 Think about, how are people talking about your organization, your product, whatever, right? What are they saying? How quickly do you respond to them? Or if you already have a community established, how quickly do they respond? Next, where is that traffic coming from? And this you can do in Google Analytics, the share of voice, what are people saying about you? Or what are people saying about your competitor? And why aren't they talking more about you? The number of new signups, page views, how long people stay on your pages, the number of questions asked, right? And answered. Who's answering them? Is it your organization or is it going to be the community? And then also lead Jen and then how much are you investing in these leads? How much does one lead cost you? What is that conversion rate? And also, like we talked about earlier, that member-generated content. Now for measuring the health and growth of your community, these are really kind of vanity metrics, but your total number of members, how many new members you acquire, how many members are active, how many members leave, what is the retention rate, how long do people stay engaged, and also how many daily or monthly or yearly active users you have. And then again, identifying those life cycle stages for your community members and understanding out of your total community members how many of them are in each of those life cycle stages. And lastly, how satisfied are they to be a member of your community? So next, I want to chat to you, chat about building your persona. And this is going to be really important because this is your target audience. So how do you go about building it? I have a few questions you should ask yourself. Again, who are you guiding through this journey? And who is your persona? So now if you don't understand what persona is, it's a semi-fictional, excuse me, semi-fictional representation of that ideal community member. So I like to make things easy. I don't like to recreate the wheel if I don't have to. HubSpot has a really awesome tool on how to do this. So I've linked it. It guides you through 14 prompts that you're going to ask yourself about your target audience. And again, you're going to be making some assumptions. But if you can leverage data, look at who signs up, who are they? What roles do they have? What titles do they hold? And why should you care about this exercise? It's a very marketing heavy exercise. But it's going to help your organization better market, sell, and also serve that community. And then next, who's going to find value in this? Well, your customer support, because now they know more about this individual, your salespeople, and also your marketing. This is an example of what HubSpot creates. It creates a PDF with all of the information you just entered, right? So I create a developer marketing Maya. How does she like to be contacted? Well, email, maybe social media, face-to-face. So it gives all that demographic information about your ideal persona. All right, let's talk about some community fundamentals. So you have identified your core persona that you want to go after. What's next? Before you start onboarding anybody into your community, I really recommend you have a code of conduct. You have a membership contract, right? You have already developed those roles and responsibilities. So when a new member comes in, they can pick a path. So if they want to be a maintainer, what does that look like? What are they signing up for? How long do you expect them to commit per month to this community? Next, how are you going to communicate with them? Is it through social media? Do you want to have a social media presence? Is it through Slack, or Discord, or maybe an email thread, or an email list, excuse me. A governance model, you need to communicate to your community. Who makes decisions? Who has the final say? So say somebody misbehaves, and you leverage the code of conduct, and you say, hey, you're violating the code of conduct. It's so bad that you need to kick out this community member. Who makes that decision? That's why you need to have a governance model in place. And like I mentioned, community roles and responsibilities, so people are aware of what they are going to be doing. As well as what I mean by routines, these are really how often do you meet with your community? How often does the governing board meet? Is it once a month, once a quarter? So it's setting up these regular touch points with your community, so you're always in touch with them. And also an onboarding checklist that is self-serve. Make it easy for them. Is it an application? Outline all the steps that they need to achieve in order to become a fully integrated member of your community. And then next, going back to smart goals and KPIs, make sure that there is alignment with your superiors, so that when you move through the year with your program, you're aligned on what you're trying to achieve, and you're aligned on how you're gonna measure it. And recruiting, promotion, how are you going to reach this, folks? If it's a brand new community, where do you find them? Do they hang out on Reddit? Do they hang out at open source conferences? So think about that, and that's where you're gonna start recruiting your members. And then also a community model. I'm gonna chat now about some frameworks to set up your first community. So I'm gonna cover three. The first one is a little bit overwhelming, but I put the entire definition in there for you. And by the way, these slides are available. You can download them as well. And the goal of this framework is to help you identify those key business objectives and the revenue drivers for your community. So according to Mr. Spinks, in order for you to start leveraging some of