Managing communities at scale

Orbit CEO Patrick Woods and Community Lead Rosie Sherry, discuss how you manage a community at scale and the lessons learned scaling up along the way with Ben Lang, Community Lead at Notion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKE_gNABB10www.youtube.com

Video

Summary

• Notion really focused on the top of the funnel i.e. user acquisition.

• From there, the Ambassador program proved useful in building community.

• Educating the community.

• Identifying power users, and making the power users feel valued.

Scribbles

• Investing early in communities helps in the long run.

• The biggest pieces initially starting up the community were templates and the ambassador program.

• Two things they focused on: Top of funnel sign-ups, helping users understand how to use notion better.

• Lessons learned from empowering ambassadors -- work to make sure they're feeling as supported as possible and helping them tap into what they manage most

• Fostering better relationships with core users - making people who already value your product feel valued.

• Word of mouth is still a very reliable and trustworthy tool that can be leveraged by building genuine community leads.

• Notion employee's favourite Notion tool? -- keyboard shortcuts, callouts, toggles,

• Notion's unique artwork has helped achieve a unique branding of its own. It has also become a huge marketplace for templates, logos, characters, and all sorts of artwork inspired by existing Notion's theme.

Leveraging ambassador programs for marketing

Why invest heavily in marketing when you have ambassadors? 🙃

• No like for real, there are always people out there who genuinely believe in the product and do not look for any monetary value.

• For folks likes these, being part of the community, contributing toward's the growth of the product is more satisfying than the monetary value to compensate for their time invested in the process.

Tips for better community lead

• Systemize things faster.

• Build systems and processes.

• Document everything whenever possible.