How to Turn Community Signals Into Business Impact | Community ROI with Jenifer De Figueiredo

Welcome to the Community ROI podcast. Here senior community experts, founders, and C-level managers tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about how community impacts business growth. By listening to these conversations, you'll get actionable steps on how to connect community goals with business goals to skyrocket business growth while still bringing extreme value to community members. My name is Yuri. I help people and brands shine through communities and personal connections. And my guest is Jennifer D. Figueredo. a community and program manager who blends data science, creativity, and strategy to turn communities into real growth engine from scaling an AI community by 260% to bridging product marketing and data. And she definitely knows how to herd some cats. So welcome, Jennifer. Thank you. I'm excited to be here and talk to you. finally it's been some time but we're here we are i'm happy to have this conversation with you and you know i was going through a linkedin profile and i saw that on your current role you are doing community management for the transition from one company to another and i know it might be hard especially when nobody knows what's going on and you need to like deal with people and talk to them and yeah it's it's so i'm curious what's the hardest part of it um i don't know honestly it's been it was really like uh like a gift to get to do this because when uh i had left dbc i was kind of like not feeling that great about it because i kind of felt like i abandoned the community and so then when the lake of us bought acquired dbc and they reached out to me to help with it the transition was like oh good like it's going to be taken care of the community is going to be okay so it's actually been a really great experience to be back in the community and let everyone know everything's going to be okay and work with all the people at lakefs who are amazing so honestly i haven't i mean there's just been you know logistical things to figure out we had to move the vs code extension from you know the iterative to treeverse and all these things and changing the website and all of the things that needed to happen. But that's just project management. I was just really happy to start getting that done and take care of the community again. It's really awesome that it's in a good new home that is committed to data version control. It ended up in a great place, so I'm really happy about that. Folks who are going through a similar transition for community builders, what is one thing to keep in mind to definitely deal with such a transition in the right way? That's a good question. I mean, you need to remember what it was and how it was. Obviously, things are changing. So, you know, as the community manager, you need to, like, give the perspective from what it was before, but digest what... is now and figure out the way to meld those things together so that you know it's workable for both sides so i think you know there's a little bit of that that needs to happen and you need to be prepared for you know making that marriage happen that needs to happen yeah i guess yeah it's always like keeping like being kind of a mediator in between two things as you've said just to tell people no worries everything will be all right i'm here for you like nobody is leaving you We are in good hands. Let's do this together. And there's been times that I'm like, you know, let's do this. I'm like, but we wouldn't have done that that way before. And I'm like, but okay, we're doing this this way now. And I'm like, okay, what if we do it this way? And so, yeah, so there's just been a little of that so that, you know, things just go more smoothly. Coming back to usual community stuff, I mean, not a transitioning period. So I'm curious, what is one community activity that you enjoy the most and why? So there's a few of them. Basically, I love any time I can see those aha moments from the community with our product or whatever. And that happens in a lot of different plays, whether it's meetups or it's in user-generated content. Right now, a project that I've been working on, and this was a major project that I was constantly keeping going at iterative and I'm continuing now, is the... the processing of all our user generated content um that so i have like a user generated content flywheel basically that i'm listening so i use tools like mention or now i use brand24 to find out what people are creating and then i'm elevating the best content and blogs the newsletter or having them on for meetups and so that turns into like a reward where i invite the best creators to present or become champions. Then I'm repeating that process over and over to provide that recognition and then it encourages contribution over time. That flywheel has been great for getting feedback and creating content that we didn't have to create, that it was already great in the universe that our community has been creating for us. Then because of that, it just builds and builds in the beginning it was just like every month and be like oh please let me have enough content for the newsletter and then because you know i started this now there's just so much of that content that i and then also dbc actually became kind of like an seo bait type of word for other thing for other products and stuff to use because they knew it would drive eyeballs to their thing so now for me to process that content it's become like a really kind of big behemoth as one person so i've i've been working on using ai to automate part of the process using agents and somewhat like some of these tools are great like lovemention.com brand24 but they also do things they count things like that you know might seem like to maybe a consumer um company or a consumer product like as good signals but to a developer community maybe not so much so because they're counting like the number of eyeballs but it's like something that we wouldn't like a developer would sniff at be like no i don't care about what this is saying what's better content for us is if like an actual developer writes something on their personal blog but how many hits is that getting in the world not very many so but but to me that's gold right whereas you know something that might get tons of hits but is just kind of seo fluff like Who cares about that? So I have to filter