Kelly Whelan (00:00)
Welcome to today's presentation. My name is Kelly Whelan. I'm Higher Logic's content marketing manager. And prior to working with Higher Logic, I worked in associations and nonprofits. I also host our podcast, the Member Engagement Show.

And today I'm joined by Eileen and John. Could you both introduce yourselves?

Eileen Quinn (00:21)
Hey there, my name is Eileen Quinn. I'm a strategic advisor on the success team. Be joined by my colleague John today too. We're here to talk about some of the strategies that we can implement following the report today.

John Yates (00:34)
Yes. Hi, I'm John. Same thing, work as a strategic advisor on the team. Yeah, we've got a good lineup. I love working with Eileen. So I feel like we both have views that support one another, but we also have different perspectives. So it'll be a good talk.

Kelly Whelan (00:51)
Awesome. Well, thank you both so much for joining me. I'm going to cover a few little housekeeping things to start out because I know these are like the type of questions people usually ask. So you will receive the link to the recording for this webinar within a week of the webinar. Usually it's much quicker than that, but we like to give ourselves a little wiggle room just in case. Also, this webinar is eligible for one CAE credit if you are

looking for CAE credits, so you will receive a certificate for that credit at the end of today's presentation along with the recording. And then we also usually add the recording to our website. And today's presentation, we're going to be talking about the 2025 Association Community Benchmark Report.

I highly recommend downloading the full report because we're going to cover some of the highlights of the report today. But the report itself is like 57 pages long. So there's a lot more stuff in there that we're not going to have time to cover today, including some strategy pages and also for Higher Logic customers, we have a couple call-outs of some of the reports where you can check your own data. So highly recommend downloading that report and I have the link and a QR code for that on the slide.

I'll just wait a second just in case you haven't had a chance to scan that.

All right, so moving on, I will also call out what we're going to cover today. So first, as I mentioned, I'm going to cover a brief overview of some of the highlights of the report so you can get a sense of the data that we're seeing in community engagement in the last year. And then I'm going to kind of pick John and Eileen's brains about some strategies for increasing engagement in your online community and ways that you can kind of

get your community members talking more, get more people logging in, maybe expand your resource library in your online community. So they're going to have all those kind of tips for you all. And as we review the data, we're going to talk both about averages and trend and a few data points that we have on strategies and their impact. So we'll have a little bit of a mix of data there. So we'll start out with the data.

First, I'll give you a sense of what Higher Logic's 2025 Association Community Benchmark Report is all about, where the data comes from. For this report, we collect and analyze anonymized data from approximately 1,500 associations and nonprofits that are using our community products. So we have a really wide array of different sizes and different types of associations and nonprofits in that data set. And the data set we look at, for the most part, is between June 1st of 2024,

to May 31st of 2025. There are a few graphs in the report where we look at a longer range of time. So those are called out when you're looking at the report.

And when we're looking at the report, there is a quick overview right at the top of the report. This June to May figure provides a snapshot of how association communities are performing in terms of user activity, participation, content generation. And these are very much in line with previous year's data, which is very interesting. On average, organizations had about 69 to 70,000 total community

user accounts, but the median size of communities was 12,000. So that highlights that there's a really wide range and you can see in the community size graph on this slide, there's a really wide range in the sizes of community and the data set. So if you don't have 70,000 users in your community, that is okay. That's gonna be skewed up by some of the really big communities in our data set. So that's not to say that you should have 70,000 people.

In the community size figure, like I said, you'll see that there's that array of different sizes. Out of the different sizes, the average number of users that are subscribed to at least one community is about 8,000. That pretty closely correlates with the number of users that have activity within a 120-day period. When we check and see how many people are active in the community, we look at that on 120-day cycle and there's a

pretty close correlation between who's subscribed to at least one sub-community and who's actually active. Communities average 1,156 total logins per month and 563 unique users logging in each month. This suggests that around two-thirds of monthly activity is generated by returning users. Definitely sustained engagement from folks over time.

The average of 68 monthly contributors reveals a healthy but smaller core group of content creators. So the folks that are posting, replying, and sharing resources is usually a smaller subset of your community than the people who are logging in and just consuming content. And then on average, communities saw 163 new discussion threads per month. And that indicates a pretty steady and meaningful flow of peer-to-peer interaction and member knowledge exchange, which is awesome.

⁓ For those who have noticed that there's a big difference between total user accounts and users with activity, I do want to call out a couple of reasons why this happens. First, it's likely that many of the organizations in our dataset do not deactivate users because it's not entirely necessary. Sometimes you might not want to deactivate them because you might want to exclude them because they're no longer members or something like that.

