By delivering the right content at the right time, Thameslink helps passengers make better decisions, reduces uncertainty, improves behaviour, increases accessibility, and enhances overall satisfaction. At the same time, the railway gains operational benefits through improved passenger distribution, optimized capacity utilization, reduced congestion, and greater efficiency. Ultimately, the success of Thameslink's digital information strategy illustrates a broader truth for customer experience design: The journey is not just made up of trains and stations. It is made up of information. And when information is delivered intelligently across every touchpoint, it becomes one of the most powerful tools for creating better customer experiences and better business outcomes simultaneously. Online Community leaders can learn from this customer journey approach, when designing for different cohorts in their online community to ensure optimal engagement throughout the member journey by focussing on what a member needs in different stages. What Community leaders can learn from this journey design When your community engagement is stalling or even has falling numbers of visitors, think about how you have designed your customer journey for your members in different cohorts. Do you know what the various types of members want at each stage of their customer journey? Have you designed your content for that? Have you designed onboarding and engagement paths for them?

This third article in the series examines why participation inequality is not a flaw to fix, but a dynamic to design for. It explains how critical mass, responsiveness, and power-law contribution patterns shape community growth, and why “replies beget replies” is key to sustaining engagement. With practical strategies, it shows how to intentionally guide members from passive observers to active contributors while building resilient, self-sustaining communities.

This second article in the series explores how communities can move beyond the 1‑9‑90 participation inequality by intentionally designing for engagement. It highlights the importance of blending strong and weak ties, fostering triadic connections, and building a compelling shared narrative to increase trust, participation, and retention. With practical tactics, it shows how thoughtful community design can shift passive audiences into active, connected contributors.

This first article in a three-part series challenges the obsession with scale in online communities, arguing that trust—not size—drives real value. Drawing on social science and community research, it shows how small, intentional subgroups and layered engagement models foster deeper connections, stronger knowledge exchange, and long-term resilience. It offers practical guidance for designing communities that balance intimacy and growth through structured pods, strong and weak ties, and meaningful member interactions.

Scaling has been the holy grail for decades, but has it truly been customer-centric? For many years, “Customer Success at Scale” has been the rallying cry. But let’s say the quiet part out loud: we’ve scaled failure. Not because we didn’t try hard enough, but because we scaled from the inside out. We optimized for our metrics, not their meaning. We chased SLAs and efficiency, and we sacrificed trust. Why scaling from the inside-out is breaking trust and how communities can put it back together. Inside-out scaling: the comfort of control. People don’t seek perfection. They seek belonging. A different premise: 5 outside-in by design tips. Inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. A practical reframe: 6 guidelines for AI + Community, done right. Craft your AI field-ready plan 30-60-90 days

AI bots are reshaping online communities, shifting them from spaces of human interaction to key sources for AI-driven discovery and insight. It introduces the concept of AI visibility and outlines a practical framework for community leaders to harness automation strategically, focusing on trust, citation, and value rather than traffic alone. With actionable steps, it helps community managers turn bots from a perceived threat into a powerful asset for growth and influence.

During the fifth edition of the Community Leaders Forum, Samuel Brown and Alan Blair shared how Ideagen rebuilt its customer community from scratch after years of silence following the shutdown of their customer portal in 2019. Tasked with creating a space for users of more than 50 products across multiple industries, they faced challenges such as limited resources, fragmented services, and low initial engagement. Despite launching within just eight months, it quickly became clear that scaling too fast and treating support and community as separate experiences created unnecessary complexity. By rethinking their approach, they unified help, support, and community into a single experience and rebranded the platform as Ideagen Luminate. Combined with a strong internal activation strategy, this shift helped reignite engagement and significantly grow traffic. Their journey highlights the importance of adaptability, internal advocacy, and simplifying the user experience — proving that successful community building at scale is less about getting it right the first time and more about continuously evolving.

At our latest Community Leaders Forum Meetup, one of our members shared his early, hands‑on insights about what happens when AI systems use community content to answer questions before anyone clicks through to the community itself. The meetup made clear that community leaders have an opportunity and a responsibility to redefine how success is measured and communicated inside their organisations.

This month’s meetup was designed to encourage an outside-in perspective. By utilising the eyes of others, we make space for fresh perspectives. Community Leaders came together to collaborate and build solutions to the challenges faced.

See how Verint transformed its community platform into a customer-centric experience by shifting from an inside-out to an outside-in approach. Guided by user insights, the redesign improves navigation, personalization, and content accessibility, ensuring customers can quickly find relevant product information and support. It demonstrates how aligning structure, design, and content around user needs creates a more intuitive and effective community experience.

Community teams are under growing pressure from AI, growth expectations, and the need to prove measurable value. Insights from Holly Rieke show that while communities deliver impact, much of it is hard to measure, especially with passive users and AI-driven traffic. To respond, her team is focusing on self-serve content, better user experience, and new metrics that connect engagement to business value, while learning to treat AI as both a challenge and an opportunity.

