 Hey, everyone, thanks for being here today. I know it's been a long week and a long day. And I'm sure lots of people have questions coming out of this week and new to-dos and are thinking about things differently. So I'm really happy that you're here today. It's like kind of the end of the conference. It always feels tough to do a talk in the afternoon the last day, but it's great to see some folks showed up. For folks who don't know, my name's John Coglin. I'm on the community relations team at GitLab. I've been there for about four years. And in my time there, I started our Meetups program. I started the GitLab Heroes program. And recently, I moved into a role where I'm like focusing on all of our user engagement. And so that's kind of like content. Thought leadership is kind of one of the work streams. Attracting more contributors and customers to become contributors is another work stream. And then there's a certification program. And when I moved into that role, we started to develop this concept of a community funnel. And the idea is to kind of understand the different ways that our community engages with us. And that will help us become kind of more efficient in moving people through. And so I just wanted to share that all briefly with you today. One of the things that we find at GitLab is that our community provides us with really valuable feedback. And so I'd love to talk to anybody after these other great lightning talks and just get your feedback on kind of what I'm about to present and see if there's anything that I can learn from you, because I know there's a ton of amazing people at this conference. So what is a funnel? So marketing and growth teams have been using kind of this funnel-based approach for a very long time. And the idea is to outline the path that you want kind of a person to take to become a customer. For folks who are more familiar with product and development work, that could be similar to like a user journey. So when you're building a product, you create this journey that other steps a person would take to become a user of your product and ultimately have a great experience using that product. And this kind of approach is really helpful in defining this kind of happy path or flow that you want a person to follow. And so communities and community managers can adopt a similar approach. And that was really the inspiration for us at GitLab, like following some of these kind of best practices in marketing and product development and applying them to the community kind of facing work that we do. Ultimately, if you're successful in this, you're going to be able to create a great experience for community members and build healthier communities and ultimately make your team more effective and more efficient. So let's talk about why. Why should you care about this? Why should your boss and the executives or leaders in your organization care about this? Communities are notoriously difficult to measure. I often joke that if you put community folks or DevRel folks in a room, then they'll talk about three things. How hard it is to measure stuff. What should we call ourselves and what part of our organization should we report into? Those are the evergreen topics in this kind of field. And I think funnels are a great way to combat that kind of difficulty in measuring things. Ultimately, people know what actions they want people to take, but the issue is attributing how people get to take those actions. And so breaking it into a series of steps or a funnel will provide a forcing function to the community team or community manager to define those touch points that you want to have with your community. Identify ways that you can have success with each of those touch points. Understand how to improve the experience for your community at each one of those levels. And then in my opinion, the most important outcome is knowing where to invest your kind of dollars or your efforts to help you get the results that you want at the end of that funnel. So before things get kind of too abstract, I'll just go through the funnel that we've created for GitLab and hopefully it can be an inspiration to you if this is something you're thinking about doing. So at the top of our funnel is awareness. So broadly, awareness is how many people know that your community exists. And this is gonna be different for different communities. So this could be something where it's driven through blog posts or conferences or speaking opportunities or sharing your project on hacker news or maybe it's just something that people are finding on GitHub because you have a lot of stars. The metrics to measure for this level of the funnel could be unique page views or Twitter impressions. Maybe it's people visiting your forum. You know, I'm not gonna really try to be too prescriptive for what you should measure. I just wanna kind of lay out the outline here. And so if I ask you, how do people first learn about your community? The first thing that pops into your head is probably a pretty good indication of what you should be thinking about at this awareness level. And now as we kind of sit here and think about that more, you might have other things popping into your head right now. So there might be now three or four different things that you thought, oh, that's how people find out about my community or this is how people find out about my community. And if you go forward with developing this funnel, I wanna encourage you to limit yourself to like one or two metrics at each level. And I know that that will force some tough decisions and trade-offs, but I think that sometimes that can be healthy. And as community managers, we tend to be stretched really thin, so enforcing those limits will allow you to narrow your focus a bit, which I think can be healthy for you in your community in the long run. And you don't need to stop doing the other things that maybe aren't metrics that you're measuring. So you can measure Twitter impressions as your awareness layer, which is what we do on our DevRel team. And we still know that blog posts and speaking opportunities are important and still do those things, but that's not what we're kind of measuring in the funnel. So at the next level is interest. And so you can imagine this level would be that folks are aware of your project and they want to learn more. So this could be signing up for a webinar or an event following you on social media or starring your project. And an important consideration at this level is whether or not that indication of interest will allow you to keep contact with your community member. So starring a project is great, but it's not gonna allow you to kind of keep in touch with the person in your community. So by optimizing for those touch points, you can have the opportunity to continue to communicate with and ultimately educate these people who are indicating interest. So I'd encourage you to just consider that when thinking about your metric for your actions and metrics at this level. At the intent level, members are showing intent to contribute to your community. So this is like right there about to contribute, but still a prerequisite. So this could be creating an account on your forum, joining your Slack, registering for a trial, opening an issue or downloading the product. At the contribution level, this is where you really start kind of feeling and seeing the impact of your community. And this is where folks are commenting on issues, reporting bugs, creating forum posts and writing answers. Maybe there's discussion happening on Slack overflow or Stack overflow or Reddit. Folks are organizing and attending meetups. And maybe they're even contributing to your code if you're an open source project. In healthy communities, you're gonna have a lot of folks taking actions in this level. And I think when people think about community, this is really what they think about. They don't necessarily think about those other levels that get you to here. And so the experience that you create for people at this level is really important. So if the experience is good, people are gonna be more likely to come back and continue contributing. If they don't have a great experience, you'll see people kind of churning out of the community. And so my recommendations for this level are that, whatever those actions that people are taking, you wanna make sure that after they take that action that there's timely and generous recognition, gratitude and kindness, and just support to help people make these contributions so that you can have activity at this level. And by creating a great experience, you can then retain these contributors and move them to the next level of the funnel, which is advocacy. Advocates are your most valuable community members. They're the recurring contributors, people that join your committees, folks who are supporting each other and answering each other's questions without intervention from your community team. Maybe they're organizing meetups and speaking at them. And a good contribution experience is essential if you wanna move people into this level. So also make sure that you're, or I should say, and then after you have people taking these actions and becoming advocates, make sure that you're still supporting them. Don't take them for granted. You need to invest in programs and resources and encouragement and training to keep these people engaged and keep them growing in your community. So yeah, it's just not the time to step off the gas because advocates are then essential for kind of filling the top of the funnel again and they can become the people that are generating awareness where your word of mouth is considered the strongest form of advertising and these advocates are gonna be the people that are telling their friends and writing blog posts and speaking at events that you maybe don't have geographic coverage to get to. And so it's a great way to keep the community following and really build a healthy community. So earlier we talked about the why. When you build out this funnel, you can see if you're doing a great job converting interested community members into contributors, maybe you should focus more on awareness and that way you can kind of build out your funnel this way. If you're seeing that you're struggling with generating awareness, you'll have to identify. Is that because we're not creating great content or a great experience in-house or is it because we're not doing a good job converting contributors into advocates? And so you're not gonna get all of the answers but you'll at least know what questions you need to answer. And ultimately the strategies required for each community are gonna be different but I think that this kind of framework can be really helpful for folks. And so I'm out of time. I was hoping to have a little bit of time for a question but thanks all and if you have questions I'll be around afterwards.