Sometimes that average number of user accounts is a lot higher than what would actually be real users. The other thing is that sometimes online community users might be just reading the email digress. So they might have an account, but they're not logging into the community. They're just looking at their email digress. And we'll talk about community digress on a future slide because they have a really high open rate. And then,

Not everyone who logs into your community is going to contribute every time. That's just the reality. Folks are at different spaces in their career, at different places, even in that year that they're working, and they're going to be driven to do different things based on that. So it's not a bad thing to see maybe lots of users, not as many logins, or lots of logins and not as many contributions, because people are still getting value. Also, the other thing I'll call out is

The fact that the average number of users with activity in 120 days, which is about four months, is a lot larger than the number of average monthly unique logins suggests that different members are logging in each month. So it's not the same like, these people log in this month and next month, it's the same people. It's definitely a swath of people over time.

So then getting into community engagement, total logins, talked about 1,156 monthly sign-ins. And then unique logins is more around 563 logins each month. So 49 % of monthly logins come from distinct individuals. So one in two thirds of folks are returning to the community more than once in the month. And unique contributors, like we said, is 68.

which reflects the most active participants. So those folks who are posting, replying, or sharing resources. So again, most community engagement comes from a small but mighty group of contributors who are actively doing things in your community. And the other folks are reading and browsing. When we break down discussion activity, the majority of discussion activity is ⁓ replies to discussions. And then the next largest group is the

new threads and then there's the smallest group is replies directly to the original poster.

One area for improvement is actually this replies to discussion. So this chart illustrates that 59 % of total posts don't receive a reply, which can impact member satisfaction and perceived value. If someone's posting and no one's answering them, that can be a little discouraging. So it's a really great opportunity for communities to increase engagement by making sure that these threads get responded to. You can pull a report in the higher logic thrive community and higher logic community.

that tells you what discussion threads don't have replies, and then you can create a plan for responding to those. And then as promised, we have the community digest open rate. So if you read our 2024 association email benchmark report that was released in January, you would have seen that the average email open rate for associations and nonprofits is 36%.

but the average community digest open rates are anywhere from 44 % to 54 % or 56%, excuse me. So these results, obviously they're a lot better than your average email and they reinforce the idea that community generated content is inherently more timely, personalized, relevant and compelling. So digests are highlighting live conversations that peers are having with each other, fresh resources that are being shared in the community,

and they're kind of proving that immediate value without your association staff needing to kind of manually create newsletters or generate content. So it's really amazing to see that they then have higher engagement. Another really great source of value in your online community is your resource library. So we saw that on average 539 new resources were created in

in resource libraries and communities over the last year. or sorry, excuse me, there were 539 downloads and 293 new library entries added. So you're having both that growth of the resources in an online community and you're seeing the members actually download and use resources that are in the community. So that's excellent. ⁓ And resource libraries represent a really scalable

way to have a self-serve knowledge center for your members, which can reduce inbound staff requests because you can direct members to existing documents or existing answers to questions. Members can contribute their own thought leadership and it's a great place to host archived materials from past programs, so that's cool as well. This is actually my favorite graph from the report and I feel like the reason it's my favorite graph from the report is

You may have seen or been hearing about how the rise of AI, including AI chat bots, content aggregators, and summary tools have been diverting traffic away from websites. So many organizations are seeing their website traffic decline significantly. But in the data for communities, in terms of community traffic and community engagement, that line is strong and steady. So

we're seeing really consistent performance from communities with previous years community performance. And it's not going down as that other traffic, that regular broader website traffic is going down. So that stability in this graph underscores that enduring strength of online communities as a high engagement channel. So unlike web content, communities are really dynamic, relationship driven and highly personalized. They're also a constant source of new insights and innovation.

So as new challenges emerge, members can turn to their peers to discuss them. And these are qualities that AI tools can't replicate. ⁓ Though we will talk a little bit about how you can improve the searchability and knowledge sharing in your community with AI. The community itself has so much value beyond what AI can offer.

And then continuing to look at trends over time, I think it's helpful to point out and be aware of overall yearly cycles. So when it comes to logins, the highest performing months were October and January. My assumption is that's from organizations that support members on kind of an academic cycle. The lowest performing months are August and December, which in my mind syncs with time out of the office when people are on holiday for either the holiday season or the summer.

⁓ And then when it comes to discussion activity, the new threads were most frequent in January, replies to discussions peak in February, which probably syncs up with if there's more new threads in January, then there's more to reply to in February. And replies to sender were mostly consistent because to me that's like you're specifically reaching out to a certain person.

Now we're going to get into some of the things that impact community performance. Examining how community size correlates with user activity, we see that while larger communities naturally have higher total volume of users, logins, etc., because they're bigger, smaller communities often see higher relative participation rates. This inverse trend between size and participation reflects

kind of that there may be this tighter social cohesion and more visible recognition in smaller communities. So if you do have a larger community, one of the things you can think about to build that more like tighter social space is to have sub communities for different groups of people that are personalized to what they might be interested in. So people can kind of either you segment them or they self segment into the communities that are discussing things most relevant to them. And that can help members.

feel more seen and heard because they're not in this like giant bucket of people.

