considerations to shape your decision: 

Audience understanding: 

Talk to the people you’re trying to engage and learn who they would like to engage with most.

Available resources: 

Be realistic about how much time your business has to dedicate to community management. We recommend a minimum of 10 hours per week is dedicated to driving engagement, at least for the first months of your community launch. Team members with existing relationships with your ideal community members are best placed to create high value and frequency engagement.

Moderation capacity: 

Assess your ability to effectively moderate and manage the community to ensure a positive experience for all members. 

Member Quality: 

Focus on attracting and retaining high-quality members who align with the values of your community rather than immediate scale.

4. Create ideal community member persona(s)

With a clear understanding of which groups of people your community strategy will focus on engaging, an ideal community member persona provides an essential brief for the rest of your strategy. These personas document the institutional needs of your target members, allowing you to tailor initiatives to better meet these needs. Here are the essential elements of an ideal community member persona: 

Persona Name: 

This is a fictional name given to represent your ideal community member. Giving your persona a name humanizes the characteristics you're identifying. It makes it easier to discuss and understand the persona and helps in empathizing with their needs and motivations. 

Profession/Demographics: 

This includes details about the person's job, age, location, gender, education, and any other relevant demographics. These details should be backed by research and only included if they help create more accurate targeting. Understanding your community members' demographics helps you tailor your content, tone, and engagement strategies to better align with their daily routines and interests. 

Key Pain Points: 

These are the specific challenges or problems that your persona faces in their professional or personal life. Identifying pain points allows you to address the real issues your community members are dealing with. By solving their problems, you can provide value and encourage active participation. 

Reasons Why They Would Join a Community: 

These are the motivations or goals that would lead your persona to become a member of your community. Understanding the reasons behind joining helps you align your community's offerings with what members expect to gain. It ensures that your community is attractive and relevant to your target audience.

5. Map member pathways

Mapping out the different stages of the Community-Led Growth process gives you a clear plan for how your community can benefit your business. It helps you choose the right platform that can adapt as your community grows. 

When starting, focus on actions that provide immediate value to members and align with your current business priorities. For instance, if you're mainly concerned about keeping customers, prioritize creating a smaller, exclusive community for paying customers over a larger, open one for the wider market. Here are the key elements of a detailed Pathway plan:

Pathway Owner: 

The Pathway Owner is the individual or team within your company responsible for overseeing the management and success of a specific pathway within the online community. Designating a Pathway Owner ensures accountability and clear responsibility for the pathway's development and effectiveness. This person or team will drive actions to achieve the intended goals and impact. 

Target Impact: 

Target Impact refers to the specific, measurable improvements or outcomes you aim to achieve through the key actions within the pathway. It defines the ultimate goal of the pathway. Clearly defining the target impact sets a clear direction for your pathway. It ensures that all efforts are aligned with achieving tangible business results, making it easier to measure the pathway's success. 

Indicators of Impact: 

Indicators of Impact are measurable outcomes or metrics that serve as evidence of progress toward achieving the target impact for the pathway. They are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you track success. These indicators provide ongoing feedback on the pathway's effectiveness. Monitoring them helps you understand whether you are moving in the right direction and where adjustments may be needed. 

Educate Step: 

The "Educate" step within a pathway involves members accessing knowledge or resources within the community to help them reach a specific goal or solve a problem. Providing an educational experience is crucial for empowering members. It equips them with the information they need to progress, building trust and increasing the chances of their continuing to follow your recommendations. 

Engage Step: 

The "Engage" step entails members participating in shared experiences or activities with other community members. This fosters a sense of belonging and collaboration. Engagement is vital for building a vibrant community. When members interact and share experiences, it enhances their connection to the community, making them more likely to deepen their relationship with your brand. 

Exchange Step:

 The "Exchange" step involves members sharing feedback, insights, or progress toward a specific goal with the community. It's a valuable form of interaction. Member feedback and shared progress contribute to the community's growth and improvement. It also opens an authentic dialog, allowing you to gauge their intent to buy or general satisfaction.

