Prove community ROI: Scale your community's impact and empower the business

As a community leader, you know that a healthy community empowers your business, enables your organization to tap into user-led flywheels, and ensures that your cross-functional teams build products that customers love.

You also know that to get there, you need to activate and scale your community impact, and you need ways to prove your community's ROI across your organization to ensure that stakeholders understand why community is more than important to continue investing in—it's imperative.

Josh Grose, Common Room's Head of Growth, highlighted a few examples from customers who use Common Room to prove their community's ROI in his recent talk, "Using community ROI to become the star you already are" at the Community Leadership Institute's CLIX 2022 conference.

Watch Josh's full talk above or on YouTube. Below, we've highlighted key examples from customers who are activating and scaling their community impact to prove business ROI:

Community contributes to new business

Community leaders that have been doing this for a while know that proving community impact has been a data problem more than anything else. They instinctually understand that activating their community empowers the business, but they haven't had a way to prove it. That’s what we’ve built at Common Room. When you connect your community engagement tools and your business data sources, you can finally get the full picture of your community's impact on your business.

In this customer example, the community team used Common Room's business data integrations, custom fields, organizations, and reporting features to show that community members from more than 300 organizations joined the community before they appeared in Salesforce. Those 300 organizations resulted in $5.3 million dollars in annual recurring revenue, an opportunity size of $50.5 million, and 8,477 paid licenses. Go-to-market (GTM) leaders are always looking to understand levers, and this type of data demonstrates that community is a definite driver of revenue.

Regional community conversion rankings and headcount indicators

What about staffing the right resources in the right locations? Headcount planning and regional expansion always feel like a game of chicken and egg due to lack of clarity on where resources can be best utilized. Making the wrong bet impacts cashflow, culture, and all the individuals involved. This is especially difficult for open-source communities whose contributors are often extremely distributed and don't have to be signed in, or even signed up, with the organization their contributions help shape.

Using Common Room, it was immediately apparent where one customer community's user density was greatest. This made it easy to see where community advocacy and involvement was strongest, and where the internal community team should expand first.

Even more impactful, the regional community concentration helped explain why sales reps in the EMEA region were getting 3x the leads of their peers in North America, despite there being less regional marketing investment.

This realization enabled more informed, nuanced territory planning - territory coverage was revised and headcount was re-allocated, saving the team a costly lesson months down the road as sales reps in one region would likely underperform, which often cascades into missed revenue targets and employee attrition.

Community accelerates the business

Does community involvement accelerate deals? Absolutely.

One community found that 72% of deals that began in community closed within 90 days. For sales and marketing-led deals, only 42% of deals closed within 90 days. If that's not an accelerant, we don't know what is.

Communities establish trust between members and the organizations building for them. They enable members to quickly find answers they need, hear directly from users that share similar challenges, build relationships with other product users, actively contribute ideas, and give valuable product feedback that shapes the roadmap so organizations can continue delivering products users love and tap into a user-led flywheel.

What's behind that user-led flywheel? Your community. With Common Room, you as a community leader finally have the proof to show how your members and community interactions empower the business.

To activate and scale your community, empower your business, and prove the ROI of your community, get started with Common Room for free.