When it comes to long-term investment in your community, community performance, especially discussion activity, increases significantly with age, particularly after the two-year mark. So mature communities engage more users and generate more content, which becomes a long-term asset for your association. If you're a younger community, remember that building this momentum takes time and intention, so it's worth investing in things like discussion prompts,

staff engagement member on boarding to kind of build this engagement over time.

And for the next couple slides, I've been doing a lot of talking. So I'm going to start transitioning us into the strategy discussion. And before I fully turn it over to John and Eileen, I want to show you a couple of slides of data that we have on some of these strategies. So first off, communities have tools obviously built into them that are meant to help you thrive engagement. One of these tools is

automation rules, well, they're called automation rules in Hieratrix products. But automation tools can really help you take repeatable tasks like nudging members to log in or reply to unanswered posts or contribute consistently. They can automate those so that you can really stay on top of driving people to log in or to engage with conversations in the community. Automation is really what makes scalability possible with your community and that's

key to sustaining engagement across especially large or complex communities. So as you can see, the more automation rules that an organization is using, because that's the top of this graph, the higher the engagement points they're seeing. So the more that they're automating things that can be automated, the better they're able to keep people involved. I will call out, when I first pulled this data many years ago, I noticed the 500

automation rules and I had a moment of being like, my God, how do communities have 500 automation rules? But for our really large communities, they kind of proliferate because you might set up a set of automation rules and then duplicate that across a couple of different sub communities. Eileen or John, I don't know if you have anything to call out about that.

and also totally fine if you don't.

Eileen Quinn (16:46)
no,

I completely agree to echo what you're saying here. This is a great opportunity to not only save your staff time, we'll talk a little bit more about specific type of rules we might recommend based on the metrics that we're looking at, but these can be rules that are automatically adding people to communities, putting them into the right security groups based on who they are or member type, which will allow them to see

relevant, customized information when they're browsing community. So I think it's great to shout out anytime you see a number like that. It's just because they can be so personalized by member segments.

Kelly Whelan (17:24)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for chiming in there. Gamification also increases engagement. So you're creating a really dynamic, responsive, rewarding experience when you use gamification strategies. And they can really encourage repeat behavior like logging in or contributing, recognize top contributors, ⁓ guide newer members toward deeper involvement because they understand the steps they should take. So again, here you're seeing

communities that have gamification enabled have significantly higher engagement than those that don't. And finally, having your community as sort of a digital town hall, that's kind of how this slide shows the little picture of like a town square, really helps have a positive impact on your engagement because it creates this cohesive member experience where members know that they can come into the community to access

reminders about a bunch of their benefits or the opportunities they have with your association. And we see in the data that that drives engagement. So communities with the participation add-on, is volunteering and mentoring, see 2.4 times more unique logins, two times the number of contributors, and two times more monthly discussions. Communities with a job board enabled, and that's available in Hierologica.

community at no additional cost, but you have to choose to turn it on. They see 829 average monthly logins compared to that 453 logins without a job board and 221 discussions per month versus 138 discussions. again, increasing the engagement and driving more people into the community.

⁓ Component management, that add-on which is mostly used by organizations that manage chapters or segmented groups or microsites. See 2.6 times more logins, 88 percent more contributors, 73 percent more discussion. Again, huge impacts on engagement in the community. Finally, communities with marketing integrated with their online community, which includes in our dataset both.

folks who use Informs and RealMagnet, so marketing professional or marketing enterprise, also outperform the average community benchmark. So 30 % more monthly logins, 76 % more discussions, 40 % more contributors. And that's part of why we as an organization make those things so easy to integrate with your community, because we know that creating that ecosystem is what really drives members to be more involved in the community, but also

more involved in the programs through their involvement with the community. So I'm sure you're all tired of hearing me talk about the data. So it's time to jump into the strategy. And I have Eileen and John here to give some tips, and I'm going to ask them to walk through a couple areas. So first, Eileen and John, I'm wondering what are some tactics you recommend for growing communities? So that could be users.

logins, that type of thing.

Eileen Quinn (20:29)
Great question. Thank you so much for that amazing introduction, Kelly. When we think about growing our community, which again, both in size and people that are visiting month over month, first thing we want to call out is our automation rules. We just touched on them briefly, but automation rules can be not only just adding someone to a community when they join your membership, but also sending them a welcome email.

So they understand new in their membership journey, what community is and what sort of value it can provide to them. But automation roles can also help us with what happens when a member is six months down the line and they haven't yet visited community. There could be new information waiting for them. This is a great time to, you know, explore our re-engagement automation roles for people who are now disengaged or maybe they've never logged in.

talked about gamification, something that I've had customers use that I think is such a unique way to welcome them into the user experience is gamifying the onboarding process. Having a task list when you first join the community might be overwhelming to a new user. What if it's four onboarding badges that they need to earn? Uploading a profile, making their first post, uploading a resource, or adding a friend from the directory.