Recap of a Community Leaders Forum discussion on how AI and bot traffic are reshaping online communities and their metrics. It highlights the challenges of declining human traffic, rising bot activity, and shifting value perceptions, while exploring how community leaders are adapting through new strategies and success metrics. Ultimately, it reframes communities as trusted sources of human knowledge and context in a post‑AI landscape, offering practical steps to manage bots and maintain relevance.

Mobile apps play a critical role in driving community engagement, with push notifications - rather than email - emerging as the primary trigger for interaction. A branded mobile app enhances accessibility, increases participation, and strengthens retention by embedding the community into users’ daily habits. Supported by data-driven insights, mobile-first experiences have become essential for building active, thriving communities.

Recap of 3sides delivering a hands-on workshop at Gainsight Pulse Europe 2025 about community strategy: SMILE, A Practical Guide for Building a Successful Community

At our latest Community Leaders Forum, we welcomed Nikola Pejkova, Community Manager at Veeam Software, who shared an inside look at how Veeam has built and sustained one of the most respected community programs in the tech industry: the V-100.

A discussion on cognitive biases, human behaviour, and effective community management strategies. It emphasizes understanding biases, managing community dynamics, and fostering authentic, empathetic communication to engage users positively and handle challenges such as negativity and tough crowds.

The significance of research collaboration and the goals of the community for the European university alliance of the universities.

Community Leaders Forum June 2025 Debrief: Accessibility is not just a sound bite or a regulatory box to tick, it is about building online spaces where everyone can participate fully.

Community Leaders Forum May 2025 Debrief: D2L Brightspace community journey: value design and SPACES Model.

Community Leaders Forum Apr 2025 Debrief: Avital Knoller (Wiz) talked about her focus on her internal and external audience but also strategically focused her priority on getting an accepted business outcome.

Community Leaders Forum Mar 2025 Debrief: Developer programs are no longer just about support, they’re about impact. When you connect developer contributions to business outcomes, real change happens.

Community Leaders Forum Feb 2025 Debrief: Most people feel that running a community program is a novelty and a big organizational change. Yet when you start looking, you will find those unsung heroes who have been silently trailblazing for well over a decade. They took all the hurdles with great tenacity and delivered a successful community for their organization.

Community Leaders Forum Jan 2025 Debrief: You win a vendor award for best 2024 community and two days later you are shut down and laid off. What do you do? Read about how the community managers came together to support him.

And the award winner is......both 🏆 🏆 ! At a fabulous award gala in London, both Hg and Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Research UK were recognised for their innovations in the Supercharged Self Service category.

We see tectonic shifts in the way communities are run. The community ecosystem is a combination of activiteis on owned enterprise and social platforms.

The days where #members and #unique logins are meaningful metrics for community success are waning.

A community delivers marketing Demand (and even Lead-) generation gold dust that we all too often see go to waste because the game, the team and the tactics are not in place.

Whoever wrote the rule that intranets are for internal people? “Internal” only exists by the grace that there is something “external”. Internal alone has no existence.

The integration of ‘the pointy nose’ and ‘the long tail’ through community-driven KM represents a significant advancement in how we manage and disseminate information

The potential is there for customer service to shift from being a transactional department that deals with customers to being a customer engagement "bridge" that aims to build a customer base of loyal fans.

Summary of talk by Hans Scharler of Mathworks and discussion on the future of building a large developer community 

Summary of talk by Hans Scharler of Mathworks on lessons learned building a large developer community

Summary of talk by Justin Lee of INPO on managing a community of nuclear power operators

The question on every community manager’s mind is: What does it mean, what are the threats, and opportunities?

We are proud to announce that 3sides has been recognized with a Rising Star Award at Verint's EMEA Partners Summit in 2023.

Knowledge of your company is owned by your company. It is yours! Capture it and distribute it.

We are very proud to announce that we are an official parter of inSided (now Gainsight Digital Hub)

As an organisation, you need to define your ecosystem strategy - what will be your keystone position?

Which questions should be answered when devising a strategy when launching your community?

Online Trust can be increased by paying attention to the mix of Authenticity, Responsiveness, Ease of Use, Language, Culture and Accessibility.

We are pleased to announce that we are now a Verint Community Certified Alliance Partner.

Start with: Purpose. What is the community for? It is always to achieve a business result

Investment in customer success should lead to measurable success - your customer's success, not only yours

UX is not a job, it is a team effort. Everyone is a designer and makes design choices which impact the customer.

The new phrase soon will be "After Covid". Some things will change forever and one of them is the online conversation

If you get down to the essence of what a customer needs, it is basically two things: good software and good people

Building a community feels a lot like a soft reorganisation

Headless allows Marketing & Sales to create great branded experience independent from backend.

Attracting an audience and engaging with them is now part of your core company strategies.