How to grow an Evangelist for your company

How it all began

I am a Community Manager at Plesk. Ten years ago, after six years of working in technical support, I was invited to go into the R & D department to build a community of Plesk users. For the last 10 years I have been creating and developing a community around our product.

At that time, the company had major partners and customers coming to the technical support service. The company used the B2B2C business model, and therefore Plesk end users did not have access to the support. However, there was a company forum where these users of the company's products came, who did not have access to the support, and whom no one had heard. At best, support officers periodically came to the forum and helped these people solve their specific problems. Thus, the forum was then something of a free Support Helpdesk. Systematically no one dealt with these people. Only lucky people got some help from people from the company or from other users. The R & D department did not receive any useful feedback from these people. The forum engine launched in 2003 was outdated and unsuitable for the development of the community on it.

To remedy the situation, it was decided to unite these people into a strong and effective community around our product. For the community to be such, it had to have its leaders, its authoritative core, its stars, after all. I thought it would be nice to call these people a guru, Plesk Guru. The highest degree of development of the guru would be the Evangelist - an outstanding expert in the field who promotes the product, infects people with enthusiasm and brings new, loyal and loyal customers to us, who is not an employee of the company and does not receive money from us. As IT father of evangelism Guy Kawasaki said, the driving force of evangelism is the desire of every person to make the world a better place . Evangelicals spread their recommendations and attract new customers because of their faith, and not for material rewards.
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The gurus should have taken on the problems of Plesk end-users who could not get official tech support. In addition to helping clients, the gurus must convey to us their pain, desires and suggestions. Using their authority and expertise, they promoted our product on other sites, such as StackOverflow, Webhostingtalk, FaceBook, Twitter, etc.



The company's strategy was to invest in only one Community Manager, which manages the community and the club of experts who do some of the support work and company employees. Community Manager creates the conditions, prepares the ground for the emergence of a powerful expert core, an expert guru club. This is a close and real goal. A further goal, the guiding star was the appearance of the company’s own Evangelist on the basis of the prepared soil.



Over the past 10 years, the composition of the elite Plesk Guru Club has been constantly changing. For various reasons of life, some experts left, others appeared. Today, the Plesk Guru elite club consists of 12 people. Most of them are system administrators, developers or hosters.

The vast majority of gurus are from Europe, but there is one expert from the USA. Their current contribution to the community can be seen on the next slide:



In the above formula, assumptions were made that the answer of the expert, labeled as Best Answer, can be considered as a solved ticket in the support. One third of likes can be considered the same. $ 75 is the price of a decided ticket for the company today.

Thus, 12 experts from the guru club bring the company income, commensurate with the income from working with the community of company employees. And these are people from support, developers, Community Manager and others. In my opinion, not bad at all.

So, how to prepare the ground, create the conditions?

So, what needs to be done in order to create an elite club of expert gurus of your community and grow from them at least one real Evangelist for your product?

1. First you need to create metrics to measure the user effectiveness of your forum. Just the number of messages left is not enough. For this, I launched a powerful gamification system on a new forum engine with a number of important metrics. For example, the number of likes, the number of responses marked by other users like Best Answer, the percentage of responses with likes and Best Answer, the number of published articles and their rating, the availability of a Plesk certificate and others. For these trophies funny icons and descriptions were invented. Thus, in addition to my personal impressions about the quality of the expertise of a participant, there appeared quite objective numerical indicators derived from the assessments of the entire community. A detailed story about how gamification was introduced can be found in my article .
2. The next step was, in fact, the creation of an elite club of experts - Plesk Guru. For this, clear rules of the club and conditions for getting into it were created and published.
   
   
   
   In particular, it was stated that one can become a member of the club only by invitation, that according to the canons of the democratic community, any member of the club can nominate a new member, and the candidate must submit his application for consideration. The charter of the club spells out the duties, rights and privileges of a member of the club. For example, club members have a closed forum section for private discussion of problems and direct communication with company employees. They have a special public recognition on the company's website, their own graphic badges, the ability to get access to early versions of the company's products, free licenses, invitations to offices and to official company events. An annual competition for the best Guru of the year is held for them with awarding cool branded prizes (for example, one of the oldest winners of the competition from Uganda we hardly sent his iPad prize, others received Apple Watch and branded drone, their participation in conferences was paid). described here .
   
3. One of the conditions for participation in the expert club and at the same time, one of the examination metrics, was certification at Plesk University .
   
   
   
   
   
   For the general public, Plesk University was opened in February 2016. Now there are approximately 2000 active users (those who have completed at least one course). Approximately, 820 students are certified - these are 40% of the total number and 50% of the number of those who completed the courses required for exams (we do not have all courses with exams). Each month, approximately 500 unique users come to the university. There are 23 courses in the university catalog, and this figure will increase - we continue to work and create new content.
   
