How Community Engagement Turns Into Real Business ROI | Community ROI with Jillian Bejtlich

Welcome to the Community Aeroi podcast here senior community experts, founders and silver managers tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about how a 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 on brands shine through communities and personal connections and my guest is Jillian Batlik, a true community nerd in the best possible way, a quirky techy filled by curiosity grounded in data and unafraid of a little chaos, who's built communities everywhere from Autodesk and BAE systems to Zapier and currently always chasing the same question. How do people connect, behave and grow together online? So welcome Jillian. Thank you, I appreciate it, I'm happy to be here. Super happy to talk, as I've mentioned before we started the conversation, I've seen you so many times everywhere, everywhere and I have no idea how we didn't talk before. Still, it's a great way to start the conversation and the first question of course, what's your definition of a community for business? Okay, starting off with those heavy-headed questions, but yeah, so a definition of a community for business is it's actually going to vary for every business. I think that's one of those interesting things, like you know I've spoke a lot of conferences, we've done a lot of podcasts and people are saying like how do I build a community and I'm like whoa, whoa, whoa, you need to define first what it is you need because every community is different. But I think kind of the way that I like to define it though at the root of it is it is a space with shared experiences, shared behaviors and shared artifacts, like no matter what that community is, whether it's virtual in real life, whether it is on Facebook or Discord or Discourse or beansate customer community or it's in your local church or school, you're still going to have all that shared experience, shared behavior and shared artifacts. I think that one's going to continue to bring true. Yeah, you know, I speak to a lot of community experts and when, for example, if there are freelancing or consulting clients, which you know to them and they say we want community and usually they expect kind of overnight success, but it doesn't really work that way, so I'm curious from your experience what company or maybe on what stage doesn't need a community. That's a great question. I think a lot of times the ones that don't need community are the ones that are not ready, just guess how kind of weird, they're not ready to like air their dirty laundry because communities are so public. Even if your community is private, you're still putting a lot of information out there for your customers and your employees and I think if you're not ready to potentially have some difficult conversations, maybe some controversy and things like that, I would argue that, you know, maybe communities not the answer. The other one is where there's no need. I think that's also something that kind of confuses people where like if you give me an example, I see sometimes listings come up for jobs and it's at a company that frankly no one's talking about, no one needs to talk about it. It might be a product that is just entirely too transactional or something along those lines or it's something where customers just don't really need to talk about it in public, like it's something where maybe a lot of PII or something like that. Those are a lot of times the ones where I'm like just back away from the community, you don't need it, it is cool, it is flashy, but if it's going to cause you more headache than go ahead then don't do it. I can imagine some private detective build on communities of their clients and then like yes, yes. Exactly. You know, the funniest thing that when you've talked about like talking dirt about the company or stuff, I remember I had a conversation once with a potential client and I told them our community and then like it will be open space, all your clients will be and they like I don't really think that our management will approve that and what if our clients will start talking shit about us and I'm like that's amazing, that's exactly how we know that you are doing something wrong and that's the opportunity for you to have those conversations and even like help those people and turn their like negative side into positive and live and grow ambassadors, but there are still so many businesses that are afraid of that and I'm like, is it even possible in such the world that we live in when you can literally ask everything in chat GPT and maybe even customers are talking shit a lot about your company, it will be even in chat GPT. So yes, is it even possible not to you know kind of like own those conversations because once again community can help you to own them and come in like to the second question. So what's your definition of a community goal? Yeah, so I think this one's always been a fun one for me because if I go way back to the beginning of my my career, when I was trying to define community goals, they were so community oriented to what you're going, well, duh, like of course they would be, but they were say this like, you know, the number of posts and replies per topic and the number of members that are engaged in the past 32 days, you know, just things like that, which it's funny, I'm sure this, you know, people are going to listen to this podcast and be like, actually, those are community goals. No, in this modern day and age, your community goals need to be aligned with your business objectives. If they are not, you are going to have executives and leaders looking at you with a very confused face and probably trying to get you to change your OKRs and your metrics. So for me, now what I think about community goal, a community goal is something that your community