This is a really great way to make the experience a little more visual, gamify it, and thank them for their initial contributions. Kelly also mentioned before, auto-subscribing users to a community digest. It's a higher logic best practice to auto-scribe your primary community to the daily digest. This also helps because there's going to be members that are more active on mobile. And if you're not using the app, they might want to participate heavily through the digest.

Because with our Daily Digest option, they can reply right from their phones, right from their email. Auto-subscribing to a digest will ultimately ensure that community content is delivered consistently to them. They'll always have control over their personal email settings. But again, subscribing from one primary community to the Daily Digest is going to ensure that this content and relevant content is not being missed by your members.

And then when we think of how do we grow our community, if you have people register coming to your site, promoting our community across channels, you can use an RSS feed from community to display that content on other channels. If you're spotlighting someone, a community member, share that on social media. It's all about driving our members through exclusive resources or threads, but they might not know what's there.

until we show them and continue to promote that value. And John, I'll turn it to you for some additional thoughts here.

John Yates (23:24)
Yes, absolutely love those things. Anybody who's worked with me knows that I also like to bring things high level and talk a little bit strategically. So my first recommendation for this always is we'll get into this, but please don't put the cart before the horse in this case. While it's important to grow your communities, it is also important to think about when is the appropriate time. So normally when you work with an advisor or me specifically, I'm sure you've heard me say,

know, and the sequential steps, like retention is the first and the primary objectives. That's it. Let's talk about it. My thoughts on this, again, strategically, like you also want to be careful about how you scale, like I'll say intimacy and how you scale relationships. I think a lot of times when we talk about growing a community, we sort of limited to like numbers. But what I would have your organization do internally is thinking about how do you scale the relationships? How do you scale the current experience that your members have?

because what you don't wanna do is to grow your community to a size that it dilutes the current experience, right? And there's ways to do that. But these tactics that we're talking about are also helping you kind of keep that personalization, keep that engagement to make sure that as the community scales, the experience is scaling too. So those are like my first thoughts. I also like to think about, and Kelly, stop me for over time, you know I'm a yapper. So just be like, all right, John, we've had enough.

⁓ But like think about the different channels, right? These are the tactics, but I would also think about the different channels for your community. So one, like am I going to grow my community? I think Kelly, I showed the data with logins. One in two people don't come back, right? Or unique logins, repeated visitors are one in two people, which means one in two people are coming to your community for the first time and then they're not coming back. So if you can capture a greater percentage of people who visit for the first time, repeatedly come back, your community will grow.

Right, so that's onboarding, that's a lot of the things that Eileen said. Two, a lot of people, to Kelly's point, have these large accounts, but only a small active user base. So how do you think about penetrating the number of people who are in your system, but just don't know about it? And I think that's where I love Eileen's recommendation about promoting it across channels, making sure the community's in your newsletter. Are you mentioning it at your event so that the people who are in your system know about it?

And the last thing is kind of like growing that membership pool to get more accounts. Again, I'll just echo what Eileen said about partnerships, sponsorships, RSS feeds, getting the word out there. But I think kind of segmenting the growth into those groups helps me like conceptualize what I'm going after.

That's it.

Kelly Whelan (26:02)
Absolutely. Thank you so much for both of your insights and sorry for folks having to wait for me for a second. I buried my mute button under my screen. So moving into discussion activity and kind of getting people talking more, I wonder Eileen and John, if you can give our attendees some ideas for tactics that can increase discussion activity.

Eileen Quinn (26:25)
Absolutely. It's one of the main questions we always hear is we have them all in this space, but how do we get them to talk to each other? Well, first, members might not always know how they can do this and what they should be talking about. In some use cases, it's very obvious, but if this is their first time on a community platform, if you've worked with me, you've probably heard me say this before, it can be scary being the first person showing up to a party. Anytime that we can seed content,

to help set the tone of our community is going to be incredibly helpful. Now, collecting seed content can be time consuming, so let's automate it. You can use an automation role to reach out to members. Maybe they've logged in, but they've never posted. Here's some brief instructions on how to post, and here's some recommended conversation starters. You can use this as a way to encourage members along their journey, especially when they're new to the platform, and encourage them to jump into conversation.

The second point here, I've outlined champions and ambassadors. Now, some communities may have a more formal champions, MVP, ambassador program, but sometimes it can be really simplified. If you're a new community and you're not sure where to start, to make sure that you have an unanswered threads widget, whether that's on your homepage or we see communities place this on a separate landing page, you can use an automation role to reach out to an active member segment and ask them to help a colleague out.

driving them to this list of unanswered threads, which will ultimately improve your number of responses per thread on average. Drive conversation around events. It is so common to either have an event community, but also to start chatter around real events that your members are going to. If you are on the hub, you know that we never stopped talking about Super Forum because it's something that is always top of mind for us and we'll drive conversation around.

whether it's an annual conference, a webinar that you are posting, or if you opt to host an in-community event, like an Ask Me Anything session, this is going to help your number of discussion threads. And it's something like I mentioned, it can be that the member doesn't know what to start talking about. So let's use something that we know they're going to. Hey, we know you've just signed up for this conference. Did you know that we're talking about...

