In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Allison Able, Senior Manager, Community at Sisense.

Allison’s non-traditional background took her on a unique path, ultimately joining Higher Logic’s community team.

As a result of Allison’s success, Higher Logic hired additional team members from the education sector, seeing strong results with their transferable skills too. During her time at Higher Logic, she was fortunate to work on many community projects, along with doing day-to-day community management activities for their clients. When asked about why Sisense decided to build a customer community over a broader, audience-specific one, she explained the importance of ensuring the goals of the community to align with business goals and member goals.

To Allison, community building is like a tree, you need a strong foundation to eventually have it branch out. In 3 months, she shares how the Sisense community grew from 0 to 500 members and the ways they engage with their members.

They launched their community publicly as a Beta, with limited promotion to invite people into it to help in the community building effort too. Much of their member growth has been organic and customers, informing them that this is something that’s needed and serves a purpose for them in their daily work lives. They’ll be launching an exciting, gamification element into the community in Q2.

She goes in-depth on her process for building a community roadmap, with strategy and careful thought, ensuring it’s aligned to business goals and shared with stakeholders. Allison sets up a QBR for the community, including key metrics, SWOT analysis for that quarter, updates on projects, and a slide for “What I’d like to See Developed in the Future.”

Before diving into leading indicators of success for their community, she notes that by having a thorough process and being clear with leaders about what she can do as a team of one vs. if there were additional team members. Thus, helping her add to the community team at Sisense, and she shares the three buckets of metrics that they focus on to better understand their community.

The community roadmap is public internally, so it helps have conversations around priorities and ensure it’s equitable for each team involved in it. Wrapping up the episode, Allison shares the 3 community trends she's watching in 2022.

Follow Allison on Twitter.