Best Ways & Examples of Linking a Community in Your Product

In this blog post, we explore ideas and information on strategies for putting your community front and center and ensuring it gets the attention it deserves.

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For a long time, community has been an afterthought for many companies. Luckily, this is slowly changing as more and more companies understand the short—and long-term value of building a strong community. The next logical step companies are taking is integrating community into their products. In this blog post, I want to highlight how different companies do this and also share a cautionary tale.

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Where to start:

• Help Menu: Including a link to your community in the help menu ensures users can easily access peer support and resources when seeking assistance.
• Under Profile Settings: Adding a community link under profile settings integrates community access into the personal account experience, encouraging user interaction.
• Main Navigation: Featuring a community link in your main navigation bar makes the community easily accessible and highlights its importance to your product.
• During New Customer Onboarding: Introducing your community during new customer onboarding familiarizes users with the support and engagement opportunities available from the start.
• Support Portal: Adding a community link to your support portal provides users with an alternative support avenue, enhancing their overall support experience.

In addition to these locations, make sure to frame the link as a Call To Action. Here are a few ideas on the actual CTA wording:

• Ask the Community
• Join our Community
• Browse Community conversations
• Get peer support in our Community
• Join discussions in Community Forum
• Join the Slack community
• Connect with peers in Discord

Linking from your product to your community

Often linking from your product is the first step on the journey to fully integrate your product and community. A simple link in your main menu, or even underneath the help menu, can already help in driving more people towards your community. 

Thus giving them a place to ask questions, find answers, and connect with other users. In turn this will help your company reduce support cost, have less customer turnover, and build stronger brand loyalty. It's an easy thing to do and brings a lot of value to both the community and the product.

Atlassian has an "Ask the Community" menu item in the help menu of each of their products. Naming this item "Ask the Community" instead of just saying "Atlassian Community" also helps prime customers to see this as a place for them to interact.

Miro lists the Miro community listed as part of their Learning Center menu. Easy to find, easy to use, and once again priming the customer to engage with the community by asking a question, not just reading.

And similar behavior we find in the dbt cloud app where we find not one but 2 community links in their help menu. One link towards their Slack community and another to their community forum.

And just to clarify the power of community, watch this short video of their CEO explaining how their Slack community drives 80% of their sales leads. Keep in mind that just linking your community won’t help drive sales, you’ll also need to foster, support, and grow your community. But if you do this right your community will be a powerful channel for growth.

Fully embedding your community in your product

The next step is fully embedding your community into your product. Having your community be a feature of your product can make the emotional connection of your customers with your product much stronger. Thus building longer term relations that create more value for both your company and your customers.

GitHub has discussions as part of its product. Every code repository in GitHub has a discussion section where contributors and users can ask questions, post updates, provide answers, and connect. Given the focus of GitHub on supporting open-source initiatives this is a massive value add, as it allows to keep everything surrounding the code (documentation, code, community) in a single place.

Even it's own community is using GitHub as their community platform.

But let’s be honest: having your community be fully integrated into your product might simply not make sense. For Github it does so because many of their customers work together with external contributors and need an easy way to communicate and collaborate.

If you want to integrate your community into your product as a feature be sure to:

• Treat your community as a major stakeholder, involve them in every product decision.
• Make sure it makes sense, nothing is worse than a feature you’ve built but nobody uses.
• Give it a prime spot in your product, don’t hide it.

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The cautionary tale of Duolingo removing its community aspect

After reading the above it probably sounds like a great idea to integrate your community more with your product.

But there is a catch! Once you've built out this bond between the community and the product it's not easy to remove. And if you want to make changes to it you'll need to involve your community heavily, otherwise it might backfire dramatically.

I would recommend you to read this article on what happened when DuoLingo removed their renowned, community driven, sentence discussions from their product. So be aware that once you add community into your product they are very much key stakeholders and need to be treated accordingly.

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I wish you all the best in unlocking the full power and potential of your community!