accommodations and sessions over here in our conference community or even in our all member forum. Last thing that I will call out here is our smart newsletter. If you don't have this smart newsletter enabled, this is an automated newsletter coming from community, but it brings in more content beyond just the digest. It's not meant to be a digest replacement, but ultimately a compliment. It will surface

more than just discussions and library resources, you can bring in events, blogs, top participants, new members, even an RSS feed actually. And it will be curated content, respecting privacy permissions sent to the user on a frequency of either one, two, or every four weeks. So these are some of my initial thoughts on how to increase discussion activity. As always, John, I will let you jump in here. You let me know what I missed and what other thoughts you have.

John Yates (29:41)
No, this is going so well together. So I'll just add to what she said or to what Eileen was talking about. One, we talk about driving conversation around events, I think it's also important to have a feedback group from the events back to your community, specifically back to the content in your community. So what I would do, and you know talked about this with different people, but if you know that there's a

a topic that keeps coming up at an event, or if you just have outstanding questions from your conference, I would make sure that those questions also get redirected back to the community so that you can post those questions as like seed content. So we talked about seed content. We talked about automation rules. But a lot of time, you can also just gather seed content by leveraging the things that you're already doing, whether it's events, whether it's meetups. If you hear a repeated topic or conversation, put that back into the community.

Just again, I'll echo what what Eileen said about making it easy, not just to find the unanswered threats, but to post. I can't tell you the number of communities or people I talk with who don't have any type of feedback mechanism in place for those people that they've lost. Right. And that means that there are people who have come to your community that experienced some type of barrier, right, either in participating, either in posting.

but you have no method of collecting feedback to ask them, what was that structural barrier to make sure that we improve it over time? Those types of things can be implemented with like interviewer surveys, polls, even just direct communication to those people who came to your community that are no longer active. All of those will give you feedback on those obstacles that might be preventing people from posting. So I'll just leave it at that. I can talk about this all day, just be, yeah, yes.

Thanks, Melissa, for being transparent with that, right? A lot of people don't. And you know, you could talk with us as advisors. We have some templates. You could also put that into the hug. A lot of people share their interviewer surveys and questions that they ask to make sure that you're capturing that to make your community experience better. So I'll just leave it at that.

Kelly Whelan (31:53)
Excellent. Thank you so much, Eileen and John, again, for walking through those. I'll drive us into the next topic, which is, so especially as we think about how AI can help increase the value of communities. I'm thinking about how, for example, Hierologic Thrive and Hierologic Community have the AI-powered search bot now that folks can use so that when someone asks a question, they can get a direct answer.

Obviously, that search bot can give better answers the more content is in the community, including resource libraries. And we have this slide on how resource libraries already provide value to members just by nature of them existing and people being able to download things like templates, checklists, documents that your organization puts out there. But I think there's also, again, this value that can be added to the community now that we have

access to AI tools like the AI powered search spot where they can pull from that as well. We just had an episode of the podcast with Kristin Barry from ASAE where she pointed out that one of the great things about that is too, that if someone searches something, they get an answer and it tags where the resulting answer came from. That can also increase the visibility of your resources that are in the online community. With that context,

I wanted to ask you, Eileen and John, what are some of the ways that you've seen work for driving more contributions in the community, whether that be like if an organization is accepting resources to be uploaded or just any kind of contribution?

Eileen Quinn (33:32)
Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you called out how to make the best use of the tools that we have, we need to make sure that we are giving it additional value by having content. And that's only going to make it more powerful. And with that does come a need for more oftentimes robust libraries. An idea here is a call for resources. If we're not sure where to begin.

Once again, I'm saying automation role, this shouldn't be a surprise. Let's use it to save your team some time and energy. You can use an automation role to reach out to subject matter experts, speakers around a certain content or other segments, whether they're active or inactive and provide them guidance and ask to upload any resources that they might have. It can be a resource, a specific checklist like Kelly mentioned that gets a member to come to community.

But now they're staying for something else, whether they're staying to volunteer, they're staying to participate in a thread, or they're staying to attend and register for an event. In order to make your content easily consumable by your members, you can leverage tags and folders to keep everything organized, and that's ultimately going to enhance your search.

We have a new AI tool, Suggested Tags. If you're someone who hasn't yet explored tagging content on your site or is looking to do a refresh of the tags that you've set up, Suggested Tags is going to take out a lot of that work for you and ultimately make things more searchable on the site. We also have a new bulk upload feature which can be used with AI. If you have a new library you're starting, if it's a standalone library or it's a brand new community,

This can allow you to quickly add conference resources like presentations or recordings at scale, ultimately saving you time and you can stand up a community library or standalone library as I mentioned super easily. That also exists though and does need to be enabled in our AI features section in the back end. And also spotlight resources.