these, really ideally you should only have one. That is good enough. And then the best case scenario is you're hitting all of these. So what does the S stand for? It stands for support. So the goal here is to improve customer satisfaction and support. And you can create a program where you enable and empower your community members to do exactly that for you. The next is product. Like I talked about before, leverage these folks, ask them feedback, because they can be giving you a lot of great information that you didn't know about before. Think about it. They are the ones that are using your tool or whatever it is that you are trying to get them to sell or market for you. They're the super users. So enable them with content. And then in return, they're gonna give you, hey, this is how, this is what we wanna see next out of your product. And then acquisition. So the goal here is to drive that brand awareness, that market share, and here you can leverage your community to be that content machine. Remember, set up pathways for them to be able to submit that. Is it an application that says, hey, my name is blah, blah, blah. I have this blog, here's the link, and then it hits your inbox, right? The next is contribution. So the goal here is, how do you motivate folks in your community to speed up that contribution content? Are you going to award them something? Swag, maybe a specific kit where it has a bunch of stickers and a shirt that just recognizes them and makes them feel special. The next one is, how are you going to retain your community members for a long time, right? And again, it's going, how do you provide value to them? How do you show them that by being part of this community, they're gonna grow? And then the last one is success. So the goal here is how do you, how does your community help others understand your product? How do they evangelize on your behalf? So let's move on to the seven principles of belonging, and this is by Charles Boggle. And here, the reason I integrated this too is because I like the way he framed it. I like that he is not really focused on, hey, how is this going to bring revenue? But really these principles are gonna help you build enduring, effective, and connected communities. So let me break it down for you. What he means by the boundary principle is what differentiates a member from a non-member? Is it do they need to apply? Do they need to be active for a certain amount of time? The next is initiation. So how do you welcome and onboard these new members? What do you do? Do you maybe hold a little ceremony and you recognize all of them? The next is rituals, right? So this is the practice that marks a time or an event as special. So OSS, right? We meet every year here to talk about open source. So this is an example of that, a temple. So this is a place where folks are gonna congregate and that could be on Zoom, that could be a physical location that you go to every week, month, whatever. So think about that. Where are you gonna ask your community members to join you? The next is stories. And this is a way of communicating what the community's values are and symbols, right? So this is your logo, for example. Like what ideas are important to your community? And then next, inner rings. And these are the pathways to show your new community members how they can grow within your community. And so lastly, the bacon method. So here, this is gonna be a blueprint to help you develop your strategy for the community. This is gonna help you get organizational buy-in, make sure that everybody's aligned, and it's gonna demonstrate value to your member. So he says, hey, kick off by producing mission and vision statements, right? This is like, how are you gonna communicate to your community member that big picture? Next, how are you gonna engage with your community? How do you want to approach them? Next is define the value that you wanna deliver for them. So how are you going to show them value? Is it maybe an outreach chair position, right? That's great for your resume or a TOC position. And then what he means by producing your big rocks is, what are those broad objectives for the year that you want to focus in on for this community? What do you want them to achieve? And then also knowing your audience. Who is it? The next one is designing a on-ramp and engagement model. So here's when you start to structure your community and you start building that onboarding checklist. And then build your quarterly plan. You can't do everything in one quarter. You gotta break it down into smaller chunks that you can achieve in a month, in a quarter, or in a year. Craft your maturity model and success criteria. So here you are going to look at the organization at your community and understand how to optimize. And this is, community is always gonna be changing. So you have to also make sure that you're adapting. That program strategy should be evergreen, but it needs to be updated on a yearly basis. Also like how often are you going to be executing? And that's why he wants it to do it on a cadence, right? He's like, hey, how do your cycles of work for community building? How are you gonna do this? So he wants you to break this down into manageable pieces and write a playbook of what you need to do, of how you're gonna scale your community. What are those activities look like? What's the timeline for them? Next is producing an incentives map. And this means how are you gonna recognize your community members? We keep talking about bringing value, but people also wanna be recognized. A lot of the times, everybody who works in open source, a lot of the times we're doing this because we want to, we're volunteering. So why should they volunteer? How can you recognize them? How can they