SaaStr Podcasts for the Week with CMX Media and Salesforce — May 22, 2020







Ep. 335: David Spinks is the Founder @ CMX, the premier network for community professionals. In 2019, CMX was acquired by Bevy, where David now serves as the VP of Community. Bevy is a customer-to-customer community management platform, building products that brands use to build, grow and manage their community event programs, both virtual and IRL for companies like Slack, Twitch, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Duolingo. Prior to CMX, David founded 2 prior startups centred around different forms of community building and before that was Community Manager in the early days of LeWeb the largest tech/startup conference in Europe.

Pssst 🗣 Loving our podcast content? Listen to the start of the episode for a promo code to our upcoming events!

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

* How David made his way into the world of SaaS and came to found CMX. Why David believes that community is so central for all SaaS companies today?
* How does David advise teams on expectation setting around virtual events? How ambitious should they be? What big mistakes does David often see in the early days of the planning? How does this differ if you have an existing cohort of users vs are starting new with no audience?
* How dependent is the success of the community on the platform it is hosted on? What is the ideal size for Slack, Telegram and Whatsapp communities? Should the host seed the discussion or allow it to be natural? How important is it to establish a handbook of expected actions and behaviors? Should you cull members who are inactive?
* What does David believe separates good from great when it comes to discussion groups? What innovative strategies has David seen work when it comes to bringing a virtual event to life? What is the right amount of people in that discussion group? What is the core role of the moderator for the group?


Ep. 336: Leveraging survey data from 66+ enterprise SaaS companies, Matt Garratt, Managing Partner of Salesforce Ventures, shares the landscape of how businesses are shifting their sales & GTM strategies to react to today’s uncertain times. Adnan Chaudhry, SVP of Sales at Salesforce, then provides actionable takeaways on how to refocus your sales teams, engage with customers, adjust your sales comp and how you can properly forecast in today’s new landscape.


This podcast is sponsored by Guru.

SaaStr’s Founder’s Favorites Series features one of SaaStr’s best of the best sessions that you might have missed.

This podcast is an excerpt from Matt and Adnan’s session at SaaStr Summit. You can see the full video here.



Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
David Spinks
Matt Garratt
Adnan Chaudhry

Below, we’ve shared the transcript of Harry’s interview with David.

Harry Stebbings: Welcome back to the official SaaStr podcast with me, Harry Stebbings, and you can suggest both questions and guests for future shows on Instagram @Hstebbings1996, with two Bs. And I always love to see you there. But to our episode today. And there’s one question every SaaS company is asking themselves right now, “How the hell do I do virtual events, and what makes the best so good?” Well, diving into this today, I’m thrilled to welcome David Spinks, founder of CMX Media, the premier network for community professionals. In 2019, CMX was acquired by Bevy, where David now serves as the VP of Community. Bevy is the leading provider of in-person community software, powering community programs and incredible companies like Slack, Twitch, Salesforce, Atlassian, and more. And prior to CMX, David founded two other startups centered around different forms of community building, and before that was community manager in the early days of LeWeb, the largest tech startup conference in Europe.

Harry Stebbings: But enough from me, so now I’m very excited to dive into this extravaganza on what makes the best virtual events, with David Spinks, founder of CMX Media.

Harry Stebbings: David, it is so great to have you on the show today. And what you probably don’t know is I’ve been an admirer of yours from afar, mostly on Twitter, for a while. So thank you so much for joining me today, David.

David Spinks: Honored to be here.

Harry Stebbings: I would love to start, though, with some context. So tell me, how did you make your way into the wonderful world of startups, SaaS, and how did you come to found CMX?

David Spinks: Yeah, it’s a long story, but to make it as brief as possible, I’ve been building communities online since I was a kid. Started in middle school, around video games, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 was my game of choice, built a big online forum around that, and just became pretty fascinated by how technology could connect people and create community. And so I did that, I was just active on every online community platform I could. Eventually that became my career and I became community manager, joined a startup in Philly called Scribnia, at the time. And we were in an accelerator program for three months, and halfway through that accelerator program, we pivoted and started