Our next guest is Mindy Day who is currently the Senior Community Manager at Patreon. She has worked as a community builder for over 7 years for brands like Imgur. Today we are going to talk about how to actually measure trust in a brand through community, the path of becoming an engaged member and so much more. Take a listen!
Our next guest is Mindy Day who is currently the Senior Community Manager at Patreon. She has worked as a community builder for over 7 years for brands like Imgur. Today we are going to talk about how to actually measure trust in a brand through community, the path of becoming an engaged member and so much more. Take a listen!
Too Long; Didn't Listen
Derek Anderson:
Welcome to the C2C Podcast. I am your host Derek Anderson. After holding my first event in 2010, I went on to create Startup Grind, a 400 chapter community based in over 100 countries.
Derek Anderson:
Along the way, I discovered the greatest marketing tool of all time: your customers. Yet I couldn't find anyone sharing how to build a community where people could experience your brand in person or at scale.
Derek Anderson:
On this show, we talk with the brightest minds and companies on the planet about how to build customer to customer marketing strategies and create in-person experiences for your brand and customer, before your competitor does.
Derek Anderson:
I'm excited to have our next guest, Mindy day, who's currently the senior community manager at Patreon. She has worked as a community builder for over seven years at a bunch of really amazing brands. Today, we're going to be talking about how to actually measure trust in a brand through community and what the path looks like to becoming an engaged member. Take a listen.
Derek Anderson:
Can you tell us what Patreon is and what your role is there?
Mindy Day:
Yeah, so Patreon's mission is to fund the creative class and what that really means in practice is that everyday we're helping creators build and run their own membership program that allows them to kind of get closer with their community, establish ongoing revenue and and kind of give them that creative independence by asking their biggest supporters to kind of support them on a monthly basis. Like, maybe they'll give $5 a month and they'll get an extra podcast episode or a behind the scenes look and and things like that.
Derek Anderson:
What role do the company values play in the Patreon community?
Mindy Day:
I mean the number one core behavior at Patreon is put creators first, so that makes my job super easy because that's basically saying put the community first and having that kind of buy in and understanding across the whole company is really special.
Derek Anderson:
Awesome. Have you been able to quantify the trust ... You've been able to quantify the trust of the brand extremely well and you proved the role that community could play. Could you break down how you measure trust? It seems like a really hard thing to quantify.
Mindy Day:
It is, and I know it's one of those big things. So, we've spent a lot of time over the past six to eight months working on this because it became a really important metric for Patreon is trust. Did a lot of work with the user research team and the data science team to establish a trust survey that goes out every month to a random selection of creators in our community and asks them the same questions every month and that gives us a trust score. And then from that I'm able to pull out from that whole bucket creators who are involved in the communities or they're in the forum or they'd come to an event that I've run. Then I'm able to compare their trust survey score versus creators who aren't in the community.
Derek Anderson:
I'd love to hear about what are some, you know, do you have any inspiring stories or anything you know, that you've seen happen or been a part of that you could share?
Mindy Day:
Yeah, I think the, I mean there's kind of two kinds. There's the everyday ones that are special, you know, just when someone takes a moment to thank you for your work. Those moments always help make the job easier. But then there's the really big ones where one example comes to mind. You know, I first got introduced to a creator because she was really unhappy with some of the decisions Patreon had made recently and the responses that she was getting from other parts of in the company and just not happy. There was a really painful bug that she had been experiencing for a couple of months. And she kind of just got to a breaking point where she was just desperate to be heard. So I was able to reach out with her. I had a phone call with her. I was able to kind of explain the situation and then use her passion and her voice internally to really fight to get that bug fixed and prioritized quickly and not just let it kind of fall away.
Mindy Day:
And then once the bug was fixed, going back to her and showing that we had delivered and kind of over six month period, she ended up helping create our Discord server that we have now. She built it from scratch. She's a lead moderator on the Discord server and she even co-hosted a meetup that we had in LA for creators. So, that to me proves that even your most angry members are only angry because they care so much and they're passionate and you know anyone can be turned around.
Derek Anderson:
You have a really interesting spectrum for your creators that shows sort of the stages of commitment along the way to subscription.
Derek Anderson:
Could you tell us about how listeners may be able to apply some of those principles to their sort of commitment inside of their community?
Mindy Day:
Yeah, so membership is a relatively new idea. I think we're all used to kind of the subscription model where, you know, you pay Netflix $10 a month and you get access to movies, but the membership model, there's little bit more nuance than that.
Mindy Day:
And we created this image that a sliding scale and on the one end of the scale is pure altruism, so they're people who support creators just because they love what they make. They don't care about any tangible benefits that come with it. They just want to you know, "Hey, I love your podcast so much. It's free. Please take my $10 every month. Just keep making what you're making. I love it."