can do to impact business objectives and you have a methodology, whether it's qualitative or quantitative, to measure that impact and progress. But usually business goals and business objectives are around profit, like making money and connect community goals to those goals. Yeah, so as far as connecting community goals to business goals, yeah, a lot of times there are about profit and ARR and MAU and WAU and all those fancy fancy, you know, acronyms and that's fine. What it really is is those you have to find a way that your community, if you can connect community goals to business goals, that tells me that your community is not serving the business. It's not aligned. You have to find a way to be able to speak business language. So for instance, I'll give you an example from both, I should audit us, Zappier, Callamy, a number of the companies I've worked with, where part of my objective was case deflection. We wanted to make sure that we were deflecting cases and so by connecting community goals, which would be things around like unique visitors, page views, you know, our people going to the community instead of submitting the support tickets, we can tell this through self serve ratios, we're able to kind of figure those things out and say, okay, if this is happening, it is having this impact on the business. If you can't draw a line between those two things, you need to step back for a moment and don't even think about metrics. You need to be thinking about your community strategy because if you can't draw that line, that tells me that community might be in a silo really too far away from your business objectives. I know that case deflection is like who almost number one go in many, many product based communities because like people have a lot of questions, they help, they need support and who can help you better, of course, support knows everything, but who can help you better than other users who are doing similar things and who really able to jump and support you as much as they can. Usually people like a lot of helping people, especially if they like your product or sometimes even the hate product, but it's totally another story. So I'm curious, what's easy the goal or maybe what is one goal of the community you are working with at the moment or maybe worked before that inspires you the most. Yeah, so that one's the easy one. My favorite part of Calamity community is so we built the community with the business objective of case deflection. Okay, so like right off the bat, like, you know, we jumped into that. We're like, this is what we're going to do. This is priority number one, but I always like to leave a bit of ambiguousness and squishingness in my community strategies, kind of like a 70, 30 rule, 70%, I have mostly figured out, I know what's going on, 30% is that I know my customers are going to surprise me and where that surprise came in with solution engineering, which has been so freaking cool because Calamity is a wildly horizontal product. Like, I mean, it's wild. So to give you a cool example, it's one of the ones I love. There is a farm, I believe it is in northern England, I want to say, and they use Calamity so that you can set up a goat coming to your Zoom call. Okay, it is five euros for five minutes. These ghosts will show up. You get to pick which goat, like you can pick Elizabeth, I think there's Liz, like there's all these goats, they'll have personalities and they'll show up on your Zoom call for five minutes for five euros. Okay, and I love that use case, love, love, love that use case, but I also have enterprise companies using Calamity that are using them for sales, for recruiting, for, you know, internal education, things like that. And when that happens, there is no role in which my marketing team or my solution architects are going to be able to build enough materials, enough education, enough training for both of those use cases and everyone in between. And so people come to the community and they ask these questions. They say, how would I achieve my goal of setting up Zoom for goats? How would I set up my fly fishing business? How would I set up Pikes with llamas? How would I set up my recruiting portal and things like that? And so we have this amazing, amazing breath and depth of knowledge that never would have happened otherwise. And what's amazing about this is that we know it's impacting the business. It is definitely not the most direct ROI. I'll be honest about that because I can't tell you for certain that, you know, we've acquired more farms because of, you know, having goats on Zoom. But I like to think that the views that I see on this content and the fact that it's getting ingested into AI and the fact that other people are getting more comfortable asking these questions tells me that there should be behavioral change and a behavioral change does have a positive impact on ROI. It's so fun, you know, like when you thought about goats, I was like, greatest of all time. Yeah, maybe literal, literal. So it's so fun because it's you know, I'm currently basically you have both. You have like goats in industries and you have like real goats. So it's so it's so interesting. But and also it sounds like more as people who are coming to the county communities, they're asking for use cases. So how do you specifically use kindly for specific business or specific stuff? So I'm curious, what are there any other crazy use cases? Yeah, yes, yes, of course. So we have, I would say it's a crazy use case, but I think it's one of the most interesting businesses I've heard of. We have quite a few business astrologers. I didn't know that was the thing until about two years ago, and I have since then that several of them, which has been amazing. We, one of my favorite use cases, this was a little bit morbid, but it was amazing. This gentleman is a funeral