I mentioned before, it can be a resource that gets someone in the door and then they stay for other components of your community. If libraries are important to your organization or the resources that your members add, consider spotlighting them once a month using a discussion post, which will then put that spotlighted resource into your digest. I love to try to get us to think about it's all a cycle.

When something is added, let's make sure we have the tools and automations in place to give more eyes and attention to that and ultimately deliver value to our members.

And John, I'll turn it over to you again.

John Yates (36:19)
Appreciate it. Yes, thanks Kelly. Take him down. He's not going to talk about what's on the slide.

Eileen Quinn (36:25)
Hahaha

Kelly Whelan (36:27)
People want to see our beautiful webinar ready faces.

John Yates (36:31)
It's helpful because people sometimes are looking and reading and trying to follow and I'm talking based on experience. So yeah, I just add two things. think we talk about accessibility and Eileen just laid out all the tools to get it into the system to make sure, excuse me, make sure your members can access it, but findability is just as important. If your members cannot find the resource that they're looking for, even if it's there.

it might as well not be. So I just want to kind of harp on the fact that folder structure is important. Having a logical way to organize your data is important. If I'm trying to get into your community library and I see 10 folders that are sporadic topics and I don't feel guided in a way that can lead me to easily find the resource, it might not be there. Or it might as well not worth, it's not worth. You know what I'm trying to say. Sorry, I've been sick, y'all. I'm still trying to just clear my mind.

But that's where our ARSearch tool can be helpful. ⁓ You can put it into it if you have a retard terms, right? Ask the question. The ARSearch tool can help you find it. But don't rely completely on that. Again, just have a logical folder structure. The second thing that I was going to say with respect to community libraries, I lost it. I forget.

Kelly Whelan (37:48)
Okay, I'll jump in with something here too from my experience. So I do also think there's an opportunity here for those of you who maybe joined us for the monetizing community webinar. Was that also this month? Wow. We talked about some of the ways that sponsorship can help your organization make money. But the other really good thing is sometimes you have partners, trusted partners that have really valuable content that they could share in your community as well.

So don't feel like you have to generate all of the content that is in your community. can, like many of what Eileen and John brought up, you can come up with ways to kind of push members to share things. You can also think of ways to loop your sponsors or trusted partners into that effort as well. I know at my past associations, we had organizations that we knew had, for example, a checklist or a template, and we could say,

could you upload this, you can put your logo on it, it can stand as a thought leadership piece that can drive people to your organization, and then we also have this valuable content that we can give our members. So that was incredibly valuable for our organization, both from a money perspective and a more value to it back to our members perspective.

John Yates (39:03)
That's exactly what I was about to say. You really just started to make yourself. You did. I was like, that's where I was going with this. In addition to even like sponsors, I know, right, we see this sometimes as community managers, we're like, I've got 10 things on my plate, right? I do not have the capacity to add another thing to it. I think that's where you one leverage the external partnerships and sponsorships that Kelly talked about. But two, right, like,

Kelly Whelan (39:07)
I just read your mind.

John Yates (39:30)
We know that part of our role is always internal buy-in and getting like the stakeholders, whether they're other team members, whether they're volunteers or ambassadors, how can we offload some of this work to them? Because nine times out of 10, your organization is already producing the content, the reports, the materials that your community members want to see. How do you get it into the community in a way that's digestible and in a way that invites feedback and participation? So.

In addition to what Kelly said, I would also say this is where you work with your marketing teams to get them to highlight some of the resources that they're putting out which are timely and relevant into the community. Now I wouldn't just post it, I mean, it's helpful to post it, but also post a question there and maybe you do kind of a thematic topic where you break it down by insights and feedback and responses. But this is where you could also lean on those other teams that are already producing content to make your job easy.

Kelly Whelan (40:24)
Absolutely. That's a really great call out, John, because I think, like you said, sometimes people think, gosh, now I have just one more thing to do. When in fact, most associations, I think every association I've either worked at or was friends with someone who worked out or talked to that as a logic client, there's almost never an organization where they actually don't don't

quote unquote, don't have enough content. Like almost all of them have almost too much content and it comes down to exactly what you shared before the findability, making sure that people can find things. So that's really a great call out to kind of ask yourself where else or what else you have. I'm gonna transition us into questions, because we do have a couple and I invite folks on with us right now. Also, if you have more questions, please feel free to

put them in the Q &A or if you put them in the chat, we'll try to catch them there too. But one person asked if the report had data on paid versus free communities or gated versus members only. As of right now, we don't have that data mostly because when we aggregate the data from all our customers, we'd have to have a way to tell that they have certain things set up certain ways and different organizations have things set up slightly differently sometimes.

So we can't compare those two data sets, but the one thing I will call out about having some parts of your community open is I generally, and then I'll ask Eileen and John about this as well. I generally tend to lean towards having a portion of your community open. And that's for two main reasons. One, search like SEO, people being able to find really high value conversations that are happening in your community.

