Develop Advocacy in Your Community Through Curiosity

In this blog, we'll be exploring the insights of successful community engagement and the four key things that can lead to developing advocacy within your community. We'll discuss the importance of knowing your value and being fearless, flexible, and curious. We'll also touch on the significance of goal harmony and how it can unify teams to work towards a common objective, and then apply the knowledge to drive impact. These tactics will help you become a better leader in your community space

Know Your Value

The first key to success is being sure of your strengths and having the confidence to go for it. Identify your strengths by taking a DISC assessment or finding your OCEAN personality type. Once you have an understanding of who you are from a scientific standpoint, see how that aligns with your day-to-day operation. Once you’ve identified your strongest areas that align with one another, spend your time developing those skills further and sharing that expertise with others.

Knowing your skill gaps is also a great way to understand where to prioritize your time and the members you spend the most time learning from.

Be Fearlessly Curious

If everybody had the same opinion, the world would be dull and full of inauthenticity. Instead of accepting things as they are, challenge yourself to be curious about finding a better way to do things. Challenge people around you in a constructive way to also be open to exploring different perspectives. It's important to constantly find a better way of doing things, especially when it comes to community engagement.

This isn’t easy for everyone though, but you have to trust the process and have the ability to shape your work. 

Create Goal Harmony

Having a common goal unifies teams and allows them to work towards a common objective. The main goal of engaging with a community should be ensuring that your members walk away with a memorable experience and value. Sure, connecting with the product, resources, or solving support issues is important and can generate revenue, but an emotionally positive experience with other members in a community creates a lifetime bond.

Recognize that everyone will have different goals and initiatives in building out and engaging with a community but at the end of the day Marketing, Sales, Success, and Support goals all roll into the unified business goal. If that goal doesn’t reflect the sub-goals of each department, your community efforts will fail to net the results you’re working towards.

Drive the Impact

Finally, it's essential to apply the learning from your community to drive impact. Knowledge is power, but the application of knowledge produces power. You can listen to webinars, podcasts, and webcasts, engage with members and create great circles of knowledge, but it's crucial to take that learning and think about how to apply it in different contexts. The ability to apply knowledge to drive the business forward is a superpower that can take a business from $2M in ARR to $5M and beyond without skipping a beat.

In conclusion, understanding and knowing your value, being fearless, flexible, and curious, achieving goal harmony, and applying learnings to drive impact are the four of the keys to success in community building.