The future of education is becoming more and more remote. Few know that more than our next guest, Kelly Neilson who is a Community Growth Manager at Lambda School. Lambda School teaches people the tech skills they need to launch a new career in just 9 months. The whole program is completely remote. We will talk with Kelly about how she grew their C2C community to over 50 chapters and why bringing your customers together is so important with remote learning. Take a listen!
The future of education is becoming more and more remote. Few know that more than our next guest, Kelly Neilson who is a Community Growth Manager at Lambda School. Lambda School teaches people the tech skills they need to launch a new career in just 9 months. The whole program is completely remote. We will talk with Kelly about how she grew their C2C community to over 50 chapters and why bringing your customers together is so important with remote learning. Take a listen!
Who is this episode great for?
B2C and/or Educational Institution, Scaling, In-person Communities
What’s the biggest takeaway?
Knowing what to focus on is extremely important with building C2C communities, there are many areas you could focus on and spread yourself thin. Kelly's answer to this was a) to focus on attendee growth which tripled year-over-year and b) testing events by "group type". Using Bevy, she set different types of groups and is now comparing the performance to see which ones the Lambda community loves the most so she can double down on those.
Derek Andersen:
In 2010, I co-founded a company called Startup Grind with one goal, inspiring, educating, and connecting every entrepreneur on the planet. Today, Startup Grind is now in 125 countries and has millions of members. Along the way, I found the most powerful marketing tool of all time customer to customer marketing. C2C marketing empowers your greatest ambassadors, your customers, to evangelize your brand and grow your community. This is a podcast we wished we'd had when we start building our community a decade ago. Each episode, we talked to the brightest minds and companies on the planet to learn how they build their community and empower their customers. I'm your host, Derek Andersen, and this is the C2C Podcast.
Derek Andersen:
I'm excited to have our next guest, Kelly Neilson, who's a community growth manager at Lambda School. Lambda School teaches people the tech skills they need to launch a new career. They can do it all in just nine months and the whole program is completely remote. In this episode we'll talk to Kelly about how she grew their C2C community to over 50 chapters and why bringing your customers together in real life is so important with remote learning. Take a listen.
Derek Andersen:
Kelly described to us what Lambda School is and what you do in your role there.
Kelly Neilson:
So Lambda is a live interactive remote online coding school and we offer students the ability to receive a developer education and nine months for full-time and 18 months for part-time courses. Our students have the option to pay nothing up front until they've landed a job making 50K or more. Not having that upfront tuition cost really makes the program significantly more accessible for our students and those looking at the program.
Derek Andersen:
What is the community program at Lambda? What does it look like? How does it work?
Kelly Neilson:
Right now we have our current students, our alumni and our mentor programs. I'm kind of over the current student community program as far as like when you're at universities and I'll expand more about this later. But at universities you have sorority sports, fraternities, things to tie you to the institution. So what can we do for students in remote school to be able to tie them to each other, to be able to connect with their peers? So really being able to connect other students with people locally when we're able to meet in person.
Derek Andersen:
Walk us through the process of how people apply to be a host.
Kelly Neilson:
So Lambda students are really engaged with each other and very supportive of one another. We use Slack and Zoom throughout their classes. And the goal is to really help foster that into a long-term and genuine community. Our big goal for the community is to be able to provide students to learn from each other's experience and grow both virtually and in person. Our students, they learn virtually, do they do all of these things, but whenever they are working in person, there're skills and professional skills and social skills that come with that. And so we want to be sure the students have that experience with their peers before they go into a job as well. And building that community and having those in-person relationships has really helped.
Derek Andersen:
Is it an easy process to get great people to be hosts or is it more difficult to find those kinds of people?
Kelly Neilson:
Well, the program hasn't even been around a year really. And we have students that apply because they want to get to know other students in their area. So once a student has applied, we try to check them out, see kind of what their school load is, how involved they already are within their community and having a dive into the responsibilities and expectations and if that'll be able to be something that they can balance while being a student as well. Because we want to provide them opportunities to have extracurriculars and leadership roles. And then if they pass through all of that, a student volunteer ends up becoming a Meetup Coordinator is what we call them.