out, you know, what's actually good. I want to show the community the best stuff. And then I want to get a really good sense of like, are we mostly driving SEO fluff now or is the community still developing good content? So I have taken like all of my judgment from my brain over the years and how things have changed. And I've like poured it into this document that. you know i i give i made like a rubric for the ai to like grade all the content that comes through and so it does that and it scores them and then if it's above a threshold it's newsletter worthy and then it also is doing enrichment so if it was written by a company then it's um you know they find the person on linkedin and we provide that content so the gtm team can be aware of it if there's product feedback in there if there's negative sentiment if there's super positive sentiment if there's any integrations with tools that are beyond the usual tools that we see all the time, like that's tagged and pulled out so that the product team can see it. So it's a way of processing all this that's so much faster than me doing it by myself. So it's been really great. It's still a work in progress. I am happy to share it with all the one man band community managers out there that are having to do this too, because it's been really helpful to me to like get through this. It also pulls out like the best quotes. It pulls out a summary of the thing so that I can use that in the newsletter or for social media for the ones that I want to promote. So I have like all these pieces of what my job has been over the years. I've created a way for this to kind of be automated. So that's been a really fun thing to work on. Am I hearing it correctly that you kind of like take all the user generated content that it's out there and then you are going like you are moving it through this UGC flywheel and it shows you where to put what pieces and how to repurpose this content. Yes, basically. Yeah. And not only that, like how to repurpose it, but how to like what teams if I have it so that it's graded if it's important. because i used to have pull out certain things that were important to the gtm team and things that were important to the product team not everything is important to those teams they don't need to see everything like my job is to filter it out i'm supposed to be their eyes so that they can just see what they need to see and not all the noise right so i'm filtering out the noise and so that they can only see what they need to see so and that's something that i learned over the years that like in the beginning i'd be like oh wow this is cool and i would share it in slack and oh wow this is cool and i'd share it in slack but like they're doing too many things it's better to like know your audience for your internal teams and give them something that they can digest or go back to and find easily so i kind of like filter everything down into a digest form so that they can go and revisit it when they need to not in this completely random manner so we mentioned product and gtm teams so how exactly this flywheel helps them or like what is the business value of this user generated content flywheel so for the product team it's like what to build next for the gtm team it might be who's ready to convert so tons of our users will always be open source users and that's perfectly fine and beautiful and we're totally happy with that but there's some that it may be time to upgrade because everything changes over time, they're dealing with more data there, you know, whatever's happening and changing for them, it might be time for them to convert to a paid version of the product. So it keeps an eye out for when that's happening. And it's providing those contacts or the contacts or those companies to the GTM team. And then also from like a brand standpoint, this whole recording of this and processing of it is giving us like a track of a way to track how our brand is developing you know within the ecosystem over time so looking at anything at one point in time isn't enough you know you need to look at it over time and so like from a return on investment standpoint you need to think of it like thinking backwards like if your community disappeared tomorrow what signals would your company lose Like that's your return on investment. So like this particular thing provides feedback for product, what to build next. GTM, who's there to convert brand? How much brand presence do you need? So these are things that a company can look at and be like, okay, this is the value that I'm getting out of this. It's a good problem to deal with when you have a lot of UGC content. And let's take a step backwards. So how to create this amount of user generated content with the help of community? Sure. So a lot of it is happening and you just need to first find it. So that's why I use the Mention.com and now we use Brand24. And there's a number of these tools also and it may make sense to do like a search according to your personal community that you're helping. There's certain tools that are better. Mention.com was actually really great for like we got more. more signal from reddit and um some other things at that time but mention.com was horrible because we had dbc was our name and it's uh acronym so then you get all types of false positives which was super painful so even if you we put all the filters on it and put all the other keywords that need to be there and it's still every week delivered like we would have to process out all the wrong things so like disney vacation club and diablo valley college and like those we got out but like there would still be ones that show up because so yeah just like newsflash never name your your product with letters just step one um so that's one but like brand 24 it has it's much better about not delivering false positives but it seems to lean more tight to job descriptions like the content that is pulling so each of these tools has a different uh strengths and weaknesses so it's good to do a little bit of research on what would make sense for your needs um to do that I'm enjoying brand 24, but ultimately there's certain things that it's not picking up that I want it to pick up. So like it'll pick up LinkedIn, but just the. like a company post but it's not going to pick up all the community members that say stuff about dbc i have to go do that search separately in linkedin in order to find it so some of it are like