4 tips from Esri on aligning stakeholders and driving community business value

At the core of Esri's identity is a community-centric strategy championed by founder Jack Dangermond's vision of fostering collaboration, idea-sharing, and mutual support among individuals since its establishment in 1969. This approach isn't an afterthought for Esri; it's a fundamental driver of their enduring success.

This community-focused mindset has not only helped define a clear purpose and vision for the community but has also elevated Esri's community program to a strategic priority rather than treating it as secondary.

Esri’s community is central to its framework, and serves as a hub for discovering solutions, exchanging ideas, and tackling challenges using Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Professionals using Esri's products benefit from the community by fostering knowledge sharing and support across Esri's extensive product portfolio. The community also enables customers to contribute to product development and supports their career advancement.

Beyond providing value for customers, Esri's community also delivers substantial benefits for the business. With 321,000 active users in2022, the community offers invaluable engagement opportunities with customers and partners, resulting in product enhancements, cost savings, improved loyalty, and solidifying Esri's standing as the leading provider of GIS technologies worldwide.

To ensure alignment across the company and underscore the community’s role in organizational-wide growth, Chris defines three primary business objectives to steer community initiatives: minimizing support costs, fostering product innovation, and facilitating growth, retention, and renewals.

Chris's success as a community leader underscores the importance of aligning community purpose and business objectives with the company's overarching mission and goals, ensuring continued investment and utilization of the community as a strategic asset.

Leveraging his professional learnings over the years, Chris's Community Shared Value Model is a strategic blueprint for empowering organizations to realize their communities' full potential. The 3 E's model enhances community program effectiveness by ensuring the development of three essential components: experience, enablement, and evaluation.

"Experience" revolves around embedding community into the overall customer experience (CX). Community leaders can initiate this process by integrating community elements into as many business functions as possible like technical support, product development, sales, and marketing. This holistic approach improves the customer experience throughout the journey and extends the communiy’s impact by adding creating added value.

"Enablement" is multifaceted, encompassing both employee training and customer support. Effective enablement ensures that organizations adequately train and onboard employees to leverage the community within their respective roles. Meanwhile, enabling customers requires providing resources and support to facilitate their engagement and participation within the community.

"Evaluation" focuses on measuring the impact of the community program through a combination of community engagement metrics and business metrics, including quantifiable measures like customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and return on investment (ROI), as well as qualitative assessments through storytelling using customer anecdotes.

Recognizing how intertwined three components are, Chris emphasizes that community leaders will only fully realize shared business value and maximum ROI with all these pieces in place. Along with ensuring investment and development within each core area, community managers should use the Shared Value Framework to engage with leadership and internal stakeholders. By guiding them through the Shared Value Framework, community leaders attain alignment from the outset and help business leaders understand the community's impact on their respective teams and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Chris is no stranger to the iterative nature of gaining buy-in for community initiatives and recognizes the importance of building relationships, socializing ideas, and storytelling to demonstrate impact beyond traditional metrics like contact avoidance.

More specifically, when looking to get buy-in from critical stakeholders, Chris recommends tailoring messaging based on the audience. Understand the leader's goals within the organization and align your languages and community initiatives to serve those goals effectively.

Speaking their language extends to the metrics you report out, too. For example, when working with the marketing department, focus on lead generation and customer advocacy metrics rather than community engagement metrics.

Growth is a journey that requires time and strategic alignment. With over 30 years of history, Esri's community program has learned firsthand the importance of patience and perseverance.

When momentum began to wane for their community, both internally and externally, they seized the opportunity by migrating from JiveX to Khoros in November 2020 to realign internal stakeholders and reengage community members.

As part of this strategic realignment, Chris rebranded the community from GeoNet to Esri Community, leveraged change management strategies to improve the adoption and engagement of the new community with its members, and created a new strategic community vision to rebuild business value among internal stakeholders.

Evidenced by Chris's success in revitalizing their community program, community-building milestones (however big or small) present community leaders with opportunities to breathe new life into their community efforts and should be used as doorways for strengthening internal cohesion.

The journey of aligning stakeholders and maximizing business value through community initiatives is multifaceted and dynamic. Chris Catania's experiences at Esri underscore the importance of a community-centric strategy, implementing the Community Shared Value Model, speaking stakeholders' language, and leveraging community-building milestones for realignment.

For more advice from Chris Cantania about how organizations in the hi-tech industry can foster stronger relationships, drive innovation, and achieve sustainable growth through their community, check out the 45-minute on-demand webinar, “Community Works: How Esri Drives Business Growth and Customer Success.”