Ines Schuber
I joined Emeritus to support them in piloting a top-of-the-funnel community that could deepen Lead and Alumni engagement with their brand and drives conversion to certifications, mini-certs, and bootcamps down the line. I joined a team of two people consisting of the Director of Product and a product manager.
Within Emeritus there wasn't anything in place to nurture leads who weren't quite ready to commit to joining a certification nor there was a way for Alumni to stay connected through the company after completing their degrees.
Emeritus decided to hire me to explore what type of community would be valuable to those people, create it and manage it to ultimately drive sales.
As Emeritus has certifications in many different areas, we decided to focus on one area first to validate the community concept: Product Management.
I was able to connect and conduct over a dozen of market research calls with past Emeritus students in Product Management. It enabled me to have a better sense of what was needed to support their career in that particular field.
Alongside this, I conducted my own benchmark on Product Management and communities in that field to have an idea of what seemed to work and what could potentially be missing.
I noticed a lack of true engagement between community members, despite large membership bases (100K+). Most forums appeared to be un-moderated, and as a result, many posts fail to receive any engagement or follow-up conversation, leading to a poor User experience.
After conducting this groundwork, it became clear that the majority of people interviewed were interested in the following:
They also mentioned being short on time and needing something that would not require too much of their time.
The following Community concept was born:
Upskill to leadership the meaningful way.
In this digital age, Emeritus Product Community facilitates live connexions & peer support to elevate senior product managers to leadership roles through meaningful and rich conversions.
How we do this:
I usually prefer to evaluate the tech requirement of the type of community we want to build as well as analyze which platforms our target audience already uses and prefers before making a choice on the platform. However, the team I worked with was pretty set on using the Circle platform to build our community, so this is the one we ended up going for.
I proceeded to build the community on Circle with a strong onboarding, including a virtual tour of the community, to familiarize members who were new to the platform.
We decided to pilot the community first with our internal team and invited a dozen of product managers from Emeritus. The goal was to get their feedback and improve the community experience to be ready to launch.
Our bi-weekly live meet-ups were really appreciated however, the community chat in Circle was not very active. We decided after a couple of months of discussion and feedback from members to migrate the community to Slack which was an app all members were already using.
We saw a big increase in engagement with this new platform which confirmed that this platform was a better fit.
To grow the community we had initially wanted to contact past students, however after weeks of back and force with the team in charge of the different certifications and schools, we realized we might never be able to contact them because of a clause in their contract. We had to be resourceful and decided to ask all product managers from Emeritus who joined our community to share a public post on their Linkedin and their networks to invite their network to our community.
We received over 50 applications which really validated our community concept.
As the community was really centered around our bi-weekly meet-up, this is really what took off and was the most appreciated by members.
Later we were able to leverage different leads within the company and send them email invites which enabled us to continue growing the community.
Post-call surveys and 1-1 discussions with members enabled me to gather topics of interest and bring them to future meet-ups to tailor the discussion and center them around real challenges members were experiencing.
Unfortunately, after the war started in Ukraine, the company had a big reorganization and decided to let go of hundreds of employees. I was one of them, as they decided to focus on quick revenue-generating activities. Community, in that case, was put on hold as it was seen as more of a long-term strategy.
I enjoy the live sessions and always look forward to the chat or discussion threads within the community!
Souradeep Product Manager @Amazon
2019