Decoding community success: Exploring the build vs. buy dilemma

Building an in-house community entails developing and managing a dedicated platform or space where customers, stakeholders, or members can interact, share ideas, and engage with each other and the brand. This approach involves the business designing, developing, and maintaining the community infrastructure, including software, servers, and support systems.

While building an in-house community offers benefits such as customization and control, it also comes with challenges, including higher initial costs, ongoing maintenance efforts, and the need for technical expertise to manage the platform effectively.

Pros of building community in-house

• Customization: In-house solutions offer the ability to tailor the platform to specific business needs. This allows companies to create a community that aligns perfectly with their brand identity, objectives, and target audience.

• Control: With an in-house solution, businesses have complete autonomy over features, updates, and data. This level of control can be essential for maintaining brand consistency and ensuring compliance with internal policies and regulations.

• Integration: In-house solutions can be developed to seamlessly integrate with existing systems and tools within the organization's infrastructure. This integration streamlines processes, enhances efficiency, and provides a unified experience for users across various platforms.

Cons of building community in-house

• Cost: Building an in-house community solution involves high upfront and ongoing development expenses. Costs include hosting, support, maintenance, and the overhead costs of skilled personnel required to design, develop, and manage the platform.

• Time: Developing an in-house community solution often entails lengthy development cycles, leading to delays in the launch of the community. This delay can impact the company's ability to engage with its audience effectively and capitalize on market opportunities.

• Maintenance: Once launched, in-house solutions require continuous support and upkeep to ensure optimal performance and user satisfaction. This ongoing maintenance can strain resources and divert attention from other critical business initiatives.

• Short-sightedness: In-house solutions may be treated as projects rather than products, leading to neglect and a lack of updates or innovation. Without a dedicated focus on long-term strategy and evolution, the community platform may stagnate and fail to meet evolving user needs and business-wide initiatives.

Buying a community solution from a vendor involves acquiring a pre-built platform or software package designed for creating and managing online communities. Rather than investing resources in developing and maintaining an in-house solution, businesses may purchase access to a ready-made product from an external provider.

Overall, purchasing a community solution from a vendor provides businesses with a streamlined and scalable approach, offering convenience, expertise, and cost savings compared to developing an in-house solution.

Pros of buying from a community vendor

• Time and cost savings: Purchasing a community solution from a vendor typically involves lower upfront and long-term maintenance costs and quicker deployment. This allows businesses to allocate resources more efficiently, start engaging with their audience sooner, and see more immediate value and business impact from their community investment.

• Best-in-class features: Community vendors like Khoros offer expertly crafted solutions with continuous evolution and growth. This ensures access to cutting-edge, out-of-the-box features, functionalities, and industry best practices without extensive internal development efforts.

• Expertise: By partnering with experienced vendors, businesses gain access to strategic guidance and support honed through years of working with diverse customers and use cases.

• Scalability: Community vendors provide solutions that can easily scale up or down based on business needs without requiring extensive development efforts or resource reallocation.

• Long-term vision: Solutions from reputable community vendors continuously evolve to keep pace with industry trends and maintain competitiveness. This ensures that the platform remains relevant and effective in meeting the changing needs of users and businesses alike.

Cons of buying from a community vendor

• Limited customization: While community vendors offer a wide range of features and functionalities, there may be customization limitations depending on your chosen vendor. Businesses may need to adapt their processes or workflows to fit within the vendor's framework.

• Dependency: Relying on a vendor for updates, support, and feature additions means businesses are at the mercy of the vendor's roadmap and priorities. This dependency impacts the company's ability to respond to emerging needs or market changes quickly.

• Integration challenges: Integrating a vendor-provided community solution with existing systems and tools within the organization's infrastructure may pose challenges. Compatibility issues, data migration complexities, and other technical hurdles could arise during implementation.

When deciding between building or buying a community solution, businesses should consider factors such as budget, timeline, required features, scalability, and long-term goals.

Moreover, it’s essential businesses weigh the critical elements that contribute to a thriving community, including attracting and engaging members, providing effective moderation, and assessing performance on an ongoing basis.

With our Khoros Communities solution, these linchpins of community success are supported by capabilities like:

• Community design: Design a brand-approved community without custom code. Get expert-created templates and a simple, drag-and-drop interface to customize page layouts, navigation, brand themes, and more.

• Gamification: Motivate behavior that fuels member participation and advocacy. Score 80+ activities, produce leaderboards, and spotlight champions with unique badges, icons, permissions, and more.

• Community automation: Help moderators work smarter, not harder. Let AI pick up on discussion intent and sentiment. Use automation to filter, tag, prioritize, route, or remove bad content before members see it.

• Community moderation: Make members feel valued. Review posts and conversations from across your community. Respond, approve, or reject in seconds. Get advanced tools for high-volume agent response.