home director, and he livestreams funerals for families, because sometimes you just can't get there. And he wanted to figure out how to use kindly for that. We have a space observatory in Utah that facilitates their community and public education and telescope borrowing program, all using kindly. A number of farms, like tons and tons of farms. We see so so many things, but that horse riding, llama hiking, goat zooms, cat yoga. We have a kitten rescue in Los Angeles that does almost everything using kindly, including, you know, space and neuters. Just a lot of amazing small businesses, solar renewers. I mean, the sky is truly the limit. I'm no longer surprised when I hear about, you know, the way people are using kindly. Yeah, I can imagine, you know, you are receiving an invitation to join funeral. I mean, like, yeah, usually not everyone will get this invitation, but yeah, it's very lovely, you know, because once again, not everyone can travel. And sometimes, especially like during COVID times, or when it's war going on, or something like that. So it's totally, totally not the best way. And yeah, coming back to this, like business case of business use of case deflection, what are some specific actions that you take to reach that go to encourage your community members to help each other? Yeah. So what's interesting is that, um, again, going back to like early in my career, I thought that when we're talking about these, you know, these communities that can help and, you know, case deflection, I thought that that meant that customers always had to help each other. Like always, always, always, I thought that, you know, if you were answering the question, you're defeating the purpose. Interestingly enough, but I've learned, especially in the stage of SaaS, and how complicated some of these products can be, or how niche some of these products can be, is that it is okay if your customer is submitting the question, and you're answering, like the, you're, you're actually providing that knowledge. That's still a user-generated content, because you're not the one who had to come up with that original question. You're not the one that was trying to think of that use case, or, you know, like, seeding the solution. With that being said, I think that we've been able to empower people to feel very comfortable coming in and asking these questions. We do see people coming in and offering insights. One of my favorite examples is one of my advocates. He is a fractional general counsel, so he's a fractional lawyer, effectively, for businesses. And I know nothing about law. I mean, I can like rattle off a few things, but I can't rattle off anything intelligent. But this gentleman, we tag him into conversations. Every time a lawyer shows up in the community and says, hey, I'm trying to set up kindly for clients that are in jail, and therefore they don't have internet access. Like, what's the best way to do this? He jumps in, and he helps out. And so I think that's kind of if I had to offer some guidance to like other community professionals, business leaders, is Joel think that, you know, if you don't have customers answering each other, that's okay. As long as your customers are comfortable asking the question and bringing in that depth and breadth of their world, their perspective, that's wonderful. And then the second part of this is getting to know your community and finding people that you can lean on and be able to tag them into conversations as needed. I mean, I have a whole group of those that, you know, I don't make them go into the community and look for these questions. I tag them and it's needed and it is incredibly, incredibly effective. You know, a long time ago, I didn't know that community viewers are literally coming and so they know that all their community members and they literally message them in DM like, well, by the way, there's a question, you might know an answer. Can you please go and jump in the conversation? And I was thinking that in vibrant communities, people are just answering each other. There is no background work, but when I learned my world will never be the same because like, yeah, there are like those people who are doing all this background for who know every, every person in the community and then they kind of like, hey, by the way, can you answer that question or that question or as? And how to like, how to motivate people to do it without you? Like, what's in it for them? Yeah, well, that's often a question you have to kind of ask your business and say, what can we even offer them? Like, what are the things that that we can do for, for calendar, for instance, and Zapier for that matter? These are both businesses for people really just wanted to have a relationship with us. They wanted to be connected to the business, they wanted to feel like they could offer us input and, and be back. They wanted to potentially have opportunities, you know, with betas or roadmaps. It's really just trying to figure out what motivates people and then, and then leaning into that. And I think also it's interesting on that one is figuring out intrinsic versus extrinsic. So I have, you know, advocates, for instance, that just darn good people. Like, they are just amazing. They are just so giving and they're just jazzed up about helping. And then I've had people that, you know, I've sent them a water bottle and they were like, oh my god, you have my love and loyalty forever. And it's, it's funny just trying to figure that out. And what's interesting about that is that it also means that when you think about value, don't assume that it's a one-size-fits-all. Like, not everyone is motivated by a t-shirt. Not everyone is motivated by a free trip to Hawaii. You have to figure out kind of like, are there multiple things you can offer people to motivate them? Which is always super fun