Chris Heuer (00:31) Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever the world you might be today. Thank you very much for joining us for this episode four of communityassistant.ai. How you doing this morning, Marius? Good.
Marius Ciortea (00:40) I’m doing fine. How are you? Just came from a
travel to New York City. It was quite nice, a little rainy, but nice.
Chris Heuer (00:45) Yeah, being a part of your most important community, correct?
Marius Ciortea (00:48) Yes, family. Family first.
Chris Heuer (00:50) Excellent, excellent. Well, we really did a great job last week. I hope everyone’s had a chance to look at our episode three, where we walk through the skill that Marius developed to look at a daily brief. We’re going to be extending on that a little bit more today with our guest here in a few moments, Mark Birch, who wrote, of course, Community in a Box and has a new company called Tribe ROI that speaks directly to the Daily Health Report and what was intended to be our next episode, which we’re now kicking off with Mark, which is about our health status.
Our community and what is the overall health metrics that we get into on that. But before we jump too far into the topic of the show I want to make sure we talk about this event you’re heading to in November over in Lisbon. So what are you up to in November, Marius?
Marius Ciortea (01:35) Yeah,
so there’s a great event in Lisbon that I get to join, which is awesome. can’t can’t ignore the fact that it’s in Lisbon, so that’s kind of nice. it’s a community meetup created or owned by Led by Community, which is an organization that hosts all kinds of cool community events globally. They have meetups, they also have online events, as well as podcasts or led by community if you had put a search in it or worth subscribing to.
and I’m gonna be joined by Nicole Saunders, my peer. and we’re gonna be talking or our session is gonna be all about MCPs and what you can do in real time. So very closely aligned to our daily brief and community assistant. we wanna show how you can get a community started from zero to ready to go in twenty minutes. That’s gonna be our goal.
And that includes completely redesigning and rebranding the community and having it all ready to go. something that would have taken us weeks beforehand. now with the power of MCP it’s literally minutes. so very much in what we are talking here, just an live demo sort of environment.
Chris Heuer (02:49) Awesome. And I’m not going to get too deep into it, but if you’re a community manager or anyone who’s a professional today and you don’t understand MCP, I encourage you to talk to your favorite AI about it, to watch a couple of videos on it on YouTube. It essentially is the new version of an API sort of server. It does a bunch of things a little differently, but it’s pretty much akin to an API server. And it’s very important for what we’re doing. And if you can scrape the community, like we showed you in the skill that Marius developed last week,
week
to get you your daily brief, which again, you’ll find on top of our work map report on communityassistant.ai that you can download and use yourself and point at any community, even if you don’t have an MCP server access to it.
But it is really a powerful skill. And Marius, I know you did a couple of iterations on it, but how long did it actually take you to build that?
Marius Ciortea (03:41) the skill itself was just like you said, iterations. Like I started with the first thing, which is, you know, what is the most important thing I should pay attention to? and then I got results. And then I looked at results and I went like, okay, that’s cool, but can you actually prioritize it with for me? Or this is great, but can you give me context on why this is important? and as I had these conversations with AI, did the skill kind of started to improve.
and with that said, it this is not finished work. It’s it’s meant, as we said last episode, is for you to get started. you should be questioning
Chris Heuer (04:16) Yeah, yeah.
Marius Ciortea (04:17) every result that you’re getting and then start, you know, making it better or make it work for you. that’s I think is the most important skill that you have when when you’re working with AI, is to improve it and question it and and and push it and say this is not quite right. the nice part working with AI, they’re infinitely patient.
Right. If we are talk our peers or employees, we they may get annoyed with us to making sure that the certain things need to be looking a certain way. AI doesn’t care. you may get charged for it tokens. otherwise it it will reiterate as often as you need to make it yours. And that’s how I got to these six things that we discussed in the last episode. but it it really meant just to be a starter, not the finished product.
Chris Heuer (05:05) And again, the whole thing with context here again is to be able to aggregate and process that data and then that enables us to understand and take action. And of course, what the daily brief does is it lets you start every day with these are the things that are happening in your community and that you should probably act upon, but you still have to process it, understand it and determine what you want to act upon and how to serve those relationships and serve the better interests of the community owner, the company, the association.
or even the nonprofit or whoever you’re serving within your community or even your content creator community if you’re running your own sort of community here. But that leads us into one very important thing that Marius said here that I want to re-emphasize. It’s just the first draft that Marius created in this skill that you’ll find on top of the work map. You can make it your own in many ways and that’s because it’s not code.
