It’s Your Thing, Do What You Wanna Do: Distributed Ownership

So, you’re a community manager. Congrats! That must mean you’re flush with cash and endless headcount, right?

🥁

Ok, I know you’re not here for the stellar jokes.

Distributed ownership and control can help you scale and build an authentic community. I’ve talked about this topic a lot, and even delivered a workshop on it at CMX Summit in 2016. Thinking about scale has always been important to me. From when I was on a small team at a nonprofit to the time I was a one woman band at Atlassian, I have had to be creative about how to grow the community and how to manage that growth over time.

The value of building community programs with distributed ownership

When I was at Salesforce, I was managing a team of six people. That team of six people oversaw several programs, including the Salesforce User Group Program. That program grew like wildfire from 2015–2020, and by the time I left Salesforce, there were around five-hundred user group meetings happening EVERY MONTH. Do you know of an events team of six people who could manage five hundred events every month on top of several other huge programs they were running? I don’t think so. This is where distributed ownership comes in. Building your community programs in a way that not only allows you to bring community members into leadership positions in your community, but also empowers them to have ownership over those communities is your key to success.

People who are invested leaders in the community help bring in new members, shape your community’s programs, and bring a personalized, local experience to their communities.

If you are building a global community like the ones I built at Atlassian and Salesforce, distributed ownership is one of the best things you can put in place. It gives each community leader the power to build a community that fits their local communities’ needs, culture, and customs. When I was at Atlassian, our Kansas City group liked to have their meetings over lunch, and facilitated a lot of discussion groups. Our group in Frankfurt appreciated after-work meetings that were more focused on presentations. We not only left it in the hands of the leaders to decide on the format of the meeting, but also, and possibly more importantly, they decided on the content.

It’s a piece of cake

One analogy that I love to use (sorry if you’ve heard it before): Let’s say it’s your friend’s birthday, and you, a great baker, are going to bake them a delicious cake. Your other friend calls you up and says they will pay for all of the ingredients for the cake if you bake it, and it can be from both of you. “Great!” you think, until your friend follows up with “The cake has to be chocolate and have rainbow sprinkles. I won’t budge on that. If you don’t do it that way, I’m not paying for anything.” Well, as you have known the birthday friend for many years, you know they hate chocolate cake and rainbow sprinkles. Do you still want to give them that cake knowing they won’t enjoy it? No. You don’t. You would be embarrassed to give them that cake. Also, your other friend kinda sucks. That’s the way I look at distributed ownership. If there’s tons of strings attached around being a community leader, including dictating how to manage their communities (that they know very well and you do not!), you aren’t going to be very successful.

Give community leaders the support, tools, and resources they need to build a community, but also empower them to build in a way that fits their community’s needs.

Incentivizing community members to step up and be leaders is the first step, and an entirely separate topic. You can read more about Community Incentivization in my blog post here.

When you have community members that are ready to step up and lead, you want to do everything in your power to keep them as happy and successful leaders. That means providing tools, resources, and support, but most importantly, it means making sure they feel ownership over their communities. Your community team and these leaders are in a partnership. Always provide valuable content for them to use, but don’t require them to use it. You might have some great recommendations for ice-breakers or networking activities. Fantastic. Share that with them to use if they choose to do so. Also, always be asking what kind of content or resources they want and need. You’ll get a million different answers and requests, but you’ll also find a common thread or two. Let them decide what to do with the resources once you provide them. This is important. You have to trust these leaders to do what they know is best for their communities.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the leaders can do anything they want with their communities. They are still part of a larger program run by your team and some boundaries need to be put in place. Those boundaries help keep the program running and keep things fair across groups around the world.

Some tips as you’re building out a program with distributed ownership

Participation Guidelines/ Code of Conduct

• Create Participation Guidelines and a Code of Conduct that all community leaders have to sign to participate- DO NOT START YOUR PROGRAM WITHOUT THESE.
• Have a plan in place to update these regularly and require they be re-signed on a regular basis.
• Use the language in your community program guidelines as a start.
• Work with your legal team.
• Have a specific guideline in place that makes it clear that your company/organization reserves the right to remove anyone from the program (a catchall).
• Why this is important: Let’s say someone starts charging sponsors $5,000 to sponsor a User Group meeting and pockets the money as profit. Did your guidelines say they couldn’t do it? Can you kick them out? How about a community leader uses their position to share their political beliefs on your platform. How do you feel about that as a company? What about something more serious, like an issue of sexual harrassment? You won’t be able to include every possible scenario, but that’s where the catchall comes in and is extremely important.

Sharing ownership with your community leaders is important, but be careful around framing and messaging.

