Bunning’s Story
Explore Bunnings' community growth journey, and learn how their efforts have driven sales impact and improved customer satisfaction.
Summary
Bunnings is Australia and New Zealand's leading retailer of home improvement and lifestyle products, and a major supplier to project builders, commercial tradespeople and the housing industry.
What started as Workshop, a standalone community with the goal of testing concepts without any risk to the Bunnings brand, has since been re-branded to Bunnings Workshop and integrated into the Bunnings brand and digital ecosystem. Today, the Bunnings Workshop community provides inspiration for new home improvement projects and help and support to finish them. Thousands of Bunnings customers seek out and find ideas and advice from the friendly and encouraging community every day.
COMMUNITY SCALE
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167 %
YoY increase in visits from organic search (2024)
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97 %
increase in page views (2024)
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80 %
of traffic to the community is from organic search (2024)
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2000 %+
YoY boost in NPS score (2021)
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Higher NPS
from community than all other Bunnings digital channels (2024)
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50 %
growth in membership (2021)
BUSINESS OUTCOMES
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98 %
YoY increase in online sales directly from community visits (2024)
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AUD$ 8 M
in sales attributed to community involvement (2021)
“Khoros has remained a supportive partner of our community program. Our Khoros customer success manager is particularly proactive and always keen to demonstrate how Khoros tools can be harnessed to help grow the community, improve customer service and deliver on business objectives.”
— Jason Hill, Online Community Manager at Bunnings
About Bunnings
What began as a humble sawmill purchased by two brothers in Western Australia in 1886 has since become the leading retailer of home improvement and outdoor living products in Australia and New Zealand and a major supplier to project builders, commercial tradespeople, and the housing industry. Bunnings’ ambition is to provide customers with the broadest range of home improvement products in accordance with the brand’s lowest prices policy, backed with the best service.
Rationale for change / Business use case
Since the beginning of their community journey, Bunnings has held steadfast to their vision of providing a friendly and accessible space where customers can seek out inspiration and advice for all their home improvement projects regardless of their skill level or previous experience. Every goal the team has set to build on the community since has had this vision at its core.
Most recently, Bunnings had found through their research that most households had many unfinished projects and there was a perception that D.I.Y. was difficult. Not only did they want to shift this viewpoint by empowering DIY’ers to share their knowledge and experience to inspire others, they also strived to build awareness of the community without spending money on advertising. Part of this initiative needed to include making their community content easily findable, accessible, promotable and digestible.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
“The Khoros Care tool has been important in ensuring that 100% of all D.I.Y. questions asked on the Bunnings Workshop community in the past 12 months were answered and that our NPS continues to grow. Meanwhile, TKB and Blog functionality in the Khoros Communities offering has allowed the Workshop team to be able to quickly and easily take the best content from our discussion boards and turn it into valuable articles for our community members.”
JASON HILL
Online Community Manager at Bunnings
“I have personally used this community while working on a home project installing underfloor insulation. I went to the community asking for recommendations on products and how to’s. The community managers were outstanding. Within minutes, they provided me with a list of recommended products and tools to suit my project. The above demonstrated to me just how Bunnings has built and managed a truly collaborative community environment which fosters cooperation and support to their members, by their members.”
TIM DOUGLAS
Khoros
COMMUNITY JOURNEY
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Inception
Inception
When setting out to build their community back in 2015, Bunnings established a deliberately slow and patient growth plan. Their goal was to slowly and cautiously introduce the Bunnings brand over time once a strong foundation of members and content had been achieved, to ensure that the site would remain focused on members and their projects.
In 2021, the team focused on increasing member engagement and participation. Specifically, they wanted to encourage members to share more quality project and DIY advice, ask more DIY and gardening questions, and consume more community content.
Bunnings began their work by building and launching regular member surveys. The feedback they obtained from these surveys helped guide future strategic decisions, including doubling the size of their team to keep up with content demand from members. The team also started publishing more proactive content, such as the Project Gallery, which features the best community-authored projects, as well as step-by-step ‘how to’ guides with full lists of tools and materials.
Technology: Bunnings initially launched their community on Lithium (now Khoros) back in 2015. A few years later in 2020, the team decided to add on Khoros Care and Brand Messenger technology to supplement the Bunnings strategy and help evolve their customer experience.
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Growth
Growth
In 2024, Bunnings deployed a content strategy to feature the most popular content and discussions in articles, while making their members the hero. The team utilized blog and knowledge base functionality to take popular advice, ideas and projects that community members were sharing and turn them into articles that were more easily findable, accessible, promotable and digestible compared to lengthy forum discussions. They also improved SEO by updating forum discussions to have SEO-friendly titles. Additionally, Bunnings leveraged Khoros Care to ensure that 100% of all D.I.Y. questions asked on the Bunnings Workshop community in the past 12 months were answered.
Lessons learned
Listen to your customers
Listen to your customers
Customer-centricity starts by listening to your customers. Bunnings did just that by very early on deploying regular member surveys. Through the feedback obtained through these surveys, the Bunnings team has been able to make strategic decisions and improvements to their community, including:
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Increase team size. An early member survey showed that 85% of members wanted more posts from Bunnings, leading to their investment in doubling the size of their team.
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Publish more proactive content. With a larger team, Bunnings was empowered to produce more content for members, who were eager for more DIY ideas, knowledge, and how-to advice.
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Improve content findability. Feedback from a more recent survey demonstrated that it was becoming more challenging for members to find what they needed. This prompted Bunnings to produce more concise content and ensure content titles were SEO-friendly.
Leverage Khoros Communities to the fullest
Leverage Khoros Communities to the fullest
Khoros Communities bring dozens of robust, yet easy-to-use features to organizations. Bunnings has specifically utilized:
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Knowledge bases to create an ever-growing hub of expert knowledge on home improvement and lifestyle topics to fuel self-service and peer-to-peer learning. These knowledge bases have also helped enable their customers and team members to collectively contribute knowledge and generate content.
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Blogs to publish insights to their members. The team can use the simple content editor tool to create professionally-designed blogs, optimize for community member consumption, and apply SEO tactics to increase community traffic.
Results
Through their hard work and dedication to their goals, Bunnings has reaped the benefits, including:
Increased traffic
Improved customer satisfaction
Boosted sales
Why Khoros Community software
The Khoros-powered Bunnings community supports the organization’s goal to deliver the best customer experience, whether in-store or online. The company highly values the Khoros Communities platform for:
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Platform scalability and stability
Bunning’s community has seen impressive growth over the years. In 2021, the team saw a 50% YoY increase in membership and a 21% YoY increase in page views. In 2024, they saw a 97% YoY increase in page views.
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Painless community content management
Bunnings is empowered to produce high-quality community content quickly, craft visual posts or articles with ease, as well as tag, review, edit, and schedule to go-live fast. The team can also archive content to remove noise.
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Unmatched expertise
Khoros provides the most modern community architecture with the longest history of enterprise-level scale, security, configurability, and uptime.
Amplify your community’s sales power
Bunnings grew their community and boosted sales with Khoros Community. Discover their journey and how it can fuel your own success—book a demo today!