It’s human readable. is human logic. It’s human statements. So you can actually take the skill, download it, run it. If you don’t like what it’s doing, you can actually talk to the AI and have the AI make the updates for you. You don’t even need to go in and edit the file itself. It’s really amazing and very helpful. But that led us as we were starting to talk about that a couple of weeks ago, not only to the idea of what’s happening each day, but what’s happening with the community overall and building a sort of community health report. And that’s why I’m excited to have Mark Birch on with his new startup,
Tribe ROI and some of the things he’s doing. We’ll look more specifically at him. But before we even get into that, Marius, you were sharing with me before what you thought was the most important community health metric. And I was just hoping you could explain that a little bit more.
Marius Ciortea (06:43) yeah. so throughout my career, the one thing I always looked at and every report had was monthly active users. and the definition of active is is one that is super debated. and I’ve seen many, many iterations of the conversations on on how deep you can go, what does actually an active user mean? and I like to keep it extremely simple and and sometimes the
People find that pretty controversial because to me is simply the act of a login. everything starts with the login. yes, you know, afterwards there are more meaningful engagements, such as like, you know, starting a thread, maybe more meaningful than replying to a thread or updating your profile doesn’t have a lot of value at all because it just updates about a profile and it doesn’t add to the community. Those are all super important conversations to have, but it all starts with the login.
If people log in, they’re doing stuff. That is great. If people don’t log in, they don’t do anything. That is bad. That’s how simple I like to take it. So measure that and create a baseline for your community, depending on what type of community you have and where the numbers should be comfortable. Rule of thumb, under 5% probably can do better. Just my point of view. Now I’m sure there are exceptions. There are some communities that are
much more on the consumption side, but five percent is sort of the lowest bar that that I’m comfortable with having in the community. And then the second piece is I look at the daily active users as well. And if you divide the daily active users over the monthly active users, you have like what the daily activity looks like of those guys that are very passionate about your community. So I tend to look at that as well.
in order to get so the first one gives me a feel overall how active the community is. And the second one is from the people who are active, how often do they actually engage in a community? Do they come in daily, do they come in weekly? both of them give you sort of the percentiles, and that is sort of my barometer. Now from there, it gets very complex. And that I think the there are many different routes to take. but for me, just having those two numbers, I can tell already, you know, if your community is actually.
You know, active or not.
Chris Heuer (08:59) Yeah, I like that. you know, you have to find some simple things that you can look to that you can have as your literally your thermometer, your barometer, whatever you want to say that you have that single metric that you can say, this is the one that I’m really tracking. Then you look at what’s causing that. And from there,
Marius Ciortea (09:13) Of course.
Chris Heuer (09:14) you can actually, you know, really make some differences in decisions and the actions you take and how you plan to achieve it. So I really like that metric a lot. Of course, there’s a lot of other things inside of it. But we’ll save that stuff for later, because I want to get Mark’s take on that and see how he approaches
it
So let me go ahead and bring Mark Birch up to join us to actually share what he thinks. Mark, how are you doing my friend?
Mark Birch (09:37) Doing great Chris. Doing great. just wanna say you have a wonderful shirt. I hope people have been commenting on your fashion since. Marius, I think you need to step up your game. But it’s always good to see you as well.
Marius Ciortea (09:48) Yeah.
good to see you, Mark. Thanks for the for the hints.
Chris Heuer (09:54) Well, Mark, before we get too far away, I’ll share the bio obviously in the show notes and put all the links in there now. But could tell us a little bit more about how you got here. I mean, we don’t need to go back to childhood, but how is it that you’re in community management now and what led you to the book and ultimately to this product?
Mark Birch (10:11) Yeah, was back in my prison camp days. No. it was kind of a accident. That turned out good. But I started a meetup in New York City. It was mostly just getting founders together to talk about B to B sales. I was a startup founder. A lot of people would wanna pick my brain and I’d
Felt I was losing all my brain, getting it all picked away by other people. So I figured,
Chris Heuer (10:37) Mm.
Mark Birch (10:38) okay, let me get everyone in a room and like other people can share what they do around B2B sales. that ended up growing like just like hotcakes. And eventually I had a chapter, one in Boston and one in Philadelphia. And then next thing I know, I had like twenty four chapters around the globe, thirty thousand members. That was the Enterprise Sales Forum.
