🧭 Striving for Optimal Community Impact through Team Alignment 🎯

Kirstie Macfarlane

In a recent discussion, we emphasized the significance of aligning with stakeholders and company objectives. This holds particular relevance for those venturing into community building, as this alignment proves pivotal for career progression and garnering internal community support.

While understanding the "why" is crucial, the process of "how" to achieve alignment is equally paramount.

Navigating Alignment: A Step-by-Step Guide

Start with Your Stakeholders

Commence by identifying key stakeholders, extending beyond immediate superiors. Consider departments integral to community health such as Marketing, Support, Success, and Product. Pinpoint aspects that could potentially be influenced positively. For instance:

• Marketing: Advocates, case studies, and marketing qualified leads.
• Support: Streamlining processes, reducing repetitive questions, ticket deflection.
• Success: Enhancing customer onboarding, satisfaction, and retention.
• Product: Gathering product feedback and requests, addressing customer concerns, sharing roadmap updates and release notes.

Adapt these goals to fit your community's purpose, and make sure they align with what your community is meant to achieve. Take a gradual approach, addressing one or two goals before expanding.

Once identified, establish key metrics for measurement, transitioning from conceptual ideas to tangible, measurable outcomes.

Let’s Chat with the Community Members

An often-overlooked step is engaging with community members directly. A listening tour proves invaluable in understanding diverse perspectives beyond the loudest voices. Identify engaged members through content consumption, community tool interactions, or recommendations from customer success and sales teams.

Clarify the purpose of discussions from the outset, focusing on member interests and motivations rather than immediate solutions. Questions to cover may include:

• Primary concerns for their role: Understanding motivations to improve performance.
• Why a community space matters: Exploring the appeal of connecting with like-minded individuals.
• Motivations for putting in their best effort: Uncovering intrinsic or extrinsic motivators.

Conducting a minimum of 25 interviews ensures a comprehensive understanding of community motivations.

Creating an Alignment Check

This step serves as the intersection between stakeholder priorities and member aspirations, culminating in measurable business outcomes. Align stakeholder goals with community motivations, ensuring a balanced approach.

For instance, if support aims to reduce ticket numbers, align it with the community's desire to share knowledge. This synergy impacts support metrics positively. Identify misalignments to navigate potential challenges; adjust either stakeholder priorities or community motivations for better cohesion.

To facilitate this alignment journey, a template is provided below. Utilize it to identify and bridge gaps, ultimately creating a vibrant and harmonious community.

Embark on your alignment journey armed with these insights. We trust the provided template will prove instrumental in cultivating a thriving community.

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This post was originally published in 2022 but has been revised and updated from its previous edition to ensure accuracy and relevance.