Intro

Stefanie Baldwin is the Manager of the D2L Brightspace community. D2L is a global supplier of their flagship Learning Experience Platform called Brightspace. She has been at the helm of this community since day one. Stefanie is a long-term member of our Community Leaders Forum, and it was time for her to get on stage and tell her story.

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Interestingly, she showed extreme modesty when I asked her if she would be willing to tell her story. A true community manager! When you do this work long enough, you know how hard it is and how much is left to do. For her, it seemed not very much of a story, but the event proved her wrong.
The discussion led to some important insights for the group.

Value Design

The CLF meetings have been discussing community values on various previous occasions. Inspired by Avital Knoller’s presentation, she realized that value is relative. It is related to whom you report and in which department you reside at that moment. Community managers are digital nomads. One year you report into Marketing, next into Customer Success, and after that, maybe in Support. Stefanie reports into support, so her internal value conversation is about case deflection, or rather even case prevention. Value design has 2 fundamental elements: How to design value for your organization and how to design value for your members.

The hard part

Relating back to her modest reaction, the hard part of making a community successful is to design and execute an experience that convinces both internal and external audiences that there is more value doing it like this than there is doing it the traditional way or even NOT doing it.

Every community manager knows how hard it is. This is where Stefanie showed real examples of innovations that would make the user experience more valuable. We saw improvements in the dialog and surfacing both answers and articles quickly, as well as tactics that would allow members to help each other.

SPACES model

Stephanie shared the the SPACES model by David Spinks. She prepared a practical set of tactics that belong to the various elements of the model. We ran a bit out of time (as predicted  ) but the model is still available to collaborate on for members of the community. Contact me for details if you want access.

What did we learn from this session?

• Thinking about value interaction on your community site leads to a deeper and more fundamental insight into where value is experienced. So, embedding value design in your experience design is key. This also means the platform is not static. It needs to be able to adapt as you develop interaction hotspots with more value!
• The value conversation is a two-topic conversation. One for the members and one for the organization. They are connected!
• D2L Community has an almost 50% customer answered question rate, alleviating the organization from spending time on it. Other members in the group reported only 2% and were more focused on automated answering via bots.
• If AI is used to answer questions, the route to a higher repeated value and interaction is essentially cut off, as members will not connect with a bot as they might do with a human being. It also kills the opportunity to build an advocacy program. Organizations seeking a dialogue with their audience should not replace their forum with AI but offer it as an option.
• A good ‘patience window’ is 24 hrs. This is the window in which a question is not yet answered by the organization but is left open for members to respond. Other participants in the meeting confirmed that a lower threshold backfires on community engagement. After those 24 hours, an answer should be sought from the organization or bot automation.

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

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