Then along the way I joined Stack Overflow. So going over to the world of developers and developer communities all online. And doing a lot of stuff though to make community happen on the ground as I was helping to build out our Stack Overflow Teams product, which was your own internal QA community for knowledge inside your organization. From there I was at AWS.
Where I was in developer relations as a global startup advocate, where again, I was very much involved in startup communities, helping founders to get onboarded and to learn more about AWS, our cloud offerings, and how we help startups to scale. And in that journey, I wrote a book called Community in a Box around how to build, grow, and scale professional communities. That’s now in its second edition. And all of that led me to this one question.
Which was how valuable is a community? And it turns out it’s not
Chris Heuer (11:56) Awesome, awesome.
Mark Birch (11:57) an easy question to answer, apparently.
Chris Heuer (11:59) No, and it all depends
Marius Ciortea (11:59) Yeah, Chris, I
Chris Heuer (12:01) on the- go ahead, Marius.
Marius Ciortea (12:02) yeah, I I was just saying when he said that I I you know, if we can edit like a holy grail and coming into our pictures and kind of moving across, that would be that would be great. ’Cause that that’s really what Mark is talking about in the community space, the ROI is the holy grail.
Chris Heuer (12:15) Yes.
Yes, Marius is always good at giving me extra work to do each week, which is why my episodes take a couple extra days off schedule.
Marius Ciortea (12:20) Yeah.
Chris Heuer (12:23) But no worries there. I think it’s a great idea and it is true. But before we get into the metric side a little bit more, I wanted to just talk to a little bit about Community in a Box. You know, as I looked at it, like one of the core tenets of the book was the idea that you should treat your community like a startup, right? And one of the things that everyone’s talking about today and literally two years ago when Claude Code came out,
People are like, Chris, you don’t need to wait for a technical founder anymore. You can just go build it yourself. Well, two years ago, you couldn’t do that. Claude Code was not working well enough to do that. But today you literally could build a startup or a community in an hour. So that leads me into a little bit of a challenge. And I definitely want you to talk about that more. But if you could talk a little bit more about how easy it would be to just spin something up to look like a community that really isn’t. And what is the heart of the community behind it? If you can still
build a community in a box which of course you can.
Mark Birch (13:18) So, community in a Box is about enabling people to give them the guidance and also the inspiration and encouragement to go ahead and do this crazy experiment. I think AI is great. I think people that are relying upon AI to do the people connecting is a very poor decision. AI can certainly give you some ideas. It can maybe point you in
Ways that you wouldn’t have known. But ultimately, just like a startup, you can’t just launch something out of AI and think it’s going to actually work. For example, in the startup world, you can build as much software as you want, but unless you have distribution, you’re going nowhere. Like it’s just and distribution is the 90% of the work of getting a startup off the ground. Same with a community.
Yeah, I take the analogy of a startup and a community trying to get up and off the ground because like a startup with community, you just don’t know a lot of things. You have an hypothesis of what your community could be. But as my example, the enterprise sales form was not meant to be us an enterprise or B2B sales community. It was meant to be a bunch of founders in a room.
Getting together over pizza and beer and discussing our woes around how as a startup to sell to big companies. And then salespeople started coming, and then sales managers and sales leaders, and then had people from around the world that wanted to gather together. So I had a hypothesis, it quickly changed after you know a very short amount of time. So to me, there’s AI as
A guide. It’s like my book. You can read the book, get some thoughts, but until you actually do the work on the ground and you talk to other people and what they care about, until you do that work, it’s really hard to say you can just do a community in a box and just spawn this wonderful, amazing thing. that hard work is the stuff that AI, a book.
A video, a podcast can help you with.
Chris Heuer (15:31) That’s beautiful.
Marius Ciortea (15:31) Hm. So Mark, are you are y are
you saying that build it and they will come is not necessarily always the right approach?
Mark Birch (15:38) I think it’s a terrible approach. I think look, I think the act of building is helping you to build muscle memory, if you understand kind of the analogy. The the act of building things helps you to get a little bit more insight, a little bit more experience, a little bit more getting punched in the face.
Because you need those iterations and those experiences and the failures to then figure out, well, maybe I should talk to users, maybe I should talk to customers, maybe I should do some market research, maybe I should explore a bit before I build the next thing. But then because you’ve had those iterations, it’s a lot easier to build the thing that eventually will find a market and have customers and hopefully be a success.