4. For feedback, two main channels were created:
   
   
   • Form for sending clearly structured reports from the forum to the third line of technical support. To date, Plesk developers have received and processed more than 260 reports through this form. An interesting detail: in the form of sending a report, the expectation from the third line of technical support can be selected as “Confirm the bug”, “Help me figure it out” and “Answer the question”.
   • To collect and work with the Feature Request from the community, the Plesk UserVoice project was launched, where people write their wishes and other people vote for them. At the moment, the base of collected Feature Requests has more than 1,300 requests that are in different statuses of work on them. About 650 requests were somehow implemented in different versions of Plesk.
     
5. In order for our gurus to share their decisions, experiences, lifehacks, a special section was created on the Resources forum. The section has a powerful rating system, commenting. Unfortunately, this form of community input has not become as popular as I expected. While the greatest contribution to it comes from company employees. Users and experts still prefer to share their decisions right in the forum topics.
   
6. For quick and not demanding complex and lengthy research of communication on the basis of the forum, Discord chat was launched. Our experts, for whom this format of assistance is convenient, actively use it.
   

These tools allowed us to identify the most active and effective experts. There was a question of their growth and further use of their potential. The most effective received offers from the technical support department about cooperation. They continued to share their expertise in an open forum and at the same time were given the opportunity to work as freelance technical support staff. Yes, this obviously contradicts the spirit of evangelism, but firstly these were rare exceptions, and secondly even highly spiritual bishops sometimes succumbed to temptations. In addition, it was a pure inner evangelism, which is very common in many companies.

In the end, our built expert club development strategy brought results. The greatest growth was achieved by one of our experts from Germany.



He appeared on the forum suddenly and showed phenomenal results in the very first months of his presence. Answers to customers' problems flew from him almost around the clock and were distinguished by excellent style, careful study and the highest quality expertise. Many on the forum considered him an employee of the company. The authority in the community was the highest. However, his main job was not related to hosting at all, and working in the Plesk community was just his hobby. He quickly found a common language with me, and through me with the management of the company. He began to make very useful suggestions for working with the community and participated in projects completely free of charge. His company loyalty and contagion with the idea of ​​promoting Plesk were fascinating. Contributing to the community was invaluable, and it was decided that the company could not afford to lose an expert of this level. It should be noted here that experts are ordinary people with their own problems, diseases, interests and so on. And for these or other reasons, they often simply disappeared after a while. This feature of working in the mode of a short flash of a “supernova” should always be kept in mind when working with such people. And therefore we could not lose a star of such magnitude. To some extent we are lucky. The Evangelist grew up on the soil that was carefully prepared by us, he opened up, and we really wanted to extend his activity by any means, given that he had many reasons to disappear, which we knew about. As a result, the head of the marketing department arrived in his city and held direct negotiations with him with proposals that he was hard to refuse. He, in fact, received the post of internal Evangelista within the marketing department. His activity at numerous conferences around the world has been impressive. He visited our Novosibirsk office, our annual summer corporate party and infected everyone around with his dedication and dedication to the product. He generated a huge amount of ideas and suggestions. It was the Evangelist in the most accurate sense of the term. His contribution to the same approximate formula that was given above, can be estimated in comparison with the expert club:



It can be seen that one Evangelist is worth four to five ordinary experts!

But like Guy Kawasaki for Apple, so did our Evangelist serve the company not for long. Talented people do not stand still, but always go further. In the same way, our Evangelist has gone further in his own way, towards his new goals. They rarely appear, to help them appear, to grow them is extremely difficult, but this is not a reason to refuse it, or a reason not to believe in the emergence of a new Evangelist. For any company, the real Evangelist of its product is an extraordinarily valuable success.

Conclusion and recipe

Ten years ago, we didn’t have a real Plesk community. We did not have experts and evangelists. And today we have:

• Community of people calling themselves Pleskians
• 13 expert gurus from different countries
• Hundreds of calls via communication channels
• Presence on FaceBook, Twitter, StackOverflow, etc.
• Cool Plesk University
• One 100% Evangelist is grown
• Often the word Evangelist is more powerful for the community.
• New Evangelists on the way

Now our pain is that the feedback has become so much that we do not have time to work quickly with it, isolate the valuable from it and implement it as quickly as possible in the product. Now people are complaining not about the fact that no one hears them, but about the fact that their requests and proposals are not being implemented as quickly as they would like. We have built a community, and now we must learn to make the most of what it gives us. The ball is on our side.

In fact, the recipe for your company is quite simple:

• Create a flexible and efficient metrics system to evaluate the input of any member of your community.
• Create clear and transparent rules, the charter of your community
• Give your community members the opportunity to grow and learn new aspects of your product.
• Encourage the success of outstanding members of your community.
• Become open to your customers, open channels to chat with you.
• Be attentive and do not miss the flash of a supernova
• Try to create in the company such conditions so that the star of the Evangelist luminaries for your company as long as possible.

Then you will create the ideal conditions for the core of your community to be powerful and effective, so that once you are lucky, from this core your own Evangelist emerges, a person who with his charisma and energy will ignite the love of your product in the hearts of many people.