to explore because every company is different, every set of customers is different. I mean, to give you example, I'm a super user for the platform that I'm on. Like, I'll be honest, I am engaged. No wonder, no wonder. Yeah, like, I am, I am a gay site platinum advocate is what I'm called. I literally have a varsity jacket in the closet behind me that they gave me in May when I was at their conference because I'm like one of the special ones. Evidently, I'm very motivated by varsity jackets and food. Who knew? So, but once again, you know, I feel like it's more like of a token of respect or acknowledgement. So it's like when you literally tell them like, I see you, I hear you, I admire you and I cherish you. Not in a way that I want to buy you with a jacket because otherwise, if you kind of like start to give people money, once again, it's maybe not nothing bad, like given them some certificates, whatever, but it's more like it's becoming more transactional and I don't really think that it's kind of community. It's kind of like you are just hiring contractors who are doing some job for you if you're like paying them. So it's always, it's always about the question of how to ensure that you are not turn it into the work relationships because otherwise, I think it will be hard. Have you ever had this experience when you did something for a community member, send them something and then it kind of turned into this work relationship? Oh, yeah. Yeah. There was a super user I had at one company. I will not name the company. I will not name them, but they very much got way too sucked into the leaderboard, a way to sucked into the advocacy program to the point where they started trying to gain the system, like just way too much. And it was frustrating because they became very robotic in their responses. They, I mean, we had a running joke for a long time. We didn't even think this person was real. We thought that they were like, it was actually slightly for AI, I became a thing, but like now, I could pretty much say like with guarantee like, oh, this person is like an AI generated like humanoid. It was like that type of like situation and it was an interesting lesson learned of that you definitely can make things too transactional. And I definitely learned to kind of be careful about that. Yeah, you know, currently there are some people on LinkedIn who are using AI to answer to make comments. And you clearly can understand when there is even if people are like not everyone is a writer, but you can clearly distinguish when it's written by AI because it literally gives you the summary of what you just wrote and asks some stupid question. And I'm like, why do you do that? Like, why do you even spend time for doing that? Are you trying to hide the algorithm? I don't think that it really works because algorithm is not that stupid. I think that they can also understand where there are AI generated comments or where not. But who knows? Anyway, everyone like people are different people. And you already told me about a case deflection. So it sounds like customer support team. I'm curious, what are two more teams that you usually work the most when you build a community? And how does community impact them? Yeah, for sure. So I would say engineering and product are a very, very big one for me. This is not going to be for every company. Like, I mean, obviously, if you're more of a marketing community or events community and you're not getting feedback, product and engineering might not be your thing. I'm actually, my background is in engineering. So I tend to get drawn towards my own people, like the nerds, the geeks. And so I spend a lot time with them, but having a really good relationship with them is important and also knowing how to communicate. We have a lot of like voice of customer programs that I've worked with in the past, and I work with right now. And then the other team, I will admit right now is the team I sit in, but marketing. I actually just recently got moved from being a customer experience over to our brand and product marketing team. I was already doing a ton of work with them, so it was like no surprise. It wasn't even a change, really. But that's a group that say, you know, figuring out how to weave community, community stories, solution, engineering into everything that they do is really, really important. And also for us, it was figuring out how to elevate our advocates. That was probably the biggest thing that we get asked a lot is, hey, do you have a user who's in this specific business, this specific country? It's really good on camera on stage and you know, trying to find that needle in a haystack is really interesting. And so it's been fun to kind of see my community program like, you know, ebb and flow and morph and shift and all that fun stuff over time as we kind of grow our strategy and our offerings and services. You know, it's very rare when community has own seat at the management table because usually it's under customer support or under marketing or under product or whatever. Some curious from York's parents, who chooses what team does community relate to? As I always say to everyone, we have to sit somewhere. Unfortunately, very few companies have gotten to the point of giving community their own function or own department. I think where I'm kind of right now is like figuring out where does your community start? Like where does it where can it incubate best? Is where you should start out? And in my situation, I did start out at how many in our customer experience departments, specifically in our customer support programs. That was a great place for us to grow because we needed to kind of like get that wealth and depth and breadth of knowledge, you know, really onto the community. We needed to figure out who our advocates were and everything like that. And then