sub stack sub stack is a huge thing right now but it's closed nothing is really getting in there so i have to do a search separately and sub stack and there's really great dbc content in there so that's why that's part of how i built like the ugc so i have the processor, but also I have an agent to look through those things as well so that it can go and search for me and pull that up for me, and so then it turns to JSON and then fed to the processor, and so then it smiths out all the answers, and it's great. Anyway, you have to know your audience and know where they are and where they live and how they interact and what's important to them. For my developer community, Substack is super important. And Medium is super important. Dev too, you know, like those type of Hacker Noon, like those are the places that I want to see. Brand24 will pick up some of those later ones, but the more closed systems like LinkedIn and Substack, it doesn't get into there. So you have to do those searches separately. It sounds like communities everywhere. And I'm curious, how do you deal with it? And it changes too. And so that's why I think you have to also be ready to like... uh adapt for the changes because like i i feel kind of silly to even say this but like i've been reading substack now for the last two years myself on certain things that i'm interested in but it didn't even really occur to me to look for the dbc content in there i was assuming that i would see it picked up in brand 24 but you're not going to it doesn't show up there so i was like then i did a search and i'm like oh my gosh there's all this content that i've been missing that's on substack so you have to like keep your kind of ear to the ground about like what's changing the patterns of where people are going and where they're putting like twitter is also another thing it was it used to be super huge and there and there is still you know in the data science space and software engineering there's things happening there but it's also gone kind of dead so like the people morph to like other things and you need to be able to follow that and see where they're going and pick up the signal from there so you need to kind of pay attention to that as well usually when people are talking about communities they mean some specific space it can be slack space or discord space or like circle space or gradle like whatever tool you use but how to deal with such a community that is everywhere like from community manager standpoint how do you manage this community it's this is hard and yeah that's part of what i'm thinking and and this this thing that i'm building is to kind of help me do that um because yes it's very like discombobulating trying to pay attention to all these signals from all these different areas but it is really important that you do it because it helps you track over time where you need to prioritize and in the beginning i was trying to boil the ocean and do everything and i burn myself out. So and that's a very normal community thing, community manager thing. So I realized by keeping the metrics, you know, because like, you know, you'll say, Oh, well, what's the most important community metric? Well, for a developer community, it's loyal monthly users. But there's not like one community activity that you can be like, Oh, and that's what did it. Because there's like you said, all these channels, all these things have to be monitored. So to me, you treat community kind of like your health metrics like you get like a health panel you don't be like oh i weigh this and so i'm healthy no it doesn't work that way like there's a number of things that you have to pay attention to in order to know whether your community is healthy or not so i recommend like start today take your you know weekly metrics or your monthly metrics maybe if that's easier and keep you know all these metrics of your channels so that you can see over time where your community is living and breathing and engaging and then you know like okay i can see that i get the most you know users and engagement in our online course so i pour interest in that in my youtube channel so i pour interest in that and that's where i'm getting the most impact rather than you know dealing with twitter which doesn't get nobody's doing anything over there so why am i spending so much time creating content for twitter because like twitter is better if you're doing it as a person not as a brand as much you know now when you talk about loyal monthly users what exactly do you mean by that so it's it's a metric kind of that you develop for for us it was like if they're using the tool and that we could see that from the command line if they're using it uh five times a month or more than we counted them as a loyal monthly user and so that we used to do that by google analytics but then we started using our own internal um way to count it because google analytics turned all weird and we didn't like using it anyway so we used our internal telemetry in order to to measure it What are some other weekly, monthly, maybe even quarterly metrics that you track and why do you track them? So, yeah, I would track the growth of the Discord server, the amount of messages that are happening in the Discord server, the YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, the engagements that happen and all of those things, our online course growth. What am I missing? So then like all this, the, all the ugc content of course has a count that gets a little amorphous because there's some like duplicates in there and whatever but it's a good thing to track um uh job description for a developer community i think like the amount of job descriptions you asking for the use of our tool is something that has been a really uh a nice signal to know is that growing is that decreasing and of course that matters according to like whether people are hiring in general in the economy now or not like that goes up and down but it's still uh it's still a good signal uh to see for a developer community i think or at least for us it has been and it's also a signal to gtm to know like oh this company is really investing in people that know how to use our tool like we need to watch them so that's important too How do you use those metrics to track community health? I mean, how do you bring visibility to the overall community impact on business internally? Sure. So I do regular digest of what's happening now. So