Maximizing User Contribution: Let Them Do The Job [CLI Fall Mag]

Community must be core to a business's value proposition engine, not a casual feature.?

[Originally published on the CLI Fall Magazine, featuring other articles from experts like Rachel Happe, Todd Nilson, Rebecca Marshburn, Carolyn Zick, Deb Shell, and others in one edition! ??. You can download the full magazine at mycli.co through your MyCLI account]

Here is a simple yet often overlooked premise for community: for it to be effective, its participants must do "the work" that creates its intrinsic value.?

In a business context, that means enabling users and customers to create value for each other. Businesses known to leverage community for success understand that user participation is fundamental to enhancing value creation.?

From Hubspot, Waze, and Duolingo to Taylor Swift, they enable their people to get the job done, turning customers, users, and fans into participants.

How do they do it??

In this article, we will review the importance of adding your users and customers to your value creation engine and introduce the User Contribution Journey and Lifecycle frameworks to help you enhance customer experience and success.

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Key Premise: Let Them Do The Job

Clayton Christensen's Theory of Jobs to Be Done states that we "hire" a product to get a job done. If successful, we hire it again. If not, we "fire" that product and look for a different solution.

Translating this idea to community: if your business incorporates community as a solution, you must activate your customers' participation to solve the problem defined in your brand promise (your business' raison d'etre).?

In practical terms, people participate in delivering your value proposition by contributing. Their job is to create value. Yours is to enable high-value interactions between them.?

For a community to yield concrete results and be relevant for customer success, its operations must be intricately connected to the business core value proposition.

The most robust business-based communities (or community-driven businesses) grow based on this premise: the "Job to Be Done" must be done by your users.?

Contribution is relevant to customer success when it:

1) Is aligned with your business core value proposition. This way, community isn't a distraction, nor a fancy feature, but a key asset to your business success.?

2) Happens systemically. Users don't solve their own problems but participate in a system that will eventually yield value back (the more they contribute, the more value they gain);

3) Builds relationships, not transactions. People interact consistently. Eventually, your product becomes the excuse (place or proposition) people meet around. What matters is the interactions around the table.?

If classic community building is about designing consistent interactions to build trust, in business that means designing products like relationship-building systems: between customers and your brand, and customer-to-customer (C2C).

When following the three pillars above, User Contribution creates a self-fulfilling community prophecy, meaning an abundance-minded space where your gifts keep on giving.

In most communities, the more people contribute, the more they become relevant, gain value, and return for more. Allowing users to contribute should enhance their big gains, leading to ultimate customer success.

The specific role participants play, as well as how much and how often they interact will vary depending on your business model. People can contribute in various ways, from writing an article to answering each other's questions or adding new people to your user base (or community). But in most cases, community means efficiency.

For a quick example of a templated business model and its unique type of contribution stemming from its value proposition:

Knowledge-Sharing Communities (e.g., VC Portfolio, Fellowships, Forums)

Key Value Proposition: Accelerate time to learning / gaining knowledge / solving problems

Key Contribution: Share knowledge. How? Answer/ask questions, host a workshop, participate in events, have 1-on-1s, and other forms of interaction.

Key Gain: The more people engage, the more likely they are to gain (fast) value when needed

If you zoom out, this model is similar to communities around service marketplaces and product development, where the key value proposition is optimization: to accelerate time to solution sourcing, be it gaining knowledge, finding a service provider, or identifying a bug.

The universal value proposition of most communities is related to optimization through participation: reducing the amount of time and effort spent by users in finding solutions. Your responsibility is to define wisely how users can contribute.?

Getting Technical: Community Business Model

Whatever contribution means in your business, the premise remains: let them get the job done.?

Borrowing the visualization from the Business Model Canvas (BMC): Customers must be present on the canvas's right and left sides.?

The right side represents the usual aspects of growth and marketing, most often associated with community: our customers, where can we find them, and how do they engage with our business (Customer Segments, Channels, and Customer Relationships, respectively).?

Since advocacy is usually the most desired outcome of community strategy, many businesses place community under marketing teams, neglecting that growth is an outcome of community as part of product and operations.

The left side represents product development and operations: what we need to deliver value, how we do it, and whom we can partner with to make this process more efficient (Key Resources, Key Activities, and Key Partners).

The right side summarizes Revenue Streams. The left, the business' Cost Structure.

Achieving customer success through community requires customers to take ownership and contribute to delivering your business' value proposition. That means adding your customers to the product/operational side of the canvas. This idea might sound counterintuitive to traditional business concepts for various reasons, but primarily because it challenges the stereotypical notion of a customer as someone whose only task is to pay and get their problem solved by your team. By moving them from a passive position of solely "value consumers" to an active role of "value creators," we're also adding customers to our Cost Structure since community operations require investment in infrastructure and interaction design.

Building a community around a business requires getting comfortable with breaking the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room, allowing customers to see through your operations and understand how to create value with your business.

In other words, people are likely to engage, contribute, and interact with others precisely because, in doing so, they are reaping the benefits of being part of said community.?

The success of a business-based community relies on your ability to carve a clear path for users to create value for each other in alignment with your core value proposition. More importantly, it is about successfully communicating how they gain value from contribution (i.e., why they should create value).?

Ultimately, community optimizes operations by leveraging the collective to source solutions, identify bugs, and solve problems.?

Thriving communities are abundance-generating machines that enhance value creation and accelerate its delivery. The ultimate success of which is efficiency.?

