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The Future of Online Communities: Trends, Value, and What’s Next

Community management is changing fast. From new expectations inside organizations to how different generations interact online, the role of community is expanding, and becoming harder to pin down.

In this AMA, Nicole Saunders, Senior Director of CX Strategy at Higher Logic, shared her perspective on where communities are headed and how managers can keep pace.

Note: this content has been lightly edited for clarity and concision. 

Q: What are the biggest trends shaping online communities right now?

Nicole Saunders: AI, clearly, is a trend. We’re all probably sick of hearing about it. It’s been around for a while, but especially with the way technologies have evolved this year—the new models that have rolled out, the applications that are becoming available—I think more and more people are starting to not just think about it or talk about it, but actually introduce it into their communities, workflows, and businesses more broadly.

But there are other trends I want to highlight. One that’s become really significant in the past year is the integration of community teams with other parts of the business. That might mean community and customer marketing sitting on the same team, or community being embedded within customer success or customer support. We’re seeing a de-siloing of community, and that’s a positive shift.

It reflects another trend: executives and business leaders are starting to understand the value of community, not as an isolated function, but as something integrated throughout the customer experience.

More and more communities are playing multiple roles—support, ideation, customer marketing, scaled success, and product feedback. That broader integration shows that community is becoming a touchpoint for prospects all the way through to long-term customers.

And tying this back to AI: companies are increasingly recognizing community as critical to business strategy, especially because of the content communities generate. LLMs depend on new content, and communities are becoming an important part of the strategy to make sure relevant, high-quality information about a company and its products is visible on the web.

The positive trend here is the rising recognition of community’s value and its connectivity across the business. The big question now is: where do we go from here, and how do we build strategies and tools that effectively support these cross-functional efforts?

Q: How can I show executives the ROI of my community?

Nicole Saunders: I get questions about this all the time: How do I show the ROI of my community? How do I convince leadership that community is important? How do I get other teams to engage?

The answer always starts the same way:

  1. Look at your business goals. What is your organization trying to achieve?
  2. Look at your users. What do they need and want?
  3. Look at your stakeholders. What are the individual goals of the people you’re working with?

That third piece doesn’t get talked about enough. For example, if you’re talking to the CMO, what are their specific marketing goals and how do those connect to both business objectives and user needs? If you’re talking to the Chief Customer Officer, what are their goals for customer experience, and how do those align?

When you map those three circles—business objectives, customer needs, and stakeholder priorities—you find an intersection point. That’s where you want to focus in ROI conversations.

Here’s an example: say you’re talking to the head of customer success, and they’ve been tasked with figuring out how to scale. They have a small group of accounts that get one-on-one CSM attention, but many others that don’t. Their challenge is: How do we make sure those customers still get best practices, product guidance, and engagement without hiring 300 CSMs?

From the community perspective, you’re hearing customers say they want more best practices, more expert interaction, more information. There’s your overlap. The CSM’s scaling challenge aligns with community goals. Now, you identify a KPI you can measure together—something both teams can report on—and use that as proof of value.

You can repeat this process across other teams. With customer marketing, maybe their challenge is finding knowledgeable, successful customers to feature in campaigns. You know those people exist in your community, but they need recognition. That’s another overlap. Build a program and a metric together, and suddenly both teams benefit.

What you’re doing is creating a cross-functional roadmap:

  • Here’s how community influences customer success metrics.
  • Here’s how it influences marketing metrics.
  • Here’s how it supports product and support metrics.

Now you’ve got stakeholder buy-in across the business. You’re showing impact to executives. You’re making the case for collaboration and for investment in community.

The key is always finding those intersection points where business goals, customer needs, and stakeholder priorities come together. That’s where community can clearly demonstrate value.

Q: How do different generations prefer to engage in online communities?

Nicole Saunders: Different audiences have different learning and communication preferences, and that shapes how communities need to engage them.

For example, if you’re running a community for senior citizens learning how to age in place—sharing tips on home maintenance, networking with others, finding reliable support—you probably wouldn’t build that on TikTok. Their communication style and comfort with technology are going to be very different from, say, a community helping high school students prepare for college.

Most communities fall somewhere in between these extremes, with a mix of demographics. That’s why the most important thing you can do is talk to your members. Find out what they want, how they prefer to engage, and then build around that. My number-one principle of community building is: go talk to the people you want to engage.

At the same time, broader shifts are happening. Page views across communities are down. People are turning to AI summaries in search engines instead of clicking into websites. That means we’ll need to rethink how we measure success. It’s not just about traffic anymore.

Instead, we should focus on metrics that capture meaningful outcomes:

  • How many connections have members made?
  • How has the community helped them in the past six months?
  • Did they gain a new skill, find a job, or solve a problem through the community?

This also changes the kinds of conversations happening in communities. As chatbots and AI answer the simpler, “low-hanging fruit” questions, the discussions that remain are more complex, like integrations, edge cases, or real-world experiences. That’s something only peers can provide: “I’ve done this before, here’s what worked for me.” That direct experience will always be valuable.

To support this, groups are becoming increasingly important. Smaller, interest-based or role-based groups help members connect with peers tackling the same challenges. At Higher Logic, we’re rolling out new group functionality this year, and I think that will be critical for fostering deeper connections and generating meaningful content.

Finally, communities will need to bridge the gap between online and offline. User groups, events, and the relationship between community and in-person experiences will play a bigger role in making connections last.

In short, the future of community is less about mass content consumption and more about meaningful connections, peer-to-peer experience sharing, and blending online with real life.

What This Means for Community Managers

Communities are becoming more integrated across the business and more diverse in how members engage. For managers, the challenge is proving value in language executives understand while adapting to the very different ways people across generations want to participate.

Explore the rest of this AMA series:

And don’t miss the full AMA webinar with Nicole Saunders.