Next on the show is Claire Smith who is the Senior Community Manager at the world’s largest online learning platform for higher education, Coursera. She previously led community experience at e-Commerce platform, Storenvy, but she started building her first community - a World of Warcraft Guild - back in 2006. We discuss why Coursera has been focusing on retention over acquisition in light of COVID-19, how she pivoted when an initial program launch didn’t work out as planned, and how community works in tandem with customer success when it comes to an education product. Take a listen!
Next on the show is Claire Smith who is the Senior Community Manager at the world’s largest online learning platform for higher education, Coursera. She previously led community experience at e-Commerce platform, Storenvy, but she started building her first community - a World of Warcraft Guild - back in 2006. We discuss why Coursera has been focusing on retention over acquisition in light of COVID-19, how she pivoted when an initial program launch didn’t work out as planned, and how community works in tandem with customer success when it comes to an education product. Take a listen!
Who is this episode great for?
Virtual community managers, early-stage community leaders, educational communities
What’s the biggest takeaway?
Claire Smith returned to her role at Coursera from maternity leave to find a very different world. In light of the pandemic, while demand for educational content has risen, Claire and her team are continuing to double down on the retention of their users to ensure that their community is growing. Coursera utilizes the strategy of allowing marketing to focus on acquiring new users so the community team can put all energies toward making sure all users and superusers are happy with the product, engaged with each other, and meeting their educational goals.
Speaker 1: (00:03)
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, C to C marketing empowers your greatest ambassadors, your customers to evangelize your brand and grow your community. This is a podcast we wish 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 Anderson. And this is the CDC podcast. I'm excited to have our next guest Claire Smith, who is a senior community manager of Coursera. She previously led community experience at eCommerce platform store envy, but she started building her first community, a world of Warcraft Guild back in 2006. Now, of course, Sarah, she oversees community for the world's largest online learning platform for higher education. Take a listen, Claire, describe what Coursera is and what you do in your role there.
Speaker 2: (01:13)
So Coursera is a platform for courses from some of the world's best universities and companies, the equivalent of a higher education level. Um, and our mission is to educate people around the world to help them to transform their lives through access, to education. Um, and I lead the community team. I work alongside one other community manager and I'm responsible for the community vision and strategy. And she does more of the day to day community management and running of the community programs. Um, our community is relatively new, at least sort of the way it is right now. It's only about two years old. So a lot of what we're focused on is like trying different things out. And so when I say I'm responsible for the strategy, there's a lot of rethinking the strategy and trying new things and iterating and trying over again. And the company is still, you know, we're, we're still figuring out exactly what we should do as well. So there's a lot of changing company initiatives and then the community strategy has to change for that too.
Speaker 1: (02:12)
I assume that customer success at Coursera is like getting users educated or having them learn whatever they're trying to learn. Is that right?
Speaker 2: (02:22)
Eventually? Yeah. I mean, we, we, we think about customized in a couple of different ways. Cause we have companies who use us to train their employees and then we have governments who use us too, and then also individuals, but ultimately a success is really success for the individual. No matter who's actually paying, we want people to gain the skills that they need to achieve their goals, whatever they are, usually it's a new job or a career change or promotion, but sometimes it's, uh, something, uh, more altruistic like, uh, helping their village or, um, they have a friend or a family member who's got cancer and they want to learn more about that and how they can support them for example. And so the community helps in a few ways. Uh, we help people to discover the courses that they are interested in or figure out which ones are going to be the right ones to help them achieve their goals. And it also helps people to get through the courses that they've chosen, you know, if they get stuck on something, they can turn to the community for help there. Um, and lastly, um, you know, it's not enough just to learn something unless you can actually apply that learning. So the community helps people to, to get that first step in their new career or to, to get a promotion, start a new business, whatever it is that they're trying to do, the community helps with that as well.
Speaker 3: (03:40)
Just curious with everything going on with COVID, I assume, you know, the demand for, for your product has just gone through the roof. Is it, would it mostly be, do you have people that are like currently unemployed that are trying to level up their skills or do you have people that are just at home more and have more times they're not commuting that are sort of leveling up their skills? Like who's using Coursera more over the sort of COVID, you know, months that have passed
Speaker 2: (04:05)
All of the above. Um, we have launched a initiative recently, um, called Coursera for workplace recovery. Um, and we're partnering with governments to offer Coursera for free to people who are unemployed and need to rescale to try and get back into the workforce. Um, and then, yeah, of course there's, there's people who have a lot more free time on their hands right now, uh, who were learning for the fun of it. Um, and of course, students who haven't been able to go in person to their universities and we were, so we were already partnering with universities to offer courses to their students. And we've sort of doubled down on that initiative as well, to help universities around the world offer Coursera courses to their students on campus or remote at the moment.