Practical Learnings from Waze, Duolingo and Hubspot

I spoke with key community leaders at the aforementioned in order to get applicable examples for this article. Each conversation was worth its entire article, if not a book - and be sure I’ll keep sharing the gems learned from them in future content.?

For now, here are a few insights that encapsulate the ideas shared above.

Make it Relevant and Accessible

As defined by Vivian Reidler , who spent eight years designing a product-based community at Duolingo , "community contribution has to move a needle to the business".?

In the case of the language learning platform valued at $6.2B, it all started from a mission that rallied the community: to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available.

Reidler said, "Everybody who joined the community agreed to this and wanted to help. What Duolingo did, since the beginning, is enable them to help."?

Duolingo's early success wouldn't have been possible without the contributions of several users who helped them to expand their course offerings into multiple languages.

In her words: "[Users] are not your employees; you can't tell them what to do. You need to have a system that encourages them [to get the job done]."?

Her team designed an incubator program: a community-driven effort in which user teams could create specific courses leveraging the company's existing template and platform.?

According to Reidler, the business "needed the community to keep the courses accurate and rich." As a team, they built a system that enabled and allowed the community to run with it. "We tried to stay out of the way," she shared.

Duolingo's community architecture evolved as the company grew: whereas at the beginning, top contributors were found in forums where users would help each other learn their own language, today, the company boasts a more complex system to spark participation based on both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations - the specifics of which is worth a whole new article.

A key factor of success for Duolingo's community efforts is based on the fact that the Community Team OKRs were directly aligned to the main business core metrics, a trait shared by another of my favorite examples of community and product integration: Waze.?

Make it Measurable and Indispensable

At Waze, the Communities Team's OKRs stem directly from the company mission and OKRs. Following a squad methodology, the Community Team's presence is spread across the entire organization, which enables them to embed community in all business operations and leverage it for success. The community-driven navigation app boasts one of the most robust community operations and architecture I've ever encountered.

Their Global Head of Community, Hila Roth , states that "community must follow the company's mission". With a data-science background, Roth was able to leverage data to validate how community efforts led to business success.?

She made community indispensable by proving its impact in product development and by enhancing the quality solutions provided to users (e.g., community-led efforts significantly reduced the time it took to identify bugs, compared to in-house testing).

Roth grew her team from one to over fifty people and, to this date, they manage thousands of active contributors organized in a complex and effective system that stems from product development to cover multiple roles and layers of commitment, from map editors to beta-testers and localizers.

As product, CX, community, and operations teams, our job is to carve a clear path that enables users and customers to get the job done. It is crucial to have a data-driven approach while ensuring their contribution stays relevant to the business value proposition.?

Make it Clear and Delightful

Starting from the stark simplicity of the obvious: to get people to do something, you must have clarity on what you want them to do. The non-obvious part is that you must decide how to do it - which widely depends on your business model and participant profile.

In conversation with Hubspot's Christina Garnett, EMBA , she highlighted data's importance in providing choice when carving those paths. According to her, customers have different needs, capabilities, and preferences for demonstrating love. Using the analogy of Gary Chapman's five love languages, she highlighted the importance of understanding how people prefer taking action and contributing within your community.

As shared in this article : "If swag doesn't make you feel valued, each subsequent gift has diminishing returns, and customer love turns cold."

An advocacy expert, Garnett identified the various ways customers prefer to demonstrate love, breaking down the most likely (and effective paths) to make contributions simple and possible to her top users.

For her, it is about meeting them where they are and providing them with choice - while keeping it relevant to your business.

The key to her success is a data-driven approach to identifying the multiple shapes that customer love could take.

The more you know about your users, the easier it will be to identify critical ways they prefer to interact, communicate, and contribute to your business.

Another underappreciated element of clarity is onboarding. According to @Greg Daine's ChurnRX report on 23 Ways to Reduce Churn in 2023 , customer lifetime is 2.4 times higher for those who chose onboarding vs. those who waived it. In the same report, Daine establishes that integration can double customer lifetime commitment.

Onboarding helps reduce the time your customers spend trying to understand how to navigate and make the most of your community.?

Next Steps: Introducing User Contribution Journey and Lifecycle

Let’s go over key steps to activate user contribution. Quick recap:?

When you design community interactions that are aligned with your key value proposition, these are also likely to be relevant to your users. By contributing, they create more value to themselves and others within the community.

In the next articles we will explore evidence-based tactics to delegate value creation to your customers, moving them from audience to protagonists of their own problem-solving journey by implementing the frameworks of User Contribution Journey and Lifecycle.

User Contribution Journey (UCJ) is a framework for activating value creation through users. Designing it helps a clear path for people to grow within your community (through participation and contribution), from new to top contributors.?

In sequence, we’ll brush through the concept of User Contribution Lifecycle (UCL), a framework that stems from the UCJ, extending its data through time to understand and predict the time elapsed from the moment someone joins your community as a new member to when they become a top contributor, and finally to when they "retire" and open space for new contributors.

Understanding your business’ UCJ and UCL helps you optimize and enhance value creation through community, allowing people to invest in their own support system.?Here are a few questions that must be answered to get your team aligned and started:

• What is your key value proposition??
• In what ways can your community participate in its delivery??
• How can you make it easy for your users to contribute?

Referencing Chapter 17 in Hacking Communities : "It is your responsibility as a community builder to create communication systems that build and maintain trust while providing tools to empower people to help your community grow." Our job is to enable people to grow our community and to grow, themselves, in the process.