What Your CEO Really Wants To Know About Your Community

Community is a cross-functional force multiplier. This is both a blessing and a curse. It means community can positively impact many different areas of a business. But that also means you have to manage many stakeholders.

Each has different needs and expectations of what community is and what it will deliver. One of the most critical relationships to manage is that with leadership, the CEO, and other senior execs who oversee or fund the community program.

In theory, community managers and CEOs have a lot in common. Community managers are often motivated by people and groups – seeking ways to collaborate and raise each other up. That’s true of CEOs, too. The good ones, at least.

And yet, when it comes to community there’s often a disconnect.

The root cause is how we think about and express the value of community. You may be focused on the health of the community where as your CEO wants to know its business impact.

To close the divide, forget stats like new member counts, event attendance rates, and posts created. Instead, you need to speak of community in terms they use and metrics they care about.

So what does your CEO really want to know about community?

Let’s take a look at what keeps them up at night. A recent study by OpenView and High Alpha reports the top worries of tech CEOs:

The good news is that community can impact almost all of these. Some directly, others in a supporting role.

Community + GTM

GTM execution tops the list of issues for CEOs by some margin. It’s a worry for 76% and has only been increasing in recent years.

The old GTM playbooks are no longer working. Outbound sales, paid ads, SEO – whatever got them to where they are isn’t working for them today. Standing out in ever increasingly competitive markets is tough and expensive.

When it comes to GTM market then, CEOs want cost-efficient methods to drive demand, land new customers, and expand revenues from existing ones.

Community can be a competitive moat for your GTM, but you’re going to need to spell out the contribution it’s making.

That means reporting on community’s impact on revenue and related metrics, including:

• Number and value of community-sourced leads (accounts active in the community before becoming customers)
• Deal size, velocity, and close rates
• Renewal, upsell, and cross-sell rates

To show impact, you can compare community members vs. non-members. However, since you’d expect to see the best accounts active in the community, be sure to compare similar groups. Rather than comparing any non-members, choose those with similar levels of product engagement to those active in the community. That way you can be confident that it was community that really made the difference.

This makes integration of community with your CRM a must, not a nice to have. Also, know that this will bring its own challenges. Once you start reporting such metrics, then your results need to deliver. Plus, you’ll be expected to improve those results over time. So choose metrics wisely and make sure you can sustain your impact.

Community + Product

56% of CEOs are concerned about product execution and the changing needs of customers. Here community plays a supporting but important role. You can’t help Product and Engineering to execute, but you can make sure they’re working on the right things.Community is home for the voice of the customer. It’s where members can vent about your product’s shortcomings, get inspired about what’s possible, and help you decide what to build next.

To show business impact, though, you need to go deeper than the number of ideas submitted or votes cast.If you’re like LEGO, then maybe you can create a program to crowdsource and develop products, like it does with LEGO Ideas. Similarly, open-source software companies can report on PR contributions. For most, though, you’ll instead need to show how you’re helping improve the product development process.

Like Figma, who use community to source product feedback from industry influencers. Or Atlassian, who run early access programs to get feedback on all new features and products through community groups.

Here you can show impact by reporting on:

• Deals closed based on ideas that came through community
• Community-sourced interviews and beta participants
• Community’s impact on product feature adoption and usage

Community + Talent

Finally, 49% of CEOs are worried about Talent: Not having the right talent, their ability to attract the best candidates, or hiring too quickly.Again, this is an area where community can contribute. Open source software companies, like GitLab or Hashicorp, have been known to hire directly from within their communities by recruiting top contributors. Community can run programs encouraging members to refer candidates. Some community teams establish academic programs to help ensure a steady flow of candidates from participating universities. Finally, Employee Resource Groups can help provide feedback to HR and improve an organization’s culture.

The impact of these initiatives can be shown with:

• Number of member hires
• Number of referrals sourced
• ERG impact on employee NPS scores, retention, and reviews on sites like Glassdoor
• Counts of candidates sourced from programs

Ultimately, the disconnect between CEOs and community teams is often a result of the differing perspectives each has on the business. By taking into account the concerns of execs and what they need from community, you can meet them where they are.That means, keeping community health metrics within your team, and instead reporting on the impact your community is having on the business.