Mindy Day:
But on the other end of the scale is the purely transactional scale where it's, "Hey, I give you $10 a month and I definitely want that bonus episode every month. That's what I'm here for. That's what I'm paying."
Mindy Day:
And so that really helps creators frame their membership model. And I've found it useful to even think about community because different people are going to get different things from your community and someone might join just to get that one answer to that question and then never come back again. But you know you've helped them. And then other people just want to be involved and kind of give back to a community that they're proud to be a member of. So it's definitely a spectrum thing and you know, every crease has probably ... and community member has a slightly different look on that.
Derek Anderson:
It's a great insight. I think what we saw building Startup Grind was, you know, we had people that would sort of bounce in and out across the spectrum in the community, how the community, like we have this one person, his name is David Scanlan.
Derek Anderson:
He was originally like a sponsor and he was the first person who attended event in three continents and then he disappeared, and then he came back two years later and he was like, I want to run the Dublin chapter and he's been running that for five years and he just stepped down this past month.
Derek Anderson:
I just told him like, you know, he sent me this really thoughtful note and I just said, "Hey, like you'll be back. Don't worry." Like, just whenever you need us, come back and I think this idea of like you sort of treat people a certain way regardless of who they are, what they're doing, and then you just never know what's going to happen, if they're going to boomerang back, if they're going to jump up the ladder, jump down the ladder, you just kind of be kind and be thoughtful and you know, and that's for the committee members is ultimately good for us too, regardless of like how that sort of shakes out inside the platform.
Mindy Day:
Yeah, it's true. And I've definitely seen that before. And that's another thing to remember is that every person is going through different things in their lives. You know, students have very different cycles where during the summer that, you know, they want to be super involved, but then when college starts back up again, you know, they're going to fade out or people have different parts going on in their lives.
Mindy Day:
And I think always having that safe base to return to is is a comfort. And knowing that they'll, there'll be there again is really important.
Derek Anderson:
Yeah, we probably need to do an episode on like how to deal with college students in your community. It's like an art unto itself. A lot of meditation. A Lot of prescription medication.
Derek Anderson:
So every community has members who go the extra mile and who help. And I wonder like how do you approach dealing with these people. Do you have playbooks? Do you have guidelines? Do you get on the phone with them? Is it all scalable? Is it unscalable? How do you approach sort of dealing with that process?
Mindy Day:
Oh my gosh, that's a good question. I definitely don't have a playbook. I think it's-
Derek Anderson:
It's good because no one reads them, so there's no point in creating it.
Mindy Day:
I think it's kind of more like my own self awareness is making sure I'm noticing those people who are the 1% and not letting them be ignored and taking that moment to thank them and say like, hey, like I saw that that you did that was really nice.
Mindy Day:
And depending on your own program, maybe it's, that was awesome and I'd love to send you a sticker or that was super cool and would you be willing to do this kind of thing more often?
Mindy Day:
So yeah, being self aware to recognize them, taking the time to reach out. I think it does have to be personal. But when it becomes scalable is when you have a, when you can bring that 1% together and they can interact and then they're recognizing, you know, the new 1% who are coming up and they're suggesting to you and maybe they're reaching out.
Mindy Day:
And so the first part is is manual, but kind of the more that you exercise that muscle and the more you bring those 1% together, the more they'll kind of pay it back in turn and help bring the next generation up.
Derek Anderson:
I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about your customer to customer program, reaching out in real life and building the community there. How has that been beneficial over other aspects of the community?
Mindy Day:
You mean, like in person events or one-on-one outreach or? What do you mean?
Derek Anderson:
Yeah, exactly. Like getting people ... This is the C2C podcast, so customer to customer marketing, getting people together in person, getting your customers to be sort of advocates for you on behalf of the brand and the product. Just like, getting people together in real life versus, yeah, filling out questions in an online forum, or something like that.
Mindy Day:
Yeah. I think it's really important to bring people together in real life as as much as you can, whether that's budget or bandwidth or whatever the reason is, but I think it does become more real when you meet people in person and I'm like an online child. I spend most of my time on the internet. That's where a lot of my communities are.
Mindy Day:
But when you meet people in person, it like validates those connections that you've made online that like, "Oh, like this is a real person. We really do get along well. We really do have this shared interest," and then it doubles the kind of feeling that you get when you then interact with those same people online. It like it really takes that relationship up a notch when you've been able to share a coffee or a drink with someone and have that shared experience.