finally getting picked up, moved over to marketing made a lot of sense because we're at the point where the support engine is kind of running, really, really, really well. I mean, like we have a great system. We have so many things that you can Google and either find through an AI overview or you can find it directly in our domain. So now we're at the point of trying to elevate, you know, our positioning, like how are we actually impacting the brand? How are we talking about our product releases? And so it's made a lot of sense to kind of move over there. So I guess kind of like the TLDR of my answer there is there is no one right place for your community to set. I would argue that you probably should not sit in finance and you probably shouldn't sit in security. There's only two functions I haven't worked for so far. I mean, it's possible. You never know, you never know exactly. Yeah, you never know. But all other functions seem kind of fair game. I would caution against starting community in marketing though, because I do find a lot of times the marketing team is not ready for feedback, whereas CX and engineering and product are going to be more ready. So if you think you're in a situation where you might get some criticism, maybe don't start marketing. If you think it's going to be happy and great and lots of productivity and, you know, advocacy, maybe marketing is okay. Not to the point that you usually as a community, you know, a lot of people and you know, a lot of their backgrounds. So security my old marks will be a good place for why not? It could be. It's the old like as the finance is fairly the only two I haven't reported to you so far. If I've literally reported to HR, CX, marketing, product, engineering, quality, I've reported almost every function I can think of at this point across my career. Not finance, not security. The world's now going to laugh at me and just watch my next chapter is going to be like, security. You know, you told about marketing product that there are difference in between how how teams are listening. And I'm curious, how do you bring visibility to the overall community impact on business internally? And by saying internally, I mean to those teams and also to like higher management. Being really loud. It's kind of like the best way to put it. No, I think I think a lot of it is that you have to be okay with amplifying your voice, getting out of your spin lane, getting out of your silo. And kind of just accepting that yeah, you might sit in a specific function, but actually you impact everyone. And so a lot of that sometimes means like for instance, in my early days of running community here at Calamly, I would do a monthly all company report that I would send out in our like big team channel and be like, Hey, here's what happened in community this month. And here's how it impacts all of you. No one else was doing that. Like that was not something people were doing across the company. And it was interesting because at first I thought, Oh, no, people are going to be like, ah, she's taking up space. She's being loud. And I've had a lot of people be like, that was great. I loved it. It helped me figure out what community was. I figured out how to like use it. And we're continuing to do that now. Like we have a roundup we do every month across all of our online presence. Where we talk about what we're seeing, how it's impacting us, where are the trends, the observations, what are some great customer stories. So I think it's a matter of being being loud. Don't be afraid to get out of your swim lane. Um, try to figure out how to like not worry about hierarchy. Um, like it's okay. If you're just a lowly community professional, um, and you're not a director, you're not a VP, it's okay. Like you can talk to get the whole company. Well, it's a fun that you mentioned that because I see a lot, especially in corporate structures, people are kind of like, if being afraid of titles. And I'm like directors and CEOs and managing directors, whatever you call them. They are humans. So they're not robots. They're not aliens. They're not from other planets. They're humans like you and me. And maybe outside of the company, if you met them on the street, you wouldn't know that they're CEOs or whatever. You would ask them for direction. The same way you would ask any other person. Like why are you afraid of them in the company? Like it's so weird, but yeah, it still exists. It exists. So I feel like stepping out and being loud. Uh, how do you feel when, okay, so you already told like when you've done it for the first time, how do you feel about it now? How do I show about now? Uh, comfortable. Yeah, no, I think, I think it's funny. Like I, I've, I've built a bit of a reputation up for myself in every company I've worked for for being loud and blunt and passionate. Um, and, and very just comfortable speaking to people. Um, I tend to use this rule in my head of that if I ran into someone at a grocery store, when I know that they were anymore special than me. Uh, and if I don't, then like I'm not going to freak out about talking to them. Um, and that's made it very, very easy for me to kind of go around the company and, and, you know, get to know people and build relationships. Um, the other thing I think that's interesting too. And you're kind of staying about like, Oh, you know, when you first started versus now. So yeah, I did a bunch of like talking to people when I first started, I built up relationships. Here I am two and a half years into running community here at Cal only. And I'm actually about to embark on a virtual road show across the company all over again to introduce myself, introduce my team, introduce our strategy. And I think it's important for people to remember just because you didn't once doesn't mean you can stop doing it. You have to constantly