that's like a biweekly thing. And that usually goes out by Slack. And then I think it's important to keep those digests in some other type of internal system that you have. whether our notion or it's a Google Doc or whatever, so that those digests are kept in one place so that if somebody like they don't have time to look at that this week, then in a month they can go there and kind of catch up, you know, so that you don't have to search through slack for all of them because that's annoying. So the regular digest, do the slack amplification with keeping it and then also quarterly, like I keep monthly metrics on all those things over time. that I had mentioned. And then in a quarterly report, I'm kind of providing like, okay, this is what's happening. And these are the other things that have happened in the community. And this is like the signals that I'm hearing from the UGC. There's been lots of talk about agents. Wow. So what can we do about that? How can we make content for that? You know, so like, just like in those quarterly reports provide that type of information. And another important thing about this is that if you don't document as you go, you'll under-report your impact later. So as these things are arriving in the front of your eyeballs, go put them in the little placeholder that you have your task for the quarterly report and for the regular digest and wherever it needs to live so that you're reporting that. that's one thing that i found is that like i'm like oh i'll remember that but no you won't you need to go like put it put a dump even with the newsletter i see things in the community i'm like oh wow we need to talk about and i'll just go dump it into my newsletter doc that i have ready before i've even started writing it but i'll know it's for next month and i'll just go dump it in there so that's a good way to do it I feel like it's also super helpful when you are coming back like three months ago and like, hey, I told you that it's happening. Now you can clearly see. Because once again, community is a long-term game. And sometimes it's very, very, very hard to prove that something is actually happening unless it happens. So I'm curious, how do you get this internal buy-in from the leadership knowing that community is a long-term game? One of the best things is to work with founders that believe in community already and their experience with it. Now, absence of that, then you need to speak in business language. So that's about retention. It's about pipeline. It's about product velocity and delivering that product feedback that you need. So if you're regularly providing product feedback, and then you can see, well, is the product team acting on any of that? No, then, okay, but we keep hearing this signal from the community. We want this, we want this, we want this, but we're not doing it. Okay, well, then I've been telling you, like you were saying, I've been telling you this all along. It's all documented. So those are things that you need to do. This is the important thing. And it's part of what I was saying about making the digest and things like that is that in the beginning, you're delivering things as you see them, but that's not helpful because you need to know your audience. So you have to respect the rest of your teammates' time is really important. And so if you can make it easy for other teams to see value, then they'll lean in and they'll work with you. But if it all feels like extra work, then they will avoid you. You need to do the things and take all the signal that you're seeing and make it into digestible pieces for your team so that they can actually do something with it. Then you need to remind them a lot, and that's just true. I'm personally a person that doesn't like to repeat myself, but if that's you, you probably shouldn't be a community manager. but um but it is part of your job like oh remember and like how many times you know something happens and like oh but this team this community member does this and this and this like and you just have to keep saying that over and over and over and over again sometimes you just have to be you know the parrot saying the same thing over and over again but i think to to really respect their time is to like diet make everything into chewable pieces that they can digest easily and put it in a place that they can visit it when they have time and then constantly remind them so um but just yeah that's pretty much it you you reminded me of member berries from south park and uh it was like remember that remember but i totally get what you are talking about because that's exactly how it works you need to remind especially if every every team has a lot of work to do and they have a lot of stuff on their plates and as you've said if you're adding some more stuff which is not helpful yeah they will put it on some like deepest uh i don't know like backlog anywhere and then they never come back to it or so you need to constantly remind and remind remind and since you are talking about the teams and you already mentioned some of those you were talking about product team gtm brand team so what are just three teams that you usually work the most with when building a community and how does a community impact them sure so product team is probably number one and that's like providing the feedback which is kind of roadmap validation and edge use cases like where integrations like one of the things that happened with dvc was that we it's an ml tool like that's what we built it for but then like we ended up getting all these other use cases that other industries were using it like in graphic design and stuff that they had large files and they started using dbc also so i created a channel and discord that was for like non-ml use cases that those people could share you know so anyway so it was like even though we were still sticking to our ml roots like it's good to know about those edge cases and you know think about that and feed that to the product team gtm is identifying expansion ready use customers like people that are ready to level up basically those are the main things for them and also providing them with like credible voices of like that are speaking on our tools because that's helpful to them and then the third uh one is customer success team so and that's providing scalable education so tutorials examples peer support um so the community reduces guesswork across teams if you package