grow? What skill sets can they walk away with? Okay, so now I'm gonna chat about some community building best practices from the open source world. So one of the things that will make your life so much easier is also figuring out like where do you wanna host your members? Identifying that core group that shows off week after week and make sure you partner with them because they're gonna be your best enthusiasts and they're gonna be the ones that are always gonna be evangelizing on behalf of your org. Do some investigation. This is why building personal relationships is really important in community building because you need to understand what motivates your community. So how are you gonna find that out if you're not talking to your community? If you're not asking them these things. And again, set SMART goals for your program. Make sure you establish measurable KPIs early on and you get all of your stakeholders aligned. Pick a tool, like a management tool early on whether it's orbit or what have you. Make sure that you are able to measure how people come in and out of your organization. And then again, think about how do you create psychological, emotional and physical safety for everyone? How be passionately inclusive? If people wanna learn, help them because that is just the most satisfying thing in the world. When you see this community member so excited because you just removed a roadblock for them and now they can contribute easily. Establish an onboarding process, right? This is like a little bit of repetitiveness. Define your community roles and responsibilities and then designate a governing body and define a transparent decision-making process, right? So who's making decisions? How are they being made? Next, make sure that you have community rules and guidelines from day one. If people come in and misbehave how are you gonna get rid of them, right? Who is gonna make that decision? Check on your community regularly. How are you gonna do this? Maybe you host a monthly meeting or a quarterly meeting or you identify events where you can have a meetup to just touch point with them or maybe you decide to do an event, maybe a happy hour and invite them all to come and start talking to them, building those relationships. Listen to your community. How, what process are you putting in place for folks to provide feedback to you? How quickly are you gonna respond to them? This is really important because sometimes people want immediate results. But if you say, hey, I have an SLA of 24 hours, at least you're being transparent and communicating with your community what to expect from you. Show appreciation for your followers. Make sure you figure out how to maintain your brand voice. Explore new ways of engaging your community whether it's online, in person. There's so many things you could do to stay engaged with these folks. And then again, please transparency is important. So what does that moderation process look like? And making sure you set up those routine meeting points. Okay, let's talk about how to recruit onboard and retain these community members. So now it's time for you to go out and pick your community members. You know already who your target persona and your ideal community member is. Now where are you gonna find them? Industry events are really great. Conference talk, go out and talk about your community. Go recruit, go tell them, go teach them how to build a community. Community events, maybe you start setting up a monthly meetup or Bevy, right? Bevy's the new hot platform for that. Maybe you wanna join a foundation, right? Like the Linux foundation or they have a ton of other child projects underneath. Maybe you wanna join the CDF or maybe you wanna join the CNCF or like the security one. Social channels, right? Twitter, where do your folks hang out? Twitter, Reddit, go, go there. Start conversations, create a hashtag. And customers and partners. A lot of the time when you're building a brand new community, who's the closest to you, right? Maybe your customers, maybe your partners. Maybe they want to also participate in this community because they also can reap the benefits. And they are already users of your product so maybe they're also already passionate enough to be somebody that helps you evangelize. And then influencers. Who are the influencers in your community? Example, CNCF. Ava is really popular. Ava Black, I don't know if you guys know her. So just knowing who they are, partnering with them. Like Kunal Kushawa, which I probably am butchering his last name and I apologize. I partnered with him in the past and we did a few activities, whether it was an online event or a blogging hackathon. These are all ideas of how to bring in folks and get them to engage with you or a webinar, right? And again, please make that onboarding process as self-service and easy to complete because I bet you that that is the first place you're gonna start losing folks. If your application or your onboarding checklist is too tedious to follow, you're gonna have a huge drop off there. So how do you do this easy, right? I love marketing, my background is in marketing, so any automation, so any marketing automation that you can set up for yourself, whether it's through forms, do it. This is gonna so help you. Also create a repo of training and documentation, right? Where can they go and look for this information on their own? Designate a space for them, right? Maybe it's an FAQ that you develop that what are the first few questions that people have when they first join your community or a landing page where they can go and get all this information from. And then also make sure you have a space for them where they can connect with other community members so that they can help each other out