Top of Funnel Community Creation & Management | Emeritus

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.

Conduct market research to establish community concept

Validate the community concept

Run and grow the community to 300 members

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:

Networking - as there was a lack of meaningful conversations with other PMs

Learning from peers - as it seemed to be difficult to get feedback from peers in and outside their companies

Having access to industry updates - as there is no official rule book for Product Management as it is still a fairly new role.

They also mentioned being short on time and needing something that would not require too much of their time.

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.

In total, we grew the community to almost 100 members

Over 50% of members joined live meet-ups

A dozen of members were paired with Product Buddies

We validated the idea and had a clear strategy to continue growing the community through referrals and various touch points during a lead's journey in the Emeritus network.

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.

Souradeep Product Manager @Amazon

Working in a big company, really slowed down my progress as I was waiting on approvals and answers from other departments.

Not relying on only one strategy to get members into the community, especially when that strategy involves other departments and could be out of my control.

Identifying active members, making them feel special, and implementing quickly their feedback is key to growing an engaged community. It really paid off as they became super users, deeply engaged in the community, and driving conversations.

Choosing a platform that is already used by members is key for retention and engagement, especially for a free community.

Getting a critical mass of at least 50 to 100 applicants before launching a community to have greater engagement in the community chat upon launch.