Mindy Day:
And I also believe that it's kind of one of those things like everyone learns slightly different. I think everyone has like a slightly different way they want to be involved in community and some people, that online thing is the only thing that they're comfortable with. For other people, the in person event is everything and that's what they're really holding on for every month and that's where they feel most inspired and connected.
Derek Anderson:
Yeah. It seems like the more and more, you know, we go online, you just have this sort of pendulum that's been swinging for months and years really of like the lack of trust in what we see online. And the trolling and all the negativity that happens online. I don't know, I'd be curious to know how many negative things you've had with your in person event experiences. I mean, I know for Startup Grind, we've done over 10,000 events. And I can count even negative things that are not even really that bad, but just on probably one hand. Is it overwhelmingly positive? Is it somewhat negative, somewhat positive, like especially compared to online community building? How has it been for you?
Mindy Day:
I mean no troll wants to be a troll in person so.
Derek Anderson:
It's amazing.
Mindy Day:
It's definitely ... If you care enough to leave your comfy home and travel and go to a place where you don't know anyone, like wow, that's pretty special and you're probably doing it for positive reasons.
Mindy Day:
I've had people like, passionate and frustrated with things, but hell, I'd rather they'd come tell me than write that on Twitter or just feel that way and never get to share that feeling. So, but yeah, I mean it's worlds apart. Mostly positive, just sometimes frustrated, but I think that's why it's always important to have that kind of open Q&A session to get like a sense of the vibe of the community.
Mindy Day:
Like, what are people feeling right now? Is everyone in this room angry with this company? That's not a good thing. I'd rather know that than not. Didn't no one come? That's a bad sign. Or even measuring like attendance rate or drop out or you know, which kind of people of your community came to this event. There's so much learning to be done by having them.
Derek Anderson:
Awesome. Yeah, and social can be a powerful tool as well. It can also be a lot of noise. How do you suggest our listeners use it to gain of active community members versus vanity metric followers or a subscriber?
Mindy Day:
It's funny. So I've run through from media throughout my career was a community manager and I just recently hired a social media manager at Patreon to do it full time. And how we managed it is so different. It's fascinating to me.
Mindy Day:
And now I've realized that I've always ran social as a community manager and not as like a marketer. And so, I think that's kind of why it tied me is because I would take like every tweet, you know, to heart, I always be looking for trends and what are people saying and feeling and what's the sentiment and really like wanting to get everyone an answer. And really social media ... I mean, you need a big team to do that. And I think for a lot of people it might just be best as like an extension of your brand message and your marketing.
Mindy Day:
However, having said that, we did a actually campaign yesterday called Share Your Studio and we encouraged creators to share photos or videos of drawings of where they create their artwork and it was awesome. And that like, proved to me that social and community can work hand in hand. Being able to see where people work helped the company, remind the community is a bunch of humans who are just trying to survive in this world and for the community, it was really inspiring to see where these people work with. And maybe you're like, oh hey, I have those paintbrushes too. Like only the best or wow, you know, you've made that space really beautiful. I wish I could have a space like that. Maybe one day. That's kind of what I'm going to aspire to now.
Mindy Day:
So I think the more kind of programs like that you can do where you encourage active community engagement and even if it's small, at least you'll see the people who responded and then that's the sign to you that they're active engaged community members. And I always quite like doing like a weekly touch point, like on Twitter just being like what reaction GIF like summed up your week this week or you know, how do you feel about your art at the moment? And just let people like just express themselves through GIFs or emojis or whatever. And it's just like a way to like laugh it off, kind of feel that sense of community online, even on Twitter.
Derek Anderson:
Awesome. As we finish, I always love to ask people what community are they engaged in and love outside of the community they work on. And you have the letter writing club. Would you please tell us what this is all about? I think I need to join.
Mindy Day:
So I was living in San Francisco for a couple of years, but we just moved to this place called Vallejo and I've been really trying to engrain myself in the local community there. And I saw a poster for a letter writing club at the bookstore and I was very intrigued and so I joined.
Mindy Day:
And twice a month, a bunch of lovely people get together. We all bring stationary and stickers and postcards and books that we want to cut up and we sit down and we write letters. And so they have a list of people who want to join a writing club, so just random strangers across the world. Or you can use that time to write letters to your own pen pals or you know, if you've got a friend or family whose birthday it is. It's just such a nice two hour period, just sitting down and putting your brain in a different gear and kind of doing something creative and full of gratitude. I really look forward to it. There's one this Friday.
Derek Anderson:
That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here and thanks for being on the C2C podcast.
Mindy Day:
Thanks for having me.
Derek Anderson:
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please leave a review wherever you listened to this.
Derek Anderson:
If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, BevyLabs.com/pod. Again, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com,/pod.