Elevate Step: 

The "Elevate" step enables members to access experiences or resources that help them reach new goals or advance in their journey. This provides opportunities for members to grow and allows you to create compelling and timely calls to action to influence revenue.

Key Pathways

By understanding and implementing the above elements within your pathways, you can create a well-structured and effective user journey that guides members toward specific goals while achieving measurable business impact. Although your community strategy may be focussed on one specific Pathway, creating a blueprint for end-to-end community-led growth will help bring the rest of your company to buy into the longer term opportunities that your community will bring.

Acquisition Pathway

The Acquisition pathway guides your members through the process of discovering your company and understanding the distinct value you offer as a brand. Helping prospects to learn, collaborate and network with peers is a proven way to keep your brand front of mind and shorten sales cycles.

Your community provides an opportunity to quickly build trust at the start of every new customer relationship by engaging them with community activities. The stickier you make this experience, the more you’ll be able to educate potential customers and keep your brand front of mind.

Adoption Pathway

The Adoption pathway gives you the structure to create habit-forming educational experiences that help members get more value out of your product or service. This pathway should be thought of as an onboarding experience, providing structured learning to help members solve their biggest challenges.

The purpose of this Pathway is to find a repeatable, methodical way of highlighting the value the community can provide in relation to their needs. Many companies create knowledge bases to teach customers about the problem they help solve. 86% of people say they would stay loyal to a business that welcomes and educates them after they’ve bought.

Retention Pathway

The Retention pathway guides members from experiencing the value your company provides to then experience repeated successes through the relationship with your company. 

This pathway gives you the structure to create unparalleled value and loyalty by connecting customers and brand experts to support each other, share knowledge and reduce reliance on customer success teams. A community is the best way to keep customers frequently engaged and build a better product or service with their input.

Advocacy Pathway

The Advocacy pathway is all about identifying and guiding your most engaged members toward sharing their successes and expertise with others. Exclusive experiences act as an incentive for members to contribute content, share reviews or invite peers to join the community. With the right key actions in place, this pathway can help dramatically reduce the marketing spend needed to drive awareness of your products and service.

It closes the growth loop and gives you the structure to scale new member growth and brand awareness. If your community is providing members value at each other stage of the flywheel, you have all the foundations in place to leverage the loyalty you’ve generated.

Backing - 1 week

1. ROI forecast

Measuring the impact of community efforts is important to show how they benefit the company and get everyone on the same page. But, sometimes, different leaders have different views. Some might see community as a "nice to have" instead of a critical tool for growing revenue. To get everyone on board, we need to set clear goals and ways to measure progress. 

In simple terms, a successful community-led growth strategy boosts direct customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is the total money a customer spends on your products or services throughout their entire relationship with your business. If CLV is high, it means the customer is valuable because they spend more and are likely to stay loyal. Less obvious but equally valuable indirect customer lifetime value is also unlocked by community. By transforming passive customers into essential participants and cocreators, their feedback and data create the building blocks of future products, services and experiences. 

Your priority Pathways can act as a guide to forecast how your community where improvements in your customer lifecycle will influence customer lifetime value. At Zapnito, we’ve found that the right combination of strategy and platform can create the following business impact.

• Acquisition - 50% increase in likelihood to buy as an active community member
• Adoption - 40% increase in engagement with educational content
• Retention - 30% decrease in likelihood to churn as an active community member
• Advocacy - 21+ increase in NPS score as an active community member

Using these benchmarks to calculate the potential upside by investing in community is a key step to achieving the backing of key stakeholders. 

2. Present your Strategy to key stakeholders

With a strategy focused on driving measurable business impact in place, it's important to bring the rest of your organization onboard. This will help ringfence budget and resources to deliver long-term success. Involving key stakeholder can also take your initial ideas to new levels. 

