The Online Community Industry Has Hit a Different Inflection Point

In today’s Masters of Community episode, you’ll hear from Community Industry expert of 20 years and native New Zealander, Sarah Hawk. Hawk began working as a software developer at Xerox in the 90’s, where her interest in the tech community was sparked and led her to eventually landing the role as a community manager. Her experience as a community manager at SitePoint network, head of Community at FeverBee, and an online community consultant finally led her to migrating to Discourse in 2016 as the Head of Community. Hawk discusses the shift that’s occurred from necessary, organic, and authentic communities to communities starting with a business goal and focused on statistics and metrics. Hawk also talks about the challenges and courage it takes to step down and move on from a community. Finally, Hawk shares the steps for figuring out a community strategy, beginning with your research, finding the fundamental need, and being a successful community manager. As well as how to find your community platform, make the most of it, and the most important metrics to measure. Notable Quotes Referring to Community Managers: “I think without the right kind of personality or the right kind of character, and depending on the kind of community, we know that the fundamentals they've got to have good product knowledge, and they've got to have the respect of users is all of those standard things that we talk about all the time, but they've also just got to have that something magic that works for that kind of audience. They need to be approachable, but knowledgeable. Right.” “My number one metric would be DAU over MAU. So calculating your stickiness. Calculate your monthly active users and dividing by your daily active users. So yeah, the stickiness of your community, because speaks across the board to a good experience, right? If people keep coming back, they either love it and love everything, or they love one thing so much that they're willing to overlook the parts that they don't like. And so the holy grail of stickiness would be, you know, around the 30% mark, but it's extremely rare to see that.”