the signal correctly ultimately so those teams end up getting, it's like I'm saying, you just take all of the things, filter it down, and give them what they need so that they can do their job. Like, that's what the community manager's job is. You know, you mentioned some time ago a very good, like, litmus test. If, like, what signals would the business miss if community will be out tomorrow? So, in your example, in, like, where you're working right now, or maybe at some communities that you worked before, What is the number one signal that business would miss if community would not exist? I would say definitely the product feedback, but also and this isn't this is something that is like a little sort of adjacent to community, but like especially in the community that I work in now because I'm an AI and ML ecosystem. So much stuff is changing right now that it's really not enough to just pay attention to your tool and what's happening. It's like you have to pay attention to what's in general happening in this whole ecosystem and who are kind of the winners and the losers and what are the paths that's happening happening right now so i think that's a really important thing to pay attention to and i think if you're in a startup you know you get very focused on oh we're building this thing and we're building this thing and that's your focus but you're kind of like missing the rest of what's happening in the ecosystem so you may not be building a really great thing so i and that's not to say that you need to change course every time with the wind and whatever's happening it's just that i think it's really important to be aware and i think the community manager is able to give some insight into that and it doesn't mean that like i said not everything needs to be jumped on and so we change direction it's just about providing an idea of everything that's happening so that while everyone's heads down doing their work, they're still paying attention to the greater ecosystem. I also think that as to your point, that community manager has to be a person who is a filter of what is community saying, because it's easier to just pass this information to the teams. But as you've mentioned before, that it's not helpful when you pass in like all these nuggets of everything. nobody cares so it sounds like a community builder has to be also like really good in the understanding of the business in general yes yes i agree and just yeah the ways of like how all the business is going i think that's very true for sure you've mentioned some brands uh not brands but like some tools such as brand 24 and you also was talking about slack and a little bit of stuff here and there so um sub stack one of those tools so what is your ideal community tech stack looks like like what platforms or tools do you enjoy using the most for what and why okay sure so i love common room for a unified view of engagement like everything comes in there uh we use it a little bit at dbc and we use orbit so orbit's not around anymore um but i really do love common room i love that i can see also in common room who's looking at our docs that's lovely um and there's i just know there's so much to do with that but i haven't gotten there yet um for social listening tools like i mentioned which were mentioned.com and brand24 but like i said there are other ones um and that's for sentiment and user-generated content discovery and then um for for platforms i think it's necessary for you know like slack or discord for you to have this is purely based on your audience this is a know your audience thing uh your your stack should help you see patterns not just activity like that's what you need to remember like it's great to report on the activity but ultimately what you're building and your tech stack should be able to see you show you patterns that are happening in your community so and then yeah the slack and discord is like definitely a I personally prefer Slack and would love to deal with that as a community manager, but we've had a Discord server this whole time. I think it's totally matters to everything you do. Know your audience, know your audience, know your audience. If you take anything from this, know your audience, dive into knowing your audience. That's the most important thing for being a community manager and making decisions for them on how their experience should be. And for UGC Flywheel, what tools do you use? So, I mean, right now I'm using Brand24. And then I'm using Tinyfish as an agent to do some of the discovery. And then I'm using Claude and Claude Code to help build out what I'm doing and processing the content currently. And then, you know, I'm... in that I'm hitting all those channels that all of our content is in. But those aren't tools that I'm using exactly. Got it. And you shared with me GitHub with all the stuff I will definitely include in the show notes so people can jump and try and play with it and definitely go and ask you all the questions. And that's fine. I would love to help anybody with that. And it's still a work in progress. I'm getting there. And you will have to, like, you will see when you open it up. you're going to have to change the rubric in order to suit you but you can you know give it all to chat gpt or claude and say like okay look at this and then this is what i need you to apply it to and fix it and it will change it so that it works for you and you're gonna have to give some thought about what makes sense and how you would apply points for certain things compared to how i apply points but you know it's a good jump start i think instead of starting from scratch Yeah, it's always amazing to see someone is building. And once again, you're a real human. You're just one message away and people can connect with you on LinkedIn and send you a message and ask you a question. Like, what can be easier? Like, it's just like, and community people are amazing. They're just super helpful. And, you know, I really wish to have the sky is the limit for a conversation, but time is the limit. So the final question, what is one thing to do right away for someone struggling with identifying their community ROI? Yes, then I would say start tracking leading indicators, not just outcomes. So those are your engagement across your channels, your contributor growth, your content creation rate. And when I say that, I'm talking about user generated content. I mean, if you're responsible