Speaker 3: (04:54)
How exactly does the community team or programming help accomplish the goal of getting users to get more engaged and take more classes or learn more?
Speaker 2: (05:02)
We, we, the community that's our, our main focus is, is retention of, of users. And we, we think about it in a few different ways. So as I, as I mentioned, it helps people to discover which courses they're actually interested in, in the first place. So that helps to get them in. And then if people are coming back to the community just itself, they might not have a current need to be taking a course. They might've just finished a course, but they can continue to learn in small ways in the community itself. And so if they're coming back to the community, they are coming back to Coursera, they're keeping Coursera in mind. Um, and then maybe they discover the next course that they want to take. And then also, if you think about that success piece, if people are taking a course, you know, online learning is really difficult and if they get stuck, then they're probably not going to come back. They're probably not even going to try a different course. And so the community, it helps to get people unstuck, and then that helps people have a good experience, finish the learning, feel good about themselves and be more likely to try another course.
Speaker 3: (06:02)
And what, what sort of specific programs do you all do inside of the community? Like community means different things to different people, but sort of what are the key programming aspects that you have?
Speaker 2: (06:12)
I haven't got too many specific programs running yet. Um, like I said, the community is relatively new. Um, so we've been focused really on growing it to the point where we can actually start running these kinds of programs. We've, we've been experimenting with various different forums to support different subject areas and to support different sort of product lions. So specifically we have, um, a product line called professional certificates, which is designed very specifically at getting people job ready versus just acquiring skills that might be useful for a job, but not necessarily. And so we've, uh, we've experimented with forums for those people to get together, to help one another. And thinking more about that kind of after they've learned piece there as well. Um, and I think we've, we've, that's, that's something that we're starting to put more in place now. So that's actually one of my big focus areas for this quarter is thinking about more programs that we can put in place and specifically thinking about super-user programs that we can set up to benefit of variety of different use cases. So maybe we have, um, career mentors, for example, and we want to double down more on those subject kinds of discussions and having community leaders to drive those discussions, those conversations, um, you know, people who are experts in their field who want to drive those conversations. We have a couple right now and they've been really successful. So we want to do more of that,
Speaker 3: (07:39)
That you have a subscription model. We talked to a lot of SAS companies or companies with subscription models. How does community benefit the acquisition and retention of, of new students, you know, subscribing, how do you all play into that? You know, sort of funnel of bringing people in.
Speaker 2: (07:57)
We decided in the interest of focus that we would leave acquisition more to marketing, although the community does contribute to SEO and word of mouth. And that's probably something we will focus on at some point in the future, but really we're focusing for now we're really doubling down on retention. So, like I said, it's, it's about getting people to come back to the community, even if they're not necessarily interested in a course right now, we want them to have those subject discussions that sort of keep them interested. It keeps them coming back for more, um, and helping them to have a really successful experience. So they feel good about Coursera. Um, and then they want to use it and the alumni piece too. So when we're thinking about helping people to transform their lives and get job ready, that's an area where we can keep people engaged after they finished taking the courses. If we're helping them to also get that job and, and continue that professional, even then, that's a reason for them to continue using the community, um, until maybe they feel the need for that, that next promotion or next step in their career. And then they're ready to come back and take a course again,
Speaker 3: (09:07)
Talk about how you measure that retention. Like, just walk through the logistical process. Like what system of record do you tie into? How do you, do you do that? Does your team do that? Do you have like a data scientist that helps you? Do you, like, how do you actually measure the retentive impact of, of the programs that you're doing?