and start that dialogue instead of always having to involve you. So in order to retain members, right, we have to provide them with value. So again, make sure you understand why they're coming to you, why they wanna join your community. Make sure you make some space at the table for them. Invite them to have an opinion. Again, build relationships, build relationships, build relationships, I'm gonna keep saying that. And then again, how do you create educational content for them that's gonna help them move forward with their career or maybe learn a new skill set? Invite them to participate and lead. A lot of the times what I've noticed, especially at the CD Foundation when I was there, was that a lot of people are really timid. They are not gonna raise their hand and say, yeah, I wanna go and put me on the form so people can vote for me. Sometimes you really just have to go and say, hey, would you be interested in this position? I've noticed you're an active member, you show up week after week, you're committed, but sometimes you just have to extend that invitation first, especially if your community is brand new. And so like I said, just make sure you extend that invitation and reward them, recognize them and then figure out how to build a culture that is welcoming, inviting, transparent and open and offer mentoring and coaching. A lot of the time mentoring and coaching go so long. Maybe sometimes people don't need their skills polished, maybe they need soft skills and they want you, you can mentor them through those experiences. And also if you can gamify to incentivize participation, do it. People like being competitive, people like being awarded badges, so that's also one idea. Now I'm gonna cover some of the popular governance models in communities. So let me jump right in. There's six of them. So the first one is duocracy. Basically this model insists that those who put in the work make the decisions. The founder leader, this is normally found in new projects or in projects that have very small contributions. So here really it's that individual or group who started the project, they're the ones making that decision. The self-appointed council or board here is where members of the open source project actually appoint a number of leadership groups to govern various aspects of that project. The next one is electoral. So here is, you might hold formal elections for the project. Corporate backed, this is where the company operates under an open source license, but they actually don't accept contributions. And the foundation backed, so maybe you donate your project to the CNCF and the original leadership team and the CNCF leadership team are the ones that jointly are making decisions on behalf of the project or the community. So now I gave you some governance models that you can leverage for your own community. I put a lot of more detail in there. I know I went kind of fast over them, but these slides are available so you can always reference this back. And then just some closing thoughts. And I like this disclaimer because a lot of people think that building community is gonna happen overnight and it's not. It takes a lot of time to build and grow it. Expect between six to 12 months before you actually see results. Learn to meet your ideal community member where they hang out and at any stage of their journey. Make sure you provide value to them first. Give rather than take. Remember, this is a virtuous cycle and trust takes time. And community building is about building relationships with those members. So this is a multi-year strategy and if you expect overnight growth, that is unrealistic. If you wanna keep in touch with me, there's my LinkedIn, my Twitter and also my website. Thank you so much. We have a little bit of time for some questions. I can also stick around after the session if you wanna have a hallway track with me. Any questions? Just one in the back. I guess, what sort of governance structure do you think is the most prone to security abuse? Abuse? That's a good one. Let me see. Honestly, I think maybe the founder leader, I really don't like this one. Cause then it just being, it ends up being like, what do they call it? The benevolent dictator. It ends up being a roadblock in my opinion when that one person is the one that has to have the final say on everything. Any other questions? Well, that, oh, yay, go ahead. And did retention is so important. What things have you seen that have been successful? Innovative examples of how to retain or recognize members? So one of the things that I noticed is, and maybe this is a, this is definitely an assumption on my part, but what I noticed about community members is they wanna build their own brand. So they're coming here because they think this is a platform for them and it is. So maybe makes, like, if you host your own personal conference, dedicate a track to them. Or if you have a webinar program, invite them to be guest speakers. Podcast program, invite them to be your guest speaker. Because then this way, they feel like they're actually part of the community and engaged all the time. When I kicked off the ambassador program for the CD Foundation, one of the ways that I, I was meeting with them monthly. I also recruited them by, I made a developer kit. So it was like a CDF branded box. They had a T-shirt and a other swag. People ate it up. They were tweeting about it. And that's how word of mouth got out. And we ended up with like 51 people in that ambassador program by the end of the year. So it's just different tactics that you gotta play around with. Each community is very unique. So what worked for me might not work for your community. Anything else? Any more questions? Well, thank you so much. I hope this was helpful.