• The program is owned by your company and your team has the expertise and insight to make the right decisions for the program overall.
• Always bring in feedback from community to influence the decisions you make about the program, but in the end, you as the community team have to make the final decisions.
• Include this in your participation guidelines and code of conduct.
• Make sure there are specific consequences for anyone that violates these guidelines and enforce it immediately.
• Always be on the lookout for behavior that’s being enabled by other people internally and make sure to educate and inform them. Community leaders shouldn’t hear a “no” from you and run to your boss or another team for a “yes.”
• Why this is important: Leaders who think they own the program will expect you to let them weigh in on every decision and will push back with every decision they don’t agree with. This will hold you back and hinder your program’s success. Leaders can start developing their own initiatives with the program without consulting with you first, possibly putting your company, program, and brand at risk. Lastly, your leaders will not always agree with one another on the way things should be done. The community team as the final decision-maker allows you to neutrally decide on what’s best for the program overall.

Your Community Leaders Aren’t Employees

• Many of these community leaders will be highly sought after internally and externally for their expertise, willingness to help, advocacy, feedback, and more. These community leaders are not employees and it’s important that everyone inside and outside of your organization knows that.
• Make sure everyone internally is educated, knows the role of these community leaders, and has either you or someone on your team as the main point of contact for this group (at least initially).
• Have some external documentation about the program available, so people can find info about the role these community leaders play.
• Make sure provided resources are clear–ie: business cards look very different than company cards, provided email addresses have mandatory signature line.
• Why this is important: You don’t want them overworked/have them taken advantage of either internally or externally. You can also run into liability issues if they are mistaken for an employee. While they represent your program, it needs to be very clear they don’t represent your company.

Establish Criteria to Become a Leader

• Focus on finding the right people with the right intentions. Establish a first set of criteria, but don’t expect everyone to be absolutely perfect. You can evolve the criteria as the program evolves, but let it grow!
• Create a list of criteria for your community leaders and break it out into must haves and nice to haves.
• Clearly outline in your participation guidelines that leader criteria is subject to change so you have the flexibility to evolve with the program
• If the interest is too high to manage or you don’t think you’re getting what you need, update your criteria.
• Why this is important: Having an extremely rigid set of criteria for community leaders right off the bat can hinder your growth. This could cause you to keep great people out of the program that you hadn’t originally considered. This also makes a difference if you have a huge influx of people applying to be leaders. You want to make sure that the onboarding and training that goes into each individual isn’t for someone that never follows through.

Always have a clear view of what’s going on in the community

• It’s important to always be able to see what’s going on in the community overall, and in individual groups. If you ever have an issue with a group or group leader, being able to get data on that group is going to be extremely important.
• Make sure that community members know how to reach out to your team directly if needed.
• Send out surveys to group members after meetings. These surveys can be helpful for the leaders as well, but also help you get a clear picture of how a group is doing.
• Why this is important: If you get a complaint about a group leader, you need to be able to go in and view other feedback about that group/leader. It also helps to be able to understand how a group is doing overall. More times than one, at different companies, I had a group leader that used the group as an opportunity to sell their services. With the feedback we got from the members, we were able to see the issue immediately and take action.

Make sure you have the right tools

• Distributed ownership is very difficult to manage without the right tools in place. Make a “vendor scorecard” to determine exactly what you need out of the tools you’re going to be using. Think about moderation, levels of access, personal data, etc.
• There’s a lot of features that are needed for a platform like this, especially when it comes to distributed ownership. I’ve included a list of what I personally would look for when choosing a distributed ownership platform.
• The most recent tool I’ve used for User Groups was Bevy. In my experience, it’s the best tool out there when it comes to distributed ownership/User Groups.

Some of these tips might seem a bit over the top. The reality is that most of your community leaders are wonderful people who are going to bring neverending greatness to your community. However, every once in a while you will have someone who is not in it for the right reasons, and when that day comes, you’ll be glad you have these protections in place. They don’t only protect your company, but they also protect your program and the other members of your community, which is of utmost importance.

It’s a win-win if you do it right

Scaling your program this way is extremely effective and powerful, but done incorrectly, you risk alienating some of your most active and engaged community leaders. As you’re building this type of program, keep in mind that these individuals care deeply about the communities they are building. With the kind of investment they are making in the community, they absolutely need to feel empowered to make important decisions for their local communities. The result will be thriving, authentic communities growing at a pace you could have never imagined.

Distributed Ownership Tools- Platform Vendor Scorecard List

Note: List is in alphabetical order, not priority order.

Functionality/Feature

• Ability to anonymize member survey if requested
• Ability to create events in all languages
• Ability to download events/event reminders to iCal, Google Cal, Outlook cal, etc
• Ability to filter and search across all events
• Community Team Dashboard
• Customizable design
• Customizable Terms and Conditions
• Different access levels for our team and for leaders
• Discoverable Community Events
• Easy event creation process for leaders
• Easy RSVP process for members
• Event emails
• Event Filtering
• Event Labels
• Event publish notifications
• Group categorizations
• Integration with Online Community Platform
• Leader Dashboard
• Leaders create their own events
• Masked member email addresses
• Community team manages onboarding
• Post event survey for leaders
• Post event survey to members
• Pre-event questionnaire for members
• Robust Event Search
• Share to Social Media
• Strong reporting functionality-ability to report on all events, labels, locations, etc
• Strong Salesforce integration