Speaker 2: (09:26)
This is something that we have not nailed yet for, by any means. Um, we are starting out by sort of assuming that retention within the community is going to equal retention in Coursera in general, but we have not got to the point where we can prove that and we measure retention. So right now we're looking at, we define it as the proportion of people who came back more than once within the last three months period. And we compare that against the proportion of people who only came once in that same three months period, to adjust for significant growth of the community. So it's not skewing our metrics too much, and that is not where we want to be either, but that's sort of the best metric that we have access to right now. We're waiting on some engineering work to hopefully get us something that will capture that even more because we want, you know, to take into account people who came a year ago and have just come back now, that's, that's a form of retention too, um, that our current metric just doesn't capture, but that's the best way of working with right now,
Speaker 3: (10:30)
You currently have about 85,000 members of your community, which is incredible. What do you think have been the biggest drivers of that growth?
Speaker 2: (10:38)
Our initial sort of plan was when we launched a couple of years ago was to port across. We had a, we had a couple of super user programs going, but no sort of overall community center. And we were hoping that we could sort of put across those most active people to get our community going. And we managed to bring a few people, but it didn't really pan out the way we had hoped. And eventually we ran a survey and we we've. We realized that most people, most Coursera learners just didn't know about the community. So we set up a series of automated emails just to let people know. So, um, essentially when someone enrolls in a course for the first time, or sometimes it's when they complete the course, if we have a forum or a community group that's relevant to that course, we will send an email to let them know about it. And that was really when we started to see our growth pick up more recently, we've had significant growth in the last few months for less, less happy reasons. Um, you know, as we discussed a minute ago, uh, coronavirus has driven a huge number of people to Coursera, and that has translated to community growth as well. And, and obviously, um, people have more of a need more time now for online community, so that that's contributed as well.
Speaker 3: (11:58)
I know you've recently, uh, hosted a, your annual conference. You did it all virtually. I wonder what you all learned from that. And if that's something that you plan to do again, if you're going to do it more regularly, less regularly, the same, like what, what are the key at 3000 plus people attend that, uh, what, what were some of the main learnings good and bad from that
Speaker 2: (12:18)
Involved in running it? And I was on maternity leave when they announced the, the sort of the results and the learnings, but I kept there is, there is some stuff I can share. I know that, um, our team who ran it, considered it to be a huge success, it enabled way more people to attend than would have been possible if it had just been in person. And I think people were, were happy with the way that the conference went, although I'm sure there was some sort of leeway in people's opinions due to the circumstances. But I know a conference team is definitely thinking about running it virtually again next year, for sure. Just because it's still unsure how, how much international travel is going to have recovered or will be safe by then. Um, but also in general, I think they felt like the benefit of having so many extra people being able to attend was, was something to not just throw away so quickly and return to, to solely in person. So definitely some, some form of virtual event will continue to happen.
Speaker 3: (13:20)
Sure. And as we wrap up, please tell me about a community that you love and why do you love it?
Speaker 2: (13:25)
Um, my husband, uh, his recently got involved in modding of a Nintendo wes', um, you know, hacking apart the circuit boards and he's actually trying to fit, uh, an old, we board Intuit, an old snares, or like one of the really, really old consoles. He's trying to put it in the case of one of those. Um, yeah. Uh, and he's part of this online community, super, super niche, of course, but people in that community, uh, helping him, you know, troubleshoot he's he's like, I've got this circuit board, it's not doing what it's supposed to do. Why not? And they're helping him like, did you wire it up wrong? Is it upside down? Is it just getting too hot or did you design it wrong? And the other day we were about to take the kids out and he's like, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, there's this guy in Italy who is helping me out. I have to test out something for him. Just give me two more minutes. I mean, I'm not a part of that community, but he tells me about it, which in itself is a, is a big deal. And I just think that's, I know obviously it's a community founded on true passion, but the, you couldn't really see true interaction, real connection. And that, that's what I think is true community. And obviously it's incredibly difficult for a brand community to replicate that. Um, but that is the ultimate goal in my mind.
Speaker 3: (14:41)
Awesome. Thank you. And I, you know, I've been a gamer for a long time. My kids are, I mean, now I worked at EA as my first job, but
Speaker 1: (14:52)
I was not aware of this community, so I just Googled it and it's really neat. Uh, it's random, but it's really neat. See like, uh, uh, we modded for like an N 64 or something, and
Speaker 2: (15:05)
We keep getting these packages in the mail that are all roughly the same size. They're all from eBay. And he's like, what do you thinks in this one? I'm like, is it another Nintendo wi Oh, yes, it is.
Speaker 1: (15:16)
That is so funny. That's so cool. All thank you for putting me onto this. This is great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked 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 bevy labs.com/pod that's B E V Y L a B s.com/pod.