Inspire your business to act: 

Create a persuasive argument for the importance of Community-Led Growth to establish a competitive advantage and highly the direct and indirect customer lifetime value that can be achieved.

Clearly Communicate Opportunities: 

Effectively convey the benefits of community-led initiatives to your stakeholders, ensuring they understand how the community aligns with departmental goals like Customer Success, Marketing, Product, and Sales, demonstrating its contribution to their objectives. 

Address Concerns and Questions: 

Anticipate and answer any stakeholder concerns, covering topics like measurement, ROI, resource needs, essential platform features, and platform selection.

Get buy-in from customers: 

A good way to get useful feedback on your community strategy is by asking a small, trusted group of customers to review it. You can motivate and reward them for their input to validate it meets the needs of your most important stakeholders—your community members.

Get resource commitments: 

Before moving ahead to select your ideal online community platform, it's important you get assurances from key stakeholders that resources can be made available to manage and grow the community. This could fall under the responsibilities of a single team member, of a single department, or require collaboration across multiple teams. Outlining where the project will need support to create content, manage users and moderate engagement is crucial, particularly where your community is first launching.

For more information on how to communicate the benefits of community led growth to individual departments, read our guide.

Platform selection - 3 weeks

1. Start procurement and budgeting

In many organizations, collaborating with the Procurement team is an essential process to select potential vendors and authorize contractual agreements. Securing backing from key stakeholders across the organization will give you greater control of the process to ensure the platform you select fully supports your strategy.

Follow these steps and you’ll be able to leverage your procurement team’s expertise, while maintaining a key voice in the decision making process.

Establish a partnership with procurement: 

Gain a clear understanding of your procurement team’s processes and clearly communicate the goals and needs of your strategy so they understand your technical requirements.

Define community management budget: 

When defining your budget for a community project, it's essential to consider more than just platform costs. Allocate resources for content creation and management time as well. We recommend dedicating a minimum of 10 hours per week to effective community management, as this commitment plays a crucial role in nurturing engagement, moderating discussions, and ensuring the community's health. By accounting for these elements in your budget, you can ensure the sustained growth and success of your community project.

Discovery: 

Create a list of key questions to compare different solutions by and define budget limitations based on your ROI estimations. These example questions below could help both the community manager and the procurement team evaluate community platforms thoroughly and ensure they align with the organization's needs and budget:

• How user-friendly is the platform for community members to navigate and engage with content? 
• What customization options does the platform offer to match our brand's look and feel? 
• Can we easily create and manage different types of content? 
• How does the platform support member onboarding and engagement strategies? 
• What analytics and reporting tools are available to track community engagement and measure success? 
• What is the total cost of ownership, including licensing, setup, maintenance, and any additional fees? 
• Does the platform offer scalable pricing options as our community grows? 
• What is the vendor's track record in terms of reliability, security, and data protection? 
• Are there any hidden costs or limitations that may impact our budget? 
• What level of customer support and training does the vendor provide, and is it included in the pricing? 

Define roles: 

Establishing how you will collaborate with your procurement team and other departments to select the ideal platform will ensure you can confidently move ahead with booking meetings and negotiations. For example Product Development could utilize valuable feedback and ideas for product improvement, ultimately reducing support costs and meeting customer needs. Marketing can amplify your community's reach and integrate existing content and events. Your Web Team can help enhance the community’s visibility and integration into the digital customer experience and shared performance metrics. 

Creating a RACI to define which individuals are responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed throughout the platform selection process creates maximum clarity. 

2. Select platform requirements

Ensuring the essential elements below align with your community-led growth strategy is critical for long-term success, as it minimizes the need for costly migrations and ensures that your community remains flexible and customizable as it scales. 