⁓ Conversations that are happening in communities tend to have really good search traffic. I'm sure they will also start informing LLMs, kind of like Reddit informs LLMs, because they are people asking questions of each other, so they're highly relevant. And I think that can help bring some traffic to your site and your community. The other reason I think it's really valuable to have some of your community open and public is because

your community and your benefits often speak for themselves. Like sometimes people being able to see what your association does is really what it takes for them to be like, my gosh, I'm missing out. Like I should join this organization because I'm missing out on this. So that's my take on it. But Eileen and John, what are your thoughts on paid versus free communities and gated versus members only?

Eileen Quinn (43:00)
was just going to say creating FOMO. That's something that we talk about a lot when we're talking about how we set up our site, how we set up our logged out homepage, and how we're sort of selling the community metaphorically to members to ultimately log in. I'm just going to 100 % agree with everything Kelly said because you did take the words out of my mouth lot, but it's finding that balance. want to tease some content to make sure that we can create that FOMO and

ultimately get our get our members in the door.

John Yates (43:31)
Yeah, I agree too. ⁓ It is finding that balance and to Kelly's point, SEO can be an acquisition tool for your organization. We know that these search engines, they're looking for fresh, relevant content. So when people are asking these questions, if they find that your community has the content, that people are interacting with it, that they're engaging with it, it only boosted in the search engine, SEO search and optimization process. So pros and cons to it.

But on the pro side, SEO is one of the benefits.

Kelly Whelan (44:03)
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the other reason this isn't directly tied to the question, but that's the other reason I often really highly recommend having a job board in your community if you don't already. That came up during my, I just had a session for TSAE on attracting and engaging specifically millennial and Gen Z members. And in my research, I was seeing that jobs are often an entry point for people to come into your organization because they'll be searching for a job.

and then they'll come to your job board and realize, ⁓ this is also an organization that can help me in my career. So having that job board is another way to draw people in and give them that sense of awareness of your organization that they might not have had otherwise because awareness, Smith Buckland did a report this year that showed awareness is actually one of the biggest barriers to people becoming members. Like the main reason they don't become members is they don't know about the association, which.

Made me cringe because I feel like when you work for an association, you feel like everyone obviously knows about our organization. How do they not? But apparently they don't. Moving into another question. Yeah.

John Yates (45:05)
I'm not saying I'm going to thinking

about the value proposition for your online community. If it is like resource and resource exclusivity, then you can consider that. But especially in today's environment where like there's a lot of information, what people are looking for is that human capital element.

Right. So not just accessing this report that I can probably ask Jim and I to find something similar on, but to access people's perspectives, people's opinions, their experience, like from this data that I'm reading. Right. So I would think about that value proposition for your personal organization. I like that determine whether you want to date this content or not.

Kelly Whelan (45:47)
Great call out, John. I'm glad that you chimed in with that. Another question from our attendees. Someone asked, if our members are vocal when they feel they get too many emails, would you recommend adding them to all the weekly consolidated dry address or going just with the smart newsletter if you had to choose one so they don't feel overloaded?

Eileen Quinn (46:10)
I mean, it's something we hear a lot, so I completely understand. I would say if you are considering starting with a consolidated digest, keep in mind that consolidated digest don't have the reply via email functionality. If you are questioning, do my members use this reply via email functionality, we have a message origination report. This will actually show you how many of your discussion posts come from the email verse web.

It is something that I want customers to be aware of before they consider launching, whether it's like a new community that's consolidated. You can find that report either under reports list, which is our newer section in the last year where you can schedule reports. The other place it lives is communities, reports, discussion tab, message origination.

I'll have John put that in the chat because clearly I need to be fact checked here. But to answer the second part of the question, with the Smart Newsletter, I don't see the Smart Newsletter as a digest replacement. Keeping in mind, the Smart Newsletter is not going to show them every single post from every community that they're part of. It's honing in on that machine learning aspect, seeing what is Eileen interested in?

What do I think is going to be most valuable for her? Whereas our digest functionality is a readout of those messages. What I've seen is either baked into an automation rule or heavily endorsed in like a tip Tuesday is how members can own their email notifications. Here's how you switch to a consolidated digest. Here's how you switch back to daily digest if you're ready to receive more information. We do have communities

on these consolidated options, but especially if you're considering the weekly, keeping in mind that if a post comes out on a Monday and it's a timely discussion topic, there is a chance that that user doesn't receive it until Friday or the day that they have specified. But I completely understand concerns about over emailing. Smart Newsletter does have a once a month option.

So it can be a wrap up that you consider, it kind of depends on what other marketing efforts you have going on that might highlight community, but I would examine them more separately as I don't see them as a one-to-one replacement. Clearly I could talk about this forever, so let me know, I'll chat more.