So you kind of need a bit of the of both things. But you know, when I talk to founders, oftentimes the ones that the founders are most successful are the ones that have had many previous iterations of screwing pull a bunch of things up and wasting time. So like I wouldn’t say to people, don’t go ahead and build stuff. And particularly now, you can build. I mean, I’ve I’ve built a bunch of things. I’ve built
a thing to make LinkedIn a little bit more I should I should say less cringy by just erasing all the cringy posts and sponsored rubbish. And I built that in like half a day and now it’s a browser extension, which makes my LinkedIn experience just a little bit more manageable. So AI is great in doing a lot of these like kind of personal project things. But if you’re trying to build software for other people, like other companies
That’s a whole other level of experience and taste and and architectural understanding to deliver an experience that people would actually want to pay for.
Chris Heuer (17:33) Yeah,
and I’m gonna go meta here before we pivot, which is the fact that again, what we’ve just talked about both in building the daily brief skill that we did last week and what Mark has done to change his experience with LinkedIn, these are all things that you can do too.
as a community manager, as a community member, as a person using a computer. And this is really the important bit behind the book that I’m working on, conversations with my AI. But I’m not going to get too much into the book. I just want you to remember that you are the solution to your own problems. And now because of AI, you have access to tools and power to do that. And it’s just really, really important. So thank you for sharing that, Mark. And that’s really important that you’re able to control your experience better.
Chris Heuer (18:18) Hey, sorry to interrupt, but I need to thank our sponsor, Higher Logic. This episode and all episodes of this season one is supported by Higher Logic. The Vanilla platform is where customer communities live. Discussions, Q&A, knowledge base, ideation, moderation, all in one place and connected to the support and CRM tools your team already runs on. Higher Logic is community first. It’s not a feature bolted onto something else. It’s a whole product built by people who have been doing this for more than fifteen years. Here’s why that matters on this show.
When AI answers the question, Vanilla is where the humans show up next, where members find each other and where trust actually gets built. Visit them at higherlogic.com and tell them that you saw them on communityassistant.ai. Now back to the show.
Chris Heuer (19:05) But let’s go ahead and shift gears here a little bit and talk about Tribe ROI. Now obviously the Holy Grail, as we said earlier, is going to
Marius Ciortea (19:14) Mm-hmm.
Chris Heuer (19:15) be like the thing of understanding what is the ROI? What are the metrics numbers that lets us know that we’re succeeding besides that personal experience of connection, besides the warmth that we get from meeting with each other and talking with each other? How do you actually measure that when we have to show to an executive sponsor
or to the people who are paying for this community that it’s actually thriving and doing well.
Mark Birch (19:38) So Tribe ROI came about as a concept that I wrote about in the book, Community in a Box, which was this sense that we’re all kind of building a lot of the same stuff, just in lots of different ways and making a lot of the same mistakes. And so I just wanted to write: here is a framework for doing this in a sensible way.
I feel a lot of ways in the community world, even though there’s things like spaces, like CMX does stuff, there’s a community, this, that, and the rest, I feel there there really are formulations that if you look across the board at how communities launch, grow, and scale, that are consistent across different types of communities. And so I wrote about one of the concepts called.
The flywheel, the community flywheel, which is content, events, and connections, and another concept called C1, C2, C3, which is a way of thinking about a metrics-based approach of connecting things on the ground in community to business outcomes. And then as I was thinking about my work at AWS, you know, we had lots of signals, but we didn’t.
Really have a way of connecting it to anything that could be meaningful for business stakeholders, whether that be the services team around product, whether that could be sales and marketing around leads or revenue or retention or new workloads, whatever it may be. And so when I left AWS, the mission was could I build that formulation and take the
the mental model of C one, C two, C three and built in such a way that you had a mathematical deterministic way of looking at your community based upon the signals across different community surfaces.
So what that idea is, is can I take a bunch of signals that come from different places? Could be Slack, could be forums, could be events. That I can look at all those signals, determine what they mean and the value. That’s C three. Then on the other side I have
What are we looking at in terms of the outcomes that we expect that community can deliver for our business? That’s C1. Those are the business outcomes. But you need something to bridge community signals, the C3, with the business outcomes, the C1. And that’s what I call bridge metrics. And so I spent a lot of time in building out TribeROI to build in what the C2 metrics are.