Derek Andersen:
One thing that's interesting about Lambda doing this program at all is basically the whole company and the whole program is remote. And then this is sort of like this in-person connection point with people. Is that that dichotomy of having those sort of different things? Does it just work or is it something you have to educate the organization on or how has that like been you know, excepted over the last year internally and with the students?
Kelly Neilson:
I think it's definitely been something that the students have craved and wanted. They are hungry to learn and especially with how Lambda structures its curriculum and teaching the students how to learn. It really helps them to know that they can be dependent on others as well. And so if they're able to connect with other peers and meet them in person, it's very motivating for them to get together to discuss their projects or the things that they're working on or the struggles that they're going with through school or what's going well just to help one another out.
Derek Andersen:
In order to scale a C2C community, you have to design it for scalability and with Startup Grind, we sort of started out with this fireside chat format and we just did that for probably our first 5,000 events. What decisions have you made for Lambda events to be more scalable?
Kelly Neilson:
So being online and virtual can really feel lonely sometimes. I mean you can only get to know others in a very limited way when being virtual for your entire course. Think about that, for nine months or 18 months and not being able to meet any of your peers in person that would be really lonely. And so when you think of universities or educational institutions, there's, like I said, the sports, the sororities, fraternities and clubs that provide these extracurriculars for students to do things outside of the coursework. This is because as humans we fundamentally crave that sense of belonging and in-person socialization.
Kelly Neilson:
So we decided to implement the program with student volunteers around the US, Africa and Europe and the volunteers, like I said, are known as the Meetup Coordinators and we have 70+ Meetup Coordinators currently that are either current students or alumni that take on the responsibility to host these in-person meetups per month for the students in their local area. So this ranges from local company offices to attending a local conference or just grabbing a bite with students in the city just to get to know one another better.
Derek Andersen:
We're in the midst of COVID-19 as of the recording of this, how have you shifted your in-person events to work online through this time that we're all dealing with?
Kelly Neilson:
So that has been something infinite adjustment for... We are virtually virtual and we are online and just our students were, but now their entire families are. And so that's something to consider as well. And so we've actually implemented a few different things for our students. We have some student workshops that we've implemented for the kids of our students and staff. So we have little workshops and we were teaching the children what to do just to kind of hearing from our students, looking at it for what it is that they need. So they're getting that virtual interaction and time off with their kids learning online.
Kelly Neilson:
And then one of the biggest things we've done as far as like filling in the meetups for the month is we've had, like for example this month in April, we're asking Meetup Coordinators to reach out to alumni in their local area to come and be a guest on a Zoom call to talk with the students about networking or how to keep up the job search during everything that's going on right now or things that had helped them get their job. And so just really trying to still engage the community and have templates or topics that they can talk about that are relevant to them right now because our students are still looking for jobs.
Kelly Neilson:
And so the biggest thing is just being able for them to connect with each other. You know, whenever students do get together in person, our students are spread out in some places. So when we have students in New York, most of our students are in NYC, but we still have students all over in New York that want to get together but that distance prohibits them from being able to do so. So if our students can be able to chime in on a virtual Zoom call, that's more than they're going to be able to do to an in-person meetup. So it's been really helpful that way.
Derek Andersen:
One thing that's really amazing about Lambda Schools community is that your chapters are consistently doing monthly events and this is really hard for a lot of groups to pull off. How are your local coordinators so consistent with this?
Kelly Neilson:
So I think our Meetup Coordinators have honestly seen the positive effect that meetups are having for the students and it's becoming more something that the students expect and haven't done and want and demand as well. So they're seeing the benefit to network and get to know all the students that are attending. I look at it like why does the president of a club take ownership of their club at a university? And it's because of the experience and opportunities that come with that role. And our Meetup Coordinators are able to meet with these students and it gets them excited when the students are excited to get together.
Kelly Neilson:
And so the Meetup Coordinators are held to a responsibility in one month if a meetup isn't held, students are reaching out saying, hey, why wasn't a meetup held this month? I miss seeing everyone. And so it very much holds them accountable. So it provides networking, leading and organizing, managing a budget and all these inclusive culture things that can go, I can go on and on, but just adding a ton of skills for the MC that students are able to really grasp onto as well.