Criteria for assessment

Member Engagement: 

Your platform’s member experience will directly impact engagement and retention. A platform that offers a user-friendly, intuitive, and personalized experience can keep members active and satisfied, driving the success of your community. From SSO (Single Sign-On) to Courses, it's important to think about how your platform will guide members through the Pathways you have designed in the most frictionless way possible. As your community grows over time, you may need to create new knowledge sharing experiences. Selecting a platform that gives you a wide range of member engagement features out of the box gives you the flexibility to adapt to changing member needs over time.

Admin Control: 

Admin control enables you to tailor the community to your strategy. It ensures that you can efficiently manage content, moderate discussions, and customize features, ultimately aligning the platform with your goals. To establish your community as a knowledge sharing hub, it's also important that it matches the look and feel of other branded channels. The success of your community will rely on good management, so having a breadth of tools to customize and manage your community is equally important as the end user experience.

Data Ownership: 

Ownership of member data ensures that you have control over valuable community insights and can use them to benefit your strategy. To prove the impact your community has on your business, it's vital that you can easily track metrics like engagement and growth, analyze member behavior, and connect community activity to business outcomes. To help you spend more time on community management and less on analysis, intuitive reports and dashboards are key requirements of a community platform. 

Security: 

Enterprise-grade security is essential to protect both member data and the integrity of the community. A platform with robust security measures safeguards against data breaches and maintains the trust of your community members. is crucial for maintaining trust and complying with privacy regulations. It’s important that the platform you select clearly prioritizes security as hard work to build trust with members can quickly be undone by data breaches or spam attacks.

Integrations: 

Integrations with other tools and platforms streamline workflows and enhance the community's functionality. They allow you to connect your community to essential systems, improving overall efficiency and effectiveness. Integration with your company’s CRM is important to maintain a central single source of truth and also make clear connections between community activity and customer lifetime value. 

Mobile: 

Mobile accessibility is vital to ensure your members can participate in your community from any device, at any time, any where. A platform with a responsive and user-friendly mobile interface ensures that members can engage with your community on the go, expanding its reach and impact. 

Expert support:

Expert support ensures that you have access to knowledgeable and responsive assistance when facing challenges or seeking guidance. It is invaluable for troubleshooting technical issues, optimizing community performance, and aligning your platform with your strategic goals. Reliable expert support can significantly reduce downtime and enhance the overall success of your community by providing the assistance needed to overcome obstacles and make informed decisions.

3. Finalize pricing and terms

Selecting a platform vendor that is committed to ongoing growth and supporting your community is crucial to success. Before choosing your platform vendor, it’s also important to get sign-off from key stakeholders. Following these steps will ensure you have all the information you need to be able to quickly begin onboarding and building once contracts are signed:

Custom Branding: 

Consult with your branding team for brand guidelines and web property visual expectations. Find a satisfactory balance between brand aesthetics and community functionality. 

UI/UX: 

Align the community's appearance with your brand and target audience. Consider both out-of-the-box designs and custom creations. 

Information Architecture: 

Start with a broad content structure and adapt based on user interactions. Ensure your community structure mirrors the expected volume of engagement. Research existing structures in your company and align the community accordingly. 

Identity Provider Integration:

Ensure your community platform can integrate with your organization's identity provider for sign-in functionalities. 

Data Migrations: 

Plan content and user account migrations if switching platforms. Determine what data needs transferring and how it fits into the new platform's structure. 

Consider Long-Term Costs: 

Look beyond initial costs and consider long-term expenses, including renewal rates and potential add-ons. Ensure the pricing is sustainable.

Understand Support and Maintenance: 

Clarify the vendor's support and maintenance policies. Know what's included in the base price and what might incur additional charges.

Meet your support team: 

Particularly when you launch, transferring your strategy into an ideal community experience will require platform training and guidance. Establishing a good working relationship with your account managers before signing is often a step that companies skip.

Assess cultural fit and communication: 

Maintain open communication with the vendor throughout the negotiation process to understand how the company communicates, supports its customers and maintains alignment. 

Once you’re happy and contracts are signed, the real work can begin.

Click here to check the third step towards your full community launch - the launch phase.