be out there talking about it. And the reason being is that your customers are constantly bringing new things to you. So you can't assume that, you know, people know, like you have to constantly be promoting, talking, connecting, relating, all that fun stuff. Now I recently started going out to community viewers and ask them questions like what would you like to know from community experts from other companies, you know, to kind of like ensure that these podcasts are speaking to specific, not just general thoughts, but like to specific points. And I feel like you already have answered that question, but this question that I recently had from one of the persons is how to get leadership on board and invested when community is a long term ROI. Yeah, that's a good question. I'm going to go back to kind of something I said really early on, which was you have to be able to speak their language and you have to be related to business objectives. If you can't do that, they're going to have a hard time getting on board with what it is you're telling them. So for instance, let's say you're going to try to start a support community, okay? So you are going from round zero, there is nothing. You don't even have a platform, but you need leadership to get bought in. And you know it's going to take a while to get to the point of positive ROI. It's a matter of being able to explain to them, you know, hey, we're going to start up this community. We are going to be getting customer questions. We're going to promptly answer these customer questions in a way that's going to be effective one to many. We're going to dominate SEO when it comes to our product. You know, we're going to build up an incredible collective resource and knowledge base. Being able to talk like that and explain the forward vision and being able to put it into words that they understand of like this will deflect support tickets, this will raise product awareness, this will increase product adoption, really gets them to understand that. I think the other big thing too is I like to under promise and over deliver. And you know, it's funny. Like I feel like I'm hoping none of my leadership is looking out. It's fine if they hear that. They know this about me. Like they can definitely tell at this point that I always like to kind of say, here's my confident objective. This is what I think I can do. They know I'm going to go do 150% and try to over deliver something absolutely ludicrous. But I think that's kind of, you know, some really good advice there is make sure that as you're talking to your leadership don't be like, I am going to single-handedly revolutionize this company and increase our ROI and ARR by 300%. No, don't, don't do that. Try to come up with something that you know that community realistically can do and commit to that and also try to drive them away from things that don't make any sense. Like one of them, for instance, I've every job I've been at. I've always been asked, well, is your membership growing? Your membership don't matter. Like unless you are a membership-based organization, so something where membership is your ARR, that metric doesn't make any sense, especially for a support community. Like we love lurkers. Lurkers add absolutely no cost and actually help us deflect potential costs. So, love them. Yeah, you are still on top of their minds, you know, because I also hear a lot that many people are trying to engage lurkers and then I also hear the stories that lurkers don't want to be engaged. So, they do not ask you to engage them. If they are still in the community and they're inside and they're like getting what they want, they are already getting what they need. They are. They actually ask you to send them like 10 more DMs asking, hey, what can I do for you? How can I ensure that you are engaged? No, they have lives. So, just leave them alone and like focus on your ambassadors, on your active members and like let those people be. Yeah. So, AI, of course, it's happening. Yeah. So, I'm curious, how do you use AI in your community building process? So, we use it a ton, actually. When I was in Zapier, I was very fortunate that Zapier got involved in the AI world so early on, like very, very early on. And so, I got to start playing with AI models and open AI and automations and web hooks and all that fun stuff way sooner than I think a lot of people did. And it's been interesting to kind of try to maintain this mindset of AI for good. I mean, I think there's a lot of AI slop out there, but I think there's also a lot of good AI can do. So, a short list of things that we're doing is we use AI to help us scale how much we can do in our community. One of my favorite examples is that we get a lot of spam. It's just the nature of a public community, especially support communities. We get a lot of spam. And historically spam with stuff that you look at and you're like, that spam. Your filters could grab it and shoot into the sun and it was great. But because of AI, we're now starting to see spam that looks like legitimate content, but it then has malicious intent or has malicious links somewhere in it. And so we use AI to detect AI using linguistic modeling. So that's been like a really fun project that we've been doing. We're also doing a lot of work right now where we're actually optimizing the content on community for AI ingestion using AI very better. It's very like inception, but it is. Yeah, exactly. But it's really cool because what's happening is that we, I'll be honest, we have seen a significant decrease in the number of page views and unique visitors since June of last year. And the reason being is that AI overview and Google started from a shaking over the world. The problem is that AI overview just pulls in whatever makes sense from an algorithmic perspective, not actually what's right. And so we