Derek Andersen:
Not every company has a strong sort of community component at its core the way that Lambda does or their business model for that matter. How do you suggest people that are, whose companies are not sort of naturally inclined to do community, how do you suggest those people approach building a community?
Kelly Neilson:
So it's interesting because I feel like this community concept has come up in the last 10 years and it's been something that's been really relevant and it's why Bevy and Startup Grind and so many things have been successful and other companies have started these communities. But I think companies should start thinking about communities right away. Communities do take a while to form. I know for some companies they may think we don't have the capacity to start forming a community right now or the team to like put into it. But I think keeping in mind from the beginning, one, the type of community you want and two, what will the community members need to have loyalty to your company. And so I think those are the stepping stones to start building your own community.
Kelly Neilson:
So it's not necessarily having the team in place, but it's having the knowledge and the structure of what it is that you will need to have that successful communities start building up. Because if you wait too long, it'll just set your community back from being able to take off and move the dial for your company. I went to Startup Grind.
Derek Andersen:
Thank you. Thank you for that.
Kelly Neilson:
I went to one of the panels that David's hosted and someone said, community is like a loyal fan club and it's true. It's something that causes a ripple effect. And when you develop and take care of the community, the individuals within that community will support and empower each other and empowering everyone who is involved.
Derek Andersen:
What metrics ultimately matter inside of Lambda as it equates to growing the community?
Kelly Neilson:
So for 2019, our goal was to really just get students together in real life. We were able to track that with Bevy and the amount of meetups happening a month to increase them. Before that we were using Google Docs and just trying to track everything and it was very monotonous and repetitive and so, but the second metric was the amount of students attending and how much that was increasing every month. We tripled our attendees and meetup rate last year and we were able to see that growth using the Bevy platform. It's been incredible.
Kelly Neilson:
And so for 2020, we kind of want to be able to provide more opportunities for all of our students with a meetup layout that will align with the efforts of our student leadership department and careers department. With Bevy, we will be able to host a range of different types of events and see which ones we are having success in and where we can push improvement based on the type of involvement from a variety of meetups we'll be implementing.
Derek Andersen:
All right, so this is a little bit of a hometown crowd type of question, but this is the C2C Podcast, so I'd love to know where do you see the trend of brands building C2C communities like Lambdas or other companies that we see over the next five to 10 years? Where do you see this type of program going?
Kelly Neilson:
So companies are already waking up to how impactful communities can be, but there's still so many that don't understand or recognize the concept of community and what it can accomplish. I think communities are really going to realize when they see the ripple effect that communities can have on their entire organization, that if we as community leaders can communicate effectively and loudly how impactful communities can really be. And I think it's even a big thing right now during COVID-19. Like at least for me being a Bevy customer for the platform that we use, I've seen so much of a team collaboration to come together and do what it is that they need to for their customers.
Kelly Neilson:
And so Lambda has been around a little over two years and the community we'll have in five to 10 years is going to be massive. And so, but it takes time to grow that and it takes meaningful relationship building and all the things that can be considered from starting from the beginning. And I think the fact that we started building that with Bevy right away has helped us scale in a way that we wouldn't have been able to track from the beginning.
Derek Andersen:
All right, well as we close this out, I'd love to know what is a community that you love and why do you love it? Tell us about it.
Kelly Neilson:
I actually have loved the CMX community. It's been such a helpful resource for me to hear from other community managers and the things that they're going through and what's been impactful or difficult for other communities. Especially right now with everything you know going on again with COVID, I've been able to go in there and see what community managers are doing are all these virtual events that are being hosted and it really just is a hub of a lot of community teams consist of five or less people if even five people and so being able to have that community and have this team of people who's working towards the same goal to drive their community and metrics. I've really been amazed at the growth in knowledge of what others want to do in that community to help others become aware.
Derek Andersen:
Great. Thank you. That's a good choice. Thank you for saying CMX. I like CMX too. Thank so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod