Customer Showcase January 2024: Sara from Wellthy

saramaloney

Hi! I’m Sara, the Manager of Community and Content Programs at Wellthy.

Wellthy has a Care Team that helps family caregivers tackle the logistical and administrative tasks that come with caregiving such as scheduling doctor appointments, researching assisted living facilities, and appealing insurance denials.

Wellthy Community is a private space for our members and anyone in their circle that they invite. Family caregivers come here to share stories, advice, and hope. Most commonly, members of Wellthy have access to our services at no cost through their employer. Our community’s goals are to provide members with a safe space to share, and drive members to create more Care Projects with our Care Team.

We launched Wellthy Community in May 2022, and now have over 4,000 members. In 2023 saw the following stats:

• 100%+ member growth in both 2022 and 2023
• 10% of members log in each month
• 8% of members logging in contribute a post

What’s worked well for us

CTA Widgets and Moderation Messages
CTA widgets and moderation messages are incredibly beneficial in directing members’ attention where we want them to focus. Here are a few ways we’ve used them:

Displaying the breadth of ways we can service our members is critical to tying Community to our business metrics. We regularly rotate out this CTA which sits on our homepage to promote events.

We recently launched a product line that one client, Hilton, was really excited about. We put a widget on the homepage for about 3 months that only showed to those in the "Hilton employees" role, promoting the new service to them.

We use Moderation Messages in various places to prompt users to take a specific action.

Virtual Support Groups
One way we’ve gotten a lot of community signups is through offering virtual support groups that you must log in to Community to register for. While I don’t expect other communities to replicate this tactic exactly, I think it’s a good reminder that using exclusivity to grow membership is huge.

User Spotlight
Every month, I interview a Community Moderator about their personal and professional experience in the caregiving world. The blog is published on wellthy.com, but we use the user spotlight widget to highlight one impactful quote so that upon logging in, users immediately feel connected. Our Community Moderators are the lifeblood of our community – they ensure that every question receives a response and offer advice from an expert's perspective that you can’t get in other caregiving forums.

Care Clips
Everyone loves video, right? Our Community Moderators record short videos detailing how to handle very specific caregiving scenarios. These are another huge driver of community signups because you must be logged into the platform to access them. Here’s one of my favorites:

https://vimeo.com/766927903?share=copy

Bi-weekly Roundup Emails
Every two weeks, Wellthy members receive an email containing recent Community discussions. These have become critical to our growth strategy as we often see 10x the number of signups on Roundup days than non-Roundup days.

What hasn’t worked

1. Manufactured posts – I quickly learned that authenticity was huge and googling “What are top questions caregivers have?” would not cut it. Not even ChatGPT could help! We’ve begun to rely more on seed question asks to gather organic content because authenticity is so important to our members. These pieces of content tend to be our most highly engaged with.
2. Ask the Experts events – this one broke my heart; I am a big fan of Ask the Experts events and have seen them be successful in other communities, but they didn’t take off in ours. This is likely because we have our Moderators available every day, so there was nothing unique being offered. In 2024, we’re going to experiment with fireside chats as a way to replace these.
3. “Fun” community tactics – family caregivers often come to Wellthy in a state of distress and overwhelm. As such, many common “fun” tactics have not worked in our community including gamification strategies, scavenger hunts, and silly discussions. Knowing your audience and what will land with them is more important than trying to check off “best practice” boxes.

In 2024, we plan to implement custom forum pages across our site, expand on our virtual support groups and fireside chats, and develop a more robust and targeted email strategy to drive community engagement. I have dreams of starting a podcast featuring our Community Moderators sharing advice with family caregivers, but that may have to wait for now :)

I hope you can take away one or two things from this showcase to help grow your community!

BrendanP

Hey @saramaloney thanks for sharing this! I am curious - what would you say has been the biggest surprised learning you and your team/organization have had since launching this community?

saramaloney

@BrendanP We initially had a lot of concerns that people wouldn't want to share such personal details on a forum they get access to through their employer. We have not found that to be a problem! We do encourage people to email me in case they want to post anonymously, but that's probably happened less than 10 times.

Also, when I interviewed members asking why they choose not to post on community, most reported that they only posted if they felt they had value to add. They didn't want to only post "me too" when they were going through the same issues as someone else. That has changed our thinking around what metrics to look at as defining success.