Why Community Teams Need An Internal PR Person

State of Internal Community PR

An all too common story in community: You’re working hard, doing all you can, but you’re not getting the recognition you deserve from colleagues and leadership.

There are a few reasons why this might be:

• You could be doing a bad job. It happens, but if your members are happy, then it’s probably not that.
• It could be that you’re working on the wrong things. Because community is so versatile, it’s easy to use it for things where it doesn’t have a unique advantage. If that’s the case, you’ll see disappointing results.
• It might be that you’re delivering value in areas your business no longer cares about. Priorities change, goalposts get moved, and suddenly you’re left working on yesterday’s OKRs.

But the most common reason I come across:

• You’re not explaining the value you create in a way the business understands. The value is there, but you’re either not telling people about it or framing it wrong.

Building the community is only part of the work. You need to tell everyone how that’s benefiting your company, too. This can be frustrating. You’re already spread thin and now I’m suggesting you have to do more?

Sadly, this is where we’re at as an industry. Communities like Harley Davidson’s Owners Club or Autodesk’s User Groups may have driven business growth for over 40 years, but most people still don’t get it. Community isn’t understood well enough in business that you can expect folks to infer its impact, they need to be told.

It’s like the proverbial falling tree in the woods, if people don’t hear about your work (and understand it!) then it’s like you did nothing at all.

You can do one of two things with that: continue as you are, hoping things might click, or you can get proactive and help people learn more about what you do and the impact it is having.

This is why your community team needs an internal PR person.

Become Your Community's Internal PR Person

It’s a role that's part art, part science. You take all the data and value you’re creating and distill it into a story that has your company rapt. Then you tell that story over and over again. It’s not actually one story, it’s dozens of slightly different ones, each tailored to who you’re telling it to.

This could be someone’s full-time job, but we both know it’s going to fall to you to get it done.

The good news, though, is that community folks have the skills for this in abundance. After all, you spend your days listening to people, understanding their needs, and figuring out how to help them solve their problems. You might not be comfortable with blowing your own trumpet, preferring to raise others up, but you’re not doing it for you. It’s all in service of getting the resources you need to build a community that supports your members and your business.

It doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s about taking every opportunity to get in front of people and explain the value prop of your community, spell out how the business benefits, and where you're at with things.

Here’s an example cadence:

• Daily (or at least weekly): Posts on Slack/Teams sharing photos, anecdotes, and wins
• Monthly: A roundup of all the things the team is doing, the results you’re seeing, and what you need help with.
• Quarterly: Taking part in the quarterly business review process or sharing your own progress on big initiatives and milestones.
• Biannually: Community Roadshow sessions with team leadership, finding out where they’re at with plans and goals to re-focus how you can help, and keeping them up to date with how you’re already helping. We created a comprehensive guide to organizing a Community Roadshow, including a deck template so you can quickly get started with this.
• Ad-hoc: Company all-hands, new hire welcome talks, brown bag lunch sessions, wherever you can.

What’s most important is consistency and repetition. You want a steady drumbeat of updates, insights, and results going out to keep you front of mind. Each share is an opportunity to refine your story, too. You can see what lands and what doesn’t so you can iterate and sharpen your delivery for next time.

You also want to share a mixture of update types - from formal reporting with figures that show your progress to off-the-cuff updates that get across the energy and vibe of your community. People respond to different types of updates and you’ll be reaching different audiences, too. Some shares will be to those who have opted-in, by joining a channel, following a ticket, or subscribing to an internal newsletter. Other times you’re getting in front of folks who otherwise wouldn’t hear from you.

Either way, sharing about your community doesn’t just educate the business about your value. It also helps you to identify the important things you should focus your efforts on, and the things you need to tell a better story.

Becoming the internal PR person for your team won’t just help you become a better storyteller, it’ll make your community program better. And you just may get the credit you deserve for your efforts, too.