decided, all right, let's just embrace that. Like let's embrace the impressions that we're getting and the fact that people are getting their answers through AI overview. What if we made sure it was pulling in the most relevant, the most accurate, the most timely, and the most correct information. And so that's been a huge project over here. And it's working. Like it is so incredibly working. My gentleman who's leading that project, he came me last month and he said, we've seen a 300 percent increase on that content alone. I was like, holy cow, that's amazing. So yeah, just using AI for things like that, doing a lot of things with like agentic AI feedback, trying to analyze our community for sentiment, with feedback, observations, trends, and all sorts of stuff like that. It's basically AI is really good at sifting through data. It's not very good at acting like a human. So we're going to use AI where AI is uniquely qualified and let us go be uniquely qualified as humans. I still remember those days when community leaders had to be this computer in machines that they had to go through tons and tons of data, find valuable content, put it into knowledge base, and then like to summarize and create a newsletter, and now it's everything on fingertips. I feel like you actually have time to be human, not to do this robotic work because it can do it for you, but more like have better decisions and bring more human sight into the community because sometimes it's not that easy when you have like a ton of data to deal with. And I wish to have the sky as a limit to our conversation, but time is a limit. So the final question, what is one thing to do right away for someone struggling with identifying their community ROI? Go look at your business objectives. And I mean, this is going to sound goofy. Literally open up Google sheets, Excel, whatever y'all want to use. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me. You can use post notes for all that care. Write down each business objective and then brainstorm what is something that the community does that impacts that business objective. And then try to draw a relationship between those two things and say, how could I qualitatively or quantitatively report on how the community is positively or negatively for that matter, impacting the business objective? That is the best thing you can do. There are a number of formulas out there that talk about, you know, page views, unique visitors, deflection rates, costs to tickets, all that fun stuff. Those are good if you're running a support community, but there are so many types of communities out there now, and especially with the fact that AI is ingesting stuff, but we're not getting credit for it. I would definitely say, look at your business objectives, draw your parallel, qualitative or quantitative metric, and then really, really lean into that. Less but not least, name two people I should reach out to to talk about community ROI. Okay, so Rachel Savano, she's that articulate. She has been doing some really cool work recently on ROI. She was talking to me recently about it, and I was like, "Ooh, okay." So she's definitely a good one to talk to. And then, gosh, who else? I would actually say Nicole Saunders, she's at Hierologic, she just recently went over there. She's doing a lot of really cool work around trying to kind of explain the value of community and why, you know, like even how AI is impacting things. And I think she would just have a really, really amazing perspective, especially from a more of a platform perspective right now, and everything that she brings from, you know, many, many years of being a community professional. By the way, Nicole was already a gear some time ago, so I definitely highly encourage everyone who listen, go and check this episode because, yes, she already shared it was some time ago. I'm sure that she knows much more at the moment, and, but yeah, anyway, I will definitely reach out to both of them and say thank you to Nicole once again from you. And what is the best way to connect with you? LinkedIn, just find me on LinkedIn. I am the only Jillian Betlick on there. Just make sure you smell my last name correctly, otherwise you won't find me. And yeah, feel free to reach out to me. I always love, you know, sharing my calendar link and jumping on calls with folks, you know, totally nerding out about community, you know, data and UI UX and architecture and all of that stuff. So don't be shy, reach out, send me a connection request. And yeah. Toro, Toro, Jillian, thank you so much for this conversation. I'm super happy that we finally had a chance to talk, especially I had a huge chance to learn from you because you shared so many amazing things. And you know, the funniest thing that one of the things that stood out to me is that people are still trying to make people answer questions of other people. It's like the main goal, but it was like a very, very insightful thing for me that you've shared that if they're asking a question, it's already a good sign. So I think it's something it's like, wow, it was, you know, it's kind of like you can understand that, but then like, oh, it's, it's a revelation. So thank you, thank you for sharing like and not just that and all the things that you've shared. And by the way, for those who want to jump on a conversation with you, I definitely propose them to ask you about all the metals behind you and all the science because there is a really interesting story. I won't tell anything, but there is a great story behind so definitely, definitely I'll say. And yeah, Jillian, thank you so much for coming. No problem. I'm super happy to have been on the show and so like have some, and part of some knowledge and hopefully we can chat again sometime soon. Totally, totally. 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.