So you can now translate all these all the stuff which looks noisy and it’s hard to really parse what it all means across these different community surfaces to things that could be directly applicable to a business outcome, whether it’s
Marius Ciortea (22:37) Let me
Mark Birch (22:37) causal or correlative. So there’s there’s different levels as well.
Marius Ciortea (22:41) Yeah, one thing to add, because I I think there’s something that I see junior community managers make a mistake all the time. they equate the community and what they are doing to the org chart they’re in. So they t try to tie it purely on the org chart they are currently in. So it’s it’s if they’re marketing, it’s like what are all the marketing signals that matter and ignore all the other signals in order to just create value to the org chart direction.
Directionally to the org chart versus the entire business. And I think what you’re saying here is super important because you need to kind of take your time of like what are all the signals? And you are responsible across the organization for business outcomes, not just your org chart. So if you can start connecting, you know, what value can I add to sales? What value can I add to support?
So it’s kind of like the just wanna make sure that community managers understand there, like, you know, don’t get stuck into the work chart point of view.
Chris Heuer (23:40) I
really like the bridge metrics, Mark, because what you’re getting at is something that we’ve been talking about a little bit over the last few years, one of my mentors and I, around what he calls success proofs. And it’s not just the case study that says we needed to do this and here’s how great we were. It’s about dealing with that messy middle, about what did it take to actually make it work, to make us get to that success. So I really love that. So tell us a little bit more about that.
Mark Birch (24:06) Yeah, so I think there’s a to your point, i we read the case studies and we say, wow, that’s great. You’re you 52% like ROI in your community, or your community led, you know, drove five point one million in community attributal revenue. Okay, well, but how? Like what was what were the connection points to make that happen? And it all just seems to be magic. And I’ve seen a bunch of mistakes.
In
trying to get to connecting community signals to business outcomes, one of which is relying too heavily on what I call proxy metrics.
Chris Heuer (24:41) Mmm.
Mark Birch (24:42) So we’ll just kind of come up with a number and we’ll say, okay, this is the number that defines X. Okay, well, if I’m a CFO, I’m kind of wondering, like, okay, well, how did you come up with that number? What is your proof?
And you have no proof because there’s a proxy metric that you just kind of plugged in to make the numbers work. So then your whole argument falls apart and you look like an idiot. Another mistake is trying to push everything into a causal framework. So this this thinking that you need to have direct attribution from community to an outcome. The reality is that yes, you can do some of that.
But it also misses out on the massive amount of value that a community is creating that will never be a causal relationship. And that is a lot of the mathematics behind the scenes that I’ve been working on for the past two years, building our TribeROI to figure out. So it’s not just, okay, we if you have causal direct correlation, you can build that attribution, great. But also we don’t want to miss out on the incredible value.
Of all the activity that happens and what that really means, if you look at support cost deflection, or you look at retention, or you look at community attributable revenue or pipeline acquisition, there’s all all these valuable drivers for business. And I’ve defined 14 specifically within TribeROI But if you didn’t look at the entire picture, you’d lose out.
You’d
lose out on the full picture.
Chris Heuer (26:12) Yeah,
you really do have to take a holistic approach. And that’s why I’m so excited about the potential for AI as an assistant for community managers to give you back more time to do some of this important work. And a big part of that important work, of course, is building the relationships with those business leaders in the organization so you can better connect the dots and have those kind of
product mindset customer conversations with those internal stakeholders to understand what they’re trying to get at.
But it’s about this tension between what we were talking about at the beginning of being able to roll your own and build your own tools
versus using a tool like TribeROI But what Mark was talking about before is so important.
it’s important to understand that the other component of running that professional software as Mark was talking about before is also the maintenance of it, is security enhancements because the security landscape is already changing and there’s a lot of things that you just don’t want to be doing on your own because the amount of time to maintain it, the cost involved in maintaining it, of building new features,
of understanding the intricacies and the really crucial factors of all of Mark’s experience that went into the software and all of Marius’s experience that’s going into Higher Logic where he’s contributing back there, that is invaluable. And this is the reason why we have not the buy build lease decision that we used to have in IT departments over technology, but we have a different sort of decision here, which is literally build or lease now, because those are the two. We’re not buying anything anymore. It’s all leased. It’s all
SaaS right but there are some things we can build for ourselves that are unique to us and then there are things that are beyond us that provides the framework and provides the methodology and that also improves upon that over time that makes it really worthwhile to go ahead and buy a service like like Mark has developed with TribeROI Now that’s not just a commercial for Mark this is a way to think about all of your software build versus lease sort of decisions as you’re getting into becoming a proveloper and building your own tool.