• Community content management: Produce high-quality community content quickly. Let subject-matter experts craft visual posts or articles with ease. Tag, review, edit, and schedule go-live fast. Archive content to remove noise.

• Community interaction styles: Cultivate two-way dialogue with members. Use a host of built-in styles to fuel interaction, including blogs, discussion forums, Q&A, ideas, private messages, and more.

• Community listening: Learn from your community conversations. Identify influencers, advocates, and naysayers. Tap into customer insights that uncover new opportunities or help your brand address issues faster.

• Community analytics: Keep your community healthy and engaged. Use dashboards, reports, and benchmark data to track visitors, usage, trending topics, interaction preferences, agent responsiveness, and more.

• Community integrations & extensions: Empower developers to build custom integrations, connect the community with business systems, and bring community content to more places across the customer journey.

If choosing to build a community in-house, consider whether you’re willing to invest the necessary resources to replicate similar features and functionality critical for a thriving community.

Alternatively, purchasing a community solution from a seasoned vendor like Khoros would enable your organization to leverage these best-in-class capabilities while freeing up resources for building key integrations between the community platform and the company’s customer experience stack.

Here, we explore two notable examples—Airbnb and Cisco—that shed light on the experiences, successes, and challenges encountered in their journeys to determine whether to build their community solutions in-house or opt for solutions provided by experienced vendors.

Airbnb: Building community for hosts

Airbnb, a pioneer in the sharing economy, recognized early on that fostering a strong community among its hosts was integral to its business model. Initially, Airbnb attempted to develop its community platform in-house, driven by the belief that ownership and control were essential for aligning the platform with its brand values and objectives. However, after two years of grappling with challenges ranging from resource constraints to suboptimal results, Airbnb made the strategic decision to partner with Khoros.

The transition to Khoros proved transformative for Airbnb's community. Today, Airbnb boasts one of the most vibrant and successful communities globally, with hosts earning 2.5 times more than non-community members. Moreover, the community has experienced remarkable growth, with a 30% increase in membership year over year. Perhaps most impressively, the community pays for itself through support deflection despite this not being its core use case. This success underscores the power of leveraging specialized community solutions from experienced vendors to drive business outcomes and foster meaningful connections among users.

Cisco: Transitioning from in-house to vendor solution

Cisco, a global leader in networking solutions, initially built its community platform using Drupal, a popular open-source content management system. While the decision to build in-house offered Cisco a level of customization and control over the platform, it soon became apparent that maintaining and scaling the platform internally posed significant challenges.

After two years of grappling with the complexities of managing an in-house solution, Cisco realized the need for a more scalable and efficient community platform. This realization led Cisco to partner with Khoros, a decision that proved instrumental in transforming its community strategy. Today, Cisco's community thrives with over one million discussions and 75,000 active members online at any given time.

The decision to build or buy a community solution hinges on various factors unique to each business. While in-house solutions offer customization and control, they come with higher costs and maintenance burdens, often diminishing long-term returns and community success. On the other hand, purchasing from a vendor provides cost savings, and access to expert features and support.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all answer, investing in a community vendor may be the best alternative for long-term business value.

However, when purchasing from a community vendor, the pivotal decision lies in selecting the right partner. This choice can mitigate many of the typical drawbacks of buying from a community vendor and establish a solid foundation for long-lasting success.

Key factors to consider when evaluating community vendors include:

• Customization: Does the community product enable you to customize page layouts, navigation, and brand themes to meet your brand’s look and feel?

• Community engagement tools: What engagement tools are built into the platform to keep community members engaged and attract new ones?

• Advanced moderation: Does the vendor offer robust moderation tools to effectively manage and regulate community content?

• Community analytics: What level of analytics and reporting capabilities does the vendor provide? Are tools available to track community engagement, user behavior, and other pertinent metrics to inform strategic decision-making and optimize community performance?

• Expertise: Does the vendor possess deep knowledge and experience supporting enterprise communities in similar industries and products?

• Scalability: Do they have the infrastructure to support and scale enterprise communities?

• Product coaching: Does the vendor provide access to guidance and support to maximize the use and benefits of the product post-sale?

• Integrations: What integrations does the vendor offer? Does the community architecture enable developers to build custom integrations?

Partnering with a community vendor known for its cutting-edge features, unparalleled customer support and product coaching, deep expertise, and seamless integrations is imperative for driving meaningful engagement, nurturing valuable connections, and effectively achieving short-term and long-term community objectives.

Companies like Khoros exemplify this standard, offering flexible community solutions finely tuned to the diverse requirements of businesses. Through Khoros’ expertise and next gen community product, we empower businesses to cultivate vibrant and sustainable online communities, harnessing cutting-edge tools, industry-leading practices, and continuous innovation.

To learn more about how Khoros can help your business build and maintain a thriving online community, reach out to our team today. Together, we can unlock the full potential of your community strategy and drive lasting value for your organization.