Intro

Avital Knoller is the Community and Beta Program lead at Wiz. Wiz is a provider of a Cloud Security Platform. And a very successful one, I might add. And indeed, the Wiz platform is supported by a community program with both an online and an event-based component. Avital and I met online, and we clicked right away. 3sides exists because we are outcome-based Community Consulting.

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When Avital told me she was focusing on the outcome and getting that accepted, we locked in each other's attentions, and ideas started flowing. One of the ideas was for her to tell her story at our monthly Community Leaders Forum meetups. In those meetups, we let one of the members present their story, and then we have a lively discussion about best practices and lifting impediments.

It’s about the accepted outcome

In 1992, James Carville, Bill Clinton's chief strategist, coined the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid!” to point to their opponents for not focusing on the right topic. Avital did something similar. I will freely adapt it to “It’s the accepted outcome, stupid!”. She focused her attention not only on her internal and external audience but also strategically focused her priority on getting an accepted business outcome. The effect was, and still is, that she has automatic management endorsement for her program.

The ten-year itch

If you put her story in the context of all the other presenters at our Community Leaders Forum, there is one topic that sticks out like a pole in the desert: Customer Communities take a long time to mature. Whether you hear Jan de Vries of Mendix, Lauri Travis of Tyler Tech or Hans Scharler of MathWorks. They all have in common to have succeeded in a community program and all had to stay in the saddle for more than 10 years to be able to reach that state. The term “stay in the saddle” is not exaggerated.

The nuance. It’s all business in the end.

Community Management, as a department by default, has a nomadic existence. Marketing, Sales, Product, Support. They are all known departments that have been around since WWII at least. Not so with Community Management. It is often not well understood and sometimes actively sabotaged as a Not Invented Here syndrome. Making sure you have a senior benefactor, a mecenas, who understands that if you want change, you have to do something different, is the single most important critical success factor to have in your community program. Combine that with the knowledge above, and you will see that if you have to survive 10 years in a company and get nomadically moved around from marketing to support or customer success, you better make sure you do this every time your chain of command changes. This is the strong nuance that Avital brought. Do this every time you move and make sure YOUR goal aligns with THEIR goal. Even in organizations that typically do not have profit as a goal, like, for instance, charities or associations. In the end, it is all business.

Renaissance Minds in a pressure cooker

The meetup felt like a pressure cooker. All of our meetings are active, but this one felt to me like a pressure cooker. Her slides were simple. Just a few words. A concert agenda for the conversation. The meeting was full of discussion and debate. In the meantime, I was also monitoring the chat that was happening at the same time. The new word that was coined was a term she called Renaissance Minds. Believing in a community requires a renaissance mind. An enlightenment of how things can be and to believe in it. Few do upfront. All do after the community is successful. It's that game of making people believe that drives a community manager to success.

What did we learn from this session?

• Know your most senior leader’s goal and align your community goal with that of your leader.
• Do not be scared to be moved around in the organization. It is part of the process to drive a community renaissance mindset. If you get moved around, realign and agree on your new outcomes and goals.
• Do not worry about the old goals. The community instrument can support multiple goals at the same time. The focus shifts, not the goals themselves.
• It’s all business, even for non-profits!

Join Us

You, too, can be part of this group of community managers. It is a true community. You give and you get. All members gladly share their stories and can also ask the questions they are struggling with. The recording is also available for members. Just go here and register. It’s once a month, every last Thursday. 10x a year. Access is free. After you register, you will

• Get access to the monthly meetups
• Get access to historic presentations, the most recent recordings, and our Slack channel
• Get access to a network of community managers
• Get an opportunity to discuss your case with others and overcome your own hurdles.