That communities are finding themselves in a changing landscape goes without a doubt. In 2025, it became clear that we are approaching a new era where AI overviews and no-search bot traffic play a big role in how communities operate. As AI keeps evolving, it can be difficult to look ahead and foresee what communities can expect. Perhaps, in times like these, looking back is more effective. What did we learn from 2025? And how can we use that to move forward? Digital Community Director Holly Rieke took us through her year-end lookback review and shared the strongest signals from 2025.

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Holly’s community exists primarily to support post‑sale customer success, satisfaction, and renewal. A value proposition that remains strong even through several leadership turnovers.

Alongside just one other team member, residing within the customer success organisation, Holly manages a tech-focused community. The community has been operating in its current form for three years after migrating to the Vanilla platform, and it is primarily ungated with many anonymous value‑consuming visitors in addition to logged‑in users. Engagement is measured through active logins, which serve as their baseline metric. In the past three years, the community has doubled in size. However, Holly and her team recognise that many members gain value from the community without ever logging in.

Will the AI cloud pass, or keep hovering?

With AI hovering above an ever-changing landscape, it becomes difficult for communities to find the right, meaningful metrics. Holly sees the challenge of providing measurable value to leaders as well when it comes to her community. This has raised questions like “How do we continue in this changing landscape?,” “What does this look like?,” as well as more specifically “What is meaningful?”. Even with recognition from leaders, proof of value remains essential to ensure continued support and funding.

Leadership is loudly pushing for AI adoption. But she also shares a grounded perspective: AI-generated forum answers aren’t always accurate for a complex product. AI integrations must respect gating and confidentiality, and AI will never replace SMEs for advanced scenario questions.

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Holly describes 2025 as the year of:

“More AI decks than I’ve ever done in my life.”

The organisation is exploring connecting community content directly to Enterprise GPT via API, but even that raises key questions like “should AI answer from internal content that was never written for external use?”

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The community is complex and role-based. It includes employees, customers and partners, meaning that Holly and her team are finding a balance between the needs and expectations of these groups, instead of just a single type of member. Holly shared that expanding the knowledge base is the biggest goal, which poses as the biggest challenge at the same time. Employees, customers, and partners all contribute in small ways, but for most of them, supporting the community is just a small piece of their day-to-day work. That makes engagement tricky, it has to be worth their time, and it has to be meaningful enough for them to come back.

Idea exchange: a hard, necessary pivot

One of the most relatable challenges Holly shared is about Idea Exchange (ideation). Vanilla’s built‑in ideation wasn’t meeting product’s needs. The product team ran evaluations and ultimately forced a full migration to Aha! A year of attempts followed to try to integrate the two systems. Community and product feedback are now more disconnected: activities on Aha! no longer trigger community badges, the latest ideas no longer appear on the community homepage.

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However, the product team is now actually using Aha. Customers will receive quarterly updates through the community summarising progress. Something they never had before.

As Holly put it:

“It’s not a platform problem as much as a people and priority problem.”

Three key focus areas for 2025

With all these challenges in mind, Holly’s team focused on three key areas to strengthen the community:

1. Self-serve learning & the community captains program: giving members access to knowledge without needing direct support. Holly designed a “Community Captains” program. Part super‑user initiative, part subject‑matter‑expert platform. Captains are deeply skilled product users (developers, architects, etc.) and they contribute technical articles, best practices, and “how-to” guidance.
2. UX enhancements: improving the platform experience to make participation easier.
3. Content findability and security: making sure that content is up-to-date, searchable, and trustworthy.

A lookback on the performance

Looking back at 2025, these key focus areas were effective in strengthening the community. Looking at their performance dashboard they saw an overall increase of 16% in members. This accounts for about 20-25 new members a week. This tells them that they’re doing the right thing.

Their total visits had a 49% increase which seems really good upfront. But digging deeper uncovers that a lot of this traffic comes from AI bots. Based on that insight they used the platform dashboard as the primary source of information, as using Google Analytics as an additonal layer showed mismatches.

The Community Influence Value Metric

A metric that has been especially useful is what she calls “Community Influence Value” (CIV). This is their big shiny number: → The total contract value of customers who logged in at least once during the year. This metric measures how the community influences the happy customer path by linking the number of active members to the financial return from renewals. Conceptually, it can be expressed as:

Community Influence Value = Active Members × Returned Financial Value (or Percentage of Renewals)

Another CLF member emphasised that this metric requires at least two years of data to be fully effective. Currently, there is no target and only one year of data has been collected. She is looking forward to reviewing the performance of this metric at the end of 2026.

Looking forward to 2026

Lots of people are using AI, it is often the starting point for people that are seeking information. For 2026, Holly doesn’t necessary see this as a threat. She wants AI to pick up on the community content, as it still answers questions of their customers and they’ll be happy. If they still require more information, it will drive traffic to the community.

Additionally, for 2026 she sees a big opportunity in building a partner program as their partners are a growth engine for their community. But partners currently rely on a patchwork of tools. A dedicated partner-community alignment program could significantly strengthen participation and content contributions.

Final thoughts

Holly’s approach shows that, despite the changing landscape, a clear focus, invention of new metrics and reflection helps community managers in navigating. 2025 was a year of transformation and signals, and Holly’s team is using those lessons to shape a stronger, more resilient community in 2026.

The meetup reminds us that community leadership today looks like navigating complexity, cross‑team politics, AI expectations, and capacity limits, all while staying focused on customer value.

Want to share your story?

If you'd like to lead an upcoming session or have a story the community can learn from, reach out anytime to the 3sides team.

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