Kelly Whelan (48:44)
do find my colleague, Sarah Spinoza has said this on webinars that she and I have done before. We've seen in our experience, sometimes people don't see the community digest as like another email either. So I'm not saying that's always the case. Certainly there are organizations where people are just like stop emailing me. But I would also kind of check your, as you roll them out, maybe check the open.

rate to see like, is this very popular? Because it might give you a sense that, people are seeing this as more, hey, this is, these are my peers talking. This isn't like a marketing email where somebody is trying to sell me something. This is a conversation that I don't want to miss. So I think that's worth keeping in mind as well. John, did you have anything to add on this?

John Yates (49:27)
I agree. One of the things I just typically say is, of course, the popular cliche like the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I'm not always sure that's the best protocol with community. Sometimes one or two people's opinions don't necessarily or shouldn't warrant a wide scale change. Sometimes it's just responding to those one or two people. Now, I don't know the case. I don't know the context. Sometimes there are 30 people that are saying, hey, this is too much. You're overwhelming me, right?

But I think at that point, right, you've hit sort of the criteria for considering whether it's an adjustment. So just a general tip, usually if one or two person is very loud, angry, we know how can we go, we'll always have those things respond to that person individually, but check the data and see if they want to brought a change.

Kelly Whelan (50:11)
That's a really great call out, John. think sometimes it's because people are allowed, you can kind of forget statistical significance. Like I know there have been times in my career where maybe 20 people complain about something. So we initially have a reaction of, my goodness, people are really mad. And then we remember, wait a minute, 2000 people came to that conference. So 20 people is a teeny tiny little group of that 2000 person event.

question that came in. Someone asked, what are some of the ways associations effectively build internal awareness and drive traffic to a new community resource or incentive or I'm assuming like member benefits?

I mean, from a marketing perspective, I would say, I feel like I've heard this so many times in my career, layered iterative marketing. So making sure that you talk about whatever that new item is or new program or whatever in multiple places, multiple channels over time. Because if someone's really busy or they're out of the office at an event and you did your entire blast about whatever the new thing is at once, they're going to miss it. Like you can even think of this.

Association Community Benchmark Report as a case study. We release the report, we email folks about the report, we do the webinar about the report, we share things on social media about the report. I will do a podcast episode about the report. Like we talk about it in multiple places because it takes time for people to internalize that there's a new thing available.

John Yates (51:48)
100 % agree with that. it's, and with all the communications that we suggest, it's not just a one-time effort. It's not even sometimes we think if we send multiple emails on it, like people see it, they might not, right? That's just like the case of it. So thinking about where can you have, it has like a stationary asset for the time being where you get.

highly trafficked area. So if it's in the community, we like to use our featured cards on the member homepage feed. If you're a higher logic customer, that's the first thing you see. It's valuable real estate. Putting it into your newsletter, putting it into your consolidated digest, I would think about those stationary places that it could land in addition to the emails and the multiple channels that you're already using.

Kelly Whelan (52:33)
Yeah, good call out. Sorry, just checking to see if there's any more open questions. Do you all know if there's a way to search for content shared in communities that then could be uploaded into the resource library? So I'm interpreting this as maybe someone in a discussion shared a document. Is there a way to pull that? I know we have reports to pull trending topics, which I know has been really valuable to some of our customers for seeing what

people are most interested in, but I don't know the answer to this question.

Eileen Quinn (53:06)
I think we may have partially answered this in the chat, but just to close the loop here. So if someone does share an attachment or something in a discussion post, it is going to be automatically added to the Associated Communities Library. So one way that you can find that as an admin is to check out one of our library reports. Specifically, our Library Entry Access History Summary Report. So many words.

This will tell you how what resources were uploaded in this specific library during this time frame. I actually think it was my colleague Tiffany who added in the chat here too. If you are using our AI search and assistant, you can actually add an agent to a specific community library page. If you're looking to have members more easily search for the content in that specific community. So it can be an agent that focuses on your all member forum or on your

whatever chapter community. So I think we may have answered that in two places, but I hope that was helpful.

Kelly Whelan (54:08)
Yes, thank you so much for catching that, Eileen, because I saw the question. Sometimes I default to just answer it, asking the questions out loud just in case we missed them. Well, since we're at time, I'm going to wrap us up. I want to thank Eileen and John so much for joining me. I'm also going to share my screen really quickly again just to call out an opportunity for you all to share your expertise with us and your peers.

As we mentioned earlier, have our annual Super Forum Conference. The call for proposals opens, actually, sorry, it opened earlier this week. If you want to go to hug.hierologic.com slash Super Forum 2026, we are calling for session proposals. You don't have to be a long-time person to be able to submit a proposal. get proposals from people at all walks of their career that have expertise in a specific thing.

or something that works really well for them. So highly recommend checking that out and submitting session proposals so that we can all learn from each other.

Thank you again for joining us and thanks again to Eileen and John for coming on and sharing their expertise.

Eileen Quinn (55:19)
Thank you so much for having us, Kelly, and for allowing us to join in on this conversation.

John Yates (55:25)
Bye y'all.

Eileen Quinn (55:26)
Thanks everyone.