Most people feel that running a community program is a novelty and a big organizational change. Yet when you start looking, you will find those unsung heroes who have been silently trailblazing for well over a decade. They took all the hurdles with great tenacity and delivered a successful community for their organization. A case in point is Lauri Travis(from Texas) of Tyler Technologies . Tyler Tech specializes in US government-used software. She has been at the helm for almost two decades driving a community from scratch for Tyler Tech. We met a long time ago already. She has been a participant in our Community Leaders Forum for years. Yet, she was still surprised that I asked her to tell her story.

Dot Pepsi

You gotta love the ingenuity of the early days of the Internet. Today, there is an abundance of ways to share content across the world instantly. It is an accepted way of scaling your operation. Back in the early Internet days, there were tools like listserv and bulletin boards. Lauri resorted to putting her name on the website to contact. That proved hugely successful. Via listserv she sent customers the latest documentation in a zip file that was disguised as a .pepsi extension. Zip files were banned by early mail servers as potentially harmful. Not very scalable but it was proof that there was customer demand and that they were happy with the knowledge that was shared by Tyler.

Seeding

The seeds of a community were planted and in the early 2000’s as a small firm in Texas, right next door to Tyler, had just the tool: Telligent Community which ultimately became the current powerhouse Verint Community. She then embarked on a prototype project to prove the community investment. Something we recommend standard these days but she had nobody to go to. She tested a forum with 1 product, 100 customers, and - most importantly - 50 employees! The latter group has proven vital in getting a dialog going between the organization and her audience as well as becoming strong internal advocates pushing for this community. From that moment on, the management of Tyler Tech started believing in the community.

The Tree

Fast forward to today. This little seed has grown into a mighty tree. Today 7600 employees work at Tyler. Roughly 40% of them participate in the community and they serve 100.000 members in a scalable way over 180 product and interest groups. For every employee, 13 customers are being served that way. A healthy community indeed.

Lessons and Challenges

One of the keys to operational success was the agreement with the product team to adhere to a cadence of new and fresh content. That could be a blog, forum, or documentation. It has led to the returning behavior of customers and that in turn has led to more active engagement.

As mentioned above, the community manager cannot and should not lift a community into success alone. Its role is to find the energy inside the organization, as well as outside, and enable those audiences to find, connect, and share knowledge. The critical spin-off of that activity was management endorsement.

We sometimes joke that grass doesn’t grow by pulling on it. Tyler has stayed on course for more than a decade now. The vision and the policy were guarded closely. The key is to demonstrate incremental value to the organization and its audiences.

The Telligent - A Verint Company platform was chosen for its agility and flexibility and it has proven to be able to follow the evolving needs of the organisation well. Those needs were largely unknown upfront.

The challenges that Lauri is facing are typical evolutionary. What is better for persistent knowledge? Wiki or Articles? Who is working on AI and how are you using it? Despite the fact that the community itself is gated only for customers. How do you set up a customer advocacy program to attract new customers? The group was able to point her to some good suggestions. And again, we ran out of time. The recording is available for those interested. We do not broadcast the recording.

Join Us

You too can be part of this group of community managers. It is a true community. You give and you get. All members gladly share their stories and also can ask the questions they are struggling with. Just go here and register. It’s once a month every last Thursday. 10x a year. Access is free.

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