Let me turn back here and look at what is it that you’ve got in front of us and why don’t you walk us through the dashboard and tell us about the metrics that matter for you and what’s going on here
Mark Birch (28:26) Tribe ROI, the whole core is this health dashboard, where the premise is there’s data signals. You have community exists on different different places where you have content. That content could be blogs, newsletters, it could be conversational sources like forums, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, and so on. And then you have events either in real life or
Online, and you’re recording who signed up, who attended. And then connections is looking at all the content and all the events and how they come together and relate to each other. Those are your members. And these are three pulse metrics. These three pulse metrics roll up into what I call the community quotient. And the community quotient is the equivalent of your health score. All this is built on discrete.
deterministic math. It’s not AI woo-woo magic. Because I fundamentally believe if you understand the math behind signals that are coming in, you get a lot richer, more trustworthy data to work with. And why this is important, I’ve seen people demo dashboards of their community stuff. And I’ve seen directly mistakes on their dashboards.
Why? Because well one, they it it’s AI and it will just come up with anything that it wants to tell you. And two, no one double checks this stuff and it drives me insane. And so there’s nothing
Chris Heuer (29:54) Totally.
Mark Birch (29:55) for you to double check here. All the math and all of the things that you attune, depending on your type of community, are all available to you in the software. And it shows you signals that you can then start to take action on.
I do use AI, but only in terms of allowing you to understand what actions do you take based on insights. For example, maybe there’s a process of re-engaging your drifting members. And I can click a button and it can show me a way of reaching out via email, a list of people that are drifting, that you can then action in some sort of email marketing system. And
Chris Heuer (30:34) Love that. Love that. And again, it’s the idea here of it’s preparing us.
to actually act and allowing us to express our own judgment in doing that. Well, one of the reasons why Mark is here this week is because he commented on our post talking about building out this daily brief and says, hey, I do a little something about that. And so that’s what I wanted to bring him in. Do you have your own version of the daily brief or was that really it? Is there another screen that you have for that? Or is it integrated into your health dashboard?
Mark Birch (31:03) Part
of it is the is in the dashboard for
Chris Heuer (31:05) There we go.
Mark Birch (31:06) health, but I also want to show what the contribution is. And so we always talk about this idea of community ROIs this holy grail. And how do you do that? Well, again, going back to C1, C2, C3, C3, we have signals. C1, we probably are talking to our stakeholders, executives about what community can contribute. C2, the bridges to show that are
Really hard and could guide you in very bad ways if you don’t have, again, a mathematical basis upon which you’re making these assertions. So, in the community contribution dashboard, not a daily brief, but that’s something I’m actually working on in terms of a roadmap to kind of roll this up into things you should do as a community leader. But taking the health score and taking the contribution can give you a good sense of.
where you need to go. And this community ROI is broken in, as I said before, into different types of business outcomes. And I’ve defined 14 in the software across retention, which is where the the big driver of value is being generated in this sample community. This is a again, this is a demo I created with seed data just to show
Chris Heuer (32:18) Good.
Mark Birch (32:19) how all these things come together. But I can look across retention, education,
Expansion pipeline, hiring, referrals, product feedback, advocacy, support cost deflection, and so on. And so all that together rolls up into information that now not only can you take action on through the health score, but now you can say to your your peers and other in other business groups, you can talk to your stakeholders and say, Hey, here’s what our contribution has been the last 30, 90,
you know, twenty you know, twelve months past in terms of how community has been valuable for your specific function. Again, talking to what you were mentioning, Chris, that you know you need to you know have these conversations with different stakeholders. You know, and and Marius, I’m sure you’ve had this conversation with many of your your fellow executive peers in the companies that you worked with, saying, you know, okay, that’s great about community, but what did it matter
Like, why do I care? What have you done for me lately? And this is the what have you done
Marius Ciortea (33:21) Mm-hmm. That’s all it is.
Chris Heuer (33:23) Yep.
Mark Birch (33:24) for me lately dashboard.
Chris Heuer (33:26) Awesome, awesome. Mark, we’re unfortunately running out of time. We could go really deep in this. So I got a couple of quick rapid fire questions that I need to get off here to make sure that we set this up properly for people to reach out to you if they’re interested in actually deploying it. The first one of which is, what sort of involvement do we need with IT? Do we need a complete IT approval on security for this sort of things? We need to partner with them, right?