for generating content, also keep those metrics, but the content creation rate of your community. And like I said, Think of it like health metrics. You need a full panel, not one number. So you can't prove ROI if you're only measuring the end result. You need to measure all the things that create the end result. And then you can see how that's changing over time. And that gives you some ability to make decisions. Otherwise, you're just kind of like floating around, doing a million things. like a chicken with your head cut off like you need to have a discipline and follow all these keep all these metrics so that you can have an idea of what direction to go it's kind of like speaks to my sales background because sometimes like to make a sale you need to prepare to create some stuff that leads to a sale that you don't really count like the sales themselves but you count a lot of stuff like for example if you make 10 sales you need to make 100 calls so you track calls before you go into this specific sales and i'm curious like what are leading indicators in your case so yeah that would be the all of the all the channels that all of the community is in so like reddit substar uh linkedin twitter discord the engagement the messages that are happening there um youtube the amount of comments that are coming through on your youtube videos uh those engagement rates uh their watch time i track that all those things you know but like that's that's the ones that i'm doing basically it's wherever your community shows up and is present like you should be trying to track those things you know so i just gave you the list of things that have been important in the dbc community and like i said that changes over time as people we see more people moving to other platforms or different ways of doing things so you need to follow that and start tracking those metrics too to keep the conversation going name two people i should reach out to to talk about community roi okay definitely gift ashia bulu he is data fest africa community manager uh he is awesome and then also yujin tang who is the OSS for AI community manager. Two great people to talk to about community. Got it. And last but not least, what is one question that I should have asked you about community ROI but didn't? I don't know. Do I love it? You could ask, what do you love the most and what do you hate the most? Okay, so let's do it right now. What do you love the most and what do you hate the most? Okay. I love the most seeing people learn and seeing people grow. Like that's still like the best part is like when you see somebody like come into the community and they're like, hi, and I don't know what I'm doing. And then they meet some people, whatever. And then they learn in this thing. And then all of a sudden they create content for you. And then like, that's really cool. Or in our online course, like seeing the progression and people getting certificates. This is, this is always golden to me. That's one of the things. What I hate the most is I don't love in the developer community that the anonymity of discord. And when, when we had the online course, I was super happy to see that like people chose in that platform to put their picture and the real name instead of like this. And you know, that is just a platform specific thing in discord that I don't love at all. But yeah, and like currently, I don't love reading like 8 million SEO listicles. that are just generated by AI right now as part of our user-generated content. Not my favorite part, but it's nice to have, nice to know that it's important and should be mentioned. So that's good. And that's exactly why you are building your agency flywheel to help you deal with that. So, you know, before that people were just interacting with people and like what someone wrote, you're interacting with this stuff. And now you need a decoder. to all this AI generated stuff to understand where is the reality. So yeah, funny times, funny times. And yeah, Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing all this experience and for sharing your work around this flywheel, like so openly to sharing all this GitHub stuff and like what you are working on. And I'm super happy that we finally had this conversation. It's definitely just the beginning. We have so many things to dive deeper. So get ready for that. And yeah, thank you so much for doing this. All right. Thanks, Yuri. And thanks for creating this podcast. It's super helpful. And yeah, see you in the community world. And thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions about how the community can help you reach and overcome your business goals faster, let's connect on LinkedIn and talk about it. That's it. We're done. See you in the next episode.

“If your community disappeared tomorrow, what signals would your company lose? That’s your return on investment."


In this episode, we discussed how community becomes business-critical asset helping other teams to understand where the market is moving, and which community members are ready to contribute, advocate, or convert, in particular:
👉 Why community ROI starts with understanding what signals the business would lose without community.
👉 How to identify leading indicators before trying to prove final business outcomes.
👉 How community can reveal product needs, expansion opportunities, brand momentum, and ecosystem trends.


Join Yurii Lazaruk, the Community Consultant, and Jenifer De Figueiredo, a community and program manager who blends data science, creativity, and strategy to turn communities into real growth engines: from scaling an AI community by 260% to bridging product, marketing, and data, she definitely knows how to herd some cats!
Together, we're connecting community goals with business goals to drive business growth! 


Connect with Jenifer and Yurii on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenifer-de-figueiredo/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/yurii-lazaruk-community-consultant/


Timestamps:
00:00 Meet Jenifer De Figueiredo
02:31 Mediating Change for Members
03:51 UGC Flywheel Basics
05:45 Automating UGC with AI
09:40 Business Value of UGC
11:25 Finding Content Everywhere
15:32 Community Health Metrics
19:57 Reporting Impact Internally
22:24 Getting Leadership Buy In
25:21 Top Teams Community Serves
29:37 Ideal Community Tech Stack
33:29 Proving ROI with Indicators


#communityROI #communitybuilding #businessgrowth