Answering questions and fostering genuine connections and trust between members are often key community goals. This is precisely where "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) sessions and "Office Hours" prove invaluable, transforming impersonal digital spaces into vibrant hubs of humans.
Easy to produce
A key advantage of AMAs and Office Hours is their ease of production. Unlike webinars with detailed presentations, these events require minimal preparation. Typically, one or two experts partner with a community host for a dedicated hour of responding live to questions. There may be minor follow-up work to track down questions left once during the live program. It's also a good idea to prepare a handful of starter questions should the audience start shy and reluctant to ask questions.
Connect with people
AMAs and Office Hours are about direct, unfiltered access and community members learning from each other. The live display of personalities fosters genuine connection. Participants get a sense of each other – humor, passion, empathetic responses. This authentic interaction helps dissipate skepticism and forge stronger bonds, making the community feel more human and trustworthy, encouraging peer-to-peer interaction
Learn deeply
For members, it's an unparalleled chance to get burning questions answered and accelerate learning. While static resources provide information, a live session offers context, nuance, and personalized guidance. Participants can delve into complex topics and absorb unique insights not readily available elsewhere, fostering a deeper collective understanding. When it works, it really works. Once a smart customer named David revealed his innovative method of product use, and 2 other customers gasped with excitement learning a new trick.
Silly chitchat
As the program begins, during that short period while people are gathering, fill the quiet with fun banter that solicits participation and warms up the audience to participate. Ask in chat their location and the local weather. Ask people to share what they ate for breakfast? Once we asked people to hold their pets up to the camera. One customer filled his webcam with a bulldog closeup, while in another window a generally stoic customer broke into a huge happy grin.
Scheduling is hard
Live events invariably mean that some people won’t attend due to scheduling problems. Mitigate this frustration by providing the ability for customers to ask their questions ahead of time in a comments section, now made possible with custom Event Page layouts. To be effective, you'll have to share the recorded answer, ideally parsed out of the longer program.
Harvest the content
Similarly, you can also share recordings of individual Q&A pairs or even the entire program (if it is well indexed). This takes resources to prepare and present, so determine metrics to see if the benefits exceed the effort.
Measure results
Speaking of metrics, you'll want to think about how to measure the effectiveness of these programs. It's relatively easy to tack on a post-event survey to measure CSAT and solicit feedback. Can you tie it to a business goal? For example, a ratio of (# customers served)/ (# staff participating) over 1 can demonstrate a more effective service delivery model for limited valuable technical people.
Expand Globally
For those with global membership, you may find requests to do programming in other time zones: EMEA, APJ, NAM . If you have willing colleagues that can take responsibility to be the host and expert, expanding globally is easy by leveraging the community events infrastructure and repeating what has worked in the initial effort. 🌎
What about you?
In my career as Community Builder, I have experienced great results when providing members with regular Office Hours style events. What has your experience been like?
Cheers, Marc
Community Success Manager, San Jose, California