Mark Birch (33:47) You’ll probably need to partner with them. The data connectors will require API access. And though you can get away with some of these connectors just bringing in CSV files. So it really depends upon the nature of your organization and where this data sits. If you have access to it,
Chris Heuer (34:06) Got it. So we can
crawl, run. So we can actually import the data using CSV files.
Mark Birch (34:12) Yes.
Chris Heuer (34:12) We can figure out how to create a non-real-time connection, and then we can get to a real-time connection, right?
Mark Birch (34:18) Correct.
the other thing I also want to mention is that you know if it comes to IT and security, everything that I’ve built out is GDPR compliant. All the data can be wiped, it’s all multi-tenant architecture. So no one, including myself, can see your community data.
Chris Heuer (34:36) Awesome, awesome. And so then the other question just to set people up a little bit. I know it’s enterprise, so we always have some flexibility in the pricing and everything. But you know, if we’re talking about a community that, let’s say, has about 10,000 members, you know, maybe a few million or whatever in revenue, 10, 20 million in revenue, something like this, what sort of cost might a community manager expect for deploying Tribe ROI to get it set up? Because I imagine you do some consulting to get them set up and then on an ongoing basis for the cost of ownership.
Mark Birch (35:05) Yeah. I mean there’s a there’s a small upfront setup fee just to get you started and connecting the systems and your business outcomes. but a monthly cost for the software is anywhere from a thousand a month to five thousand a month, depending on the size of your organization and the amount of data that would be
Chris Heuer (35:21) Awesome.
Mark Birch (35:22) sitting in Tribe.
Chris Heuer (35:23) Yeah, and so we’re looking at all in then somewhere around.
15, 20,000 up to maybe 80 for the entire year, which actually is reasonable for this sort of thing, because particularly it is the basis of the ROI of your community. So being able to get that sort of knowledge and insights all packed together is really important and valuable and I think is worthwhile on this sort of thing. And of course, get the secret sauce of everything that Mark’s built. You we can talk about connecting business outcomes to community activity all day long, but it is that messy middle in the C2 and as he’s defined it and what he’s discovered
doing the work that is really valuable here and I really appreciate that very much Mark and I’m just so glad to have you on with us here. Marius, any closing thoughts before we have to run off?
Marius Ciortea (36:08) my only closing thought would be if you start in community fresh, maybe start with the ROI first. because if you have
Chris Heuer (36:16) Mmm.
Marius Ciortea (36:16) a clear understanding of what that is, it’s gonna help you actually build the community in a better way that actually drives the results. So working backwards on a business outcome always leads to better results.
Chris Heuer (36:31) That’s
awesome. Really important. Start with the end. Start with the end in mind. Absolutely. And then
Marius Ciortea (36:35) Yeah.
Chris Heuer (36:35) let’s not forget Simon Sinek. What’s our why?
Make sure we’ve got our Y embedded in as well.
Mark Birch (36:40) Yes.
Chris Heuer (36:41) Mark, one last question for you. And again, you’ll be able to find Mark Birch through Tribe ROI and of course his book Community in a Box. But Mark, I had this question I didn’t get to ask before and I want to make it the closing question if I could for you. We talked a lot about different metrics, a lot of vanity metrics and things like this. What is the one metric you would suggest everyone retire that really isn’t helpful?
Mark Birch (37:04) God, there’s like so many. I would say drop the proxy metrics. you know, stop just with make-believe numbers just to try and create business value. There’s actually ways of defining what that value is. And in fact, I would talk to your business stakeholders first to understand what they’re looking at and how they look at their numbers, whether it’s the marketing, whether it’s the product team.
Because they have very specific formulations proven in data. Use those.
Chris Heuer (37:34) Yep. So while AI is making things easier, we still have to put in the work. And that’s really the closing thought for the day. Things are getting easier.
but we’ve got to put in the work and more importantly, we’ve got to choose what work we need to be doing. And that’s where I think Mark’s work here with Tribe ROI and with his book and with all the other stuff we’ve been talking about will be helpful for you to help you figure out where to point yourself and what work you should be doing. So this is Chris Heuer with Marius Ciortea joined today by Mark Birch, author of Community in a Box and founder of Tribe ROI. Thank you all very much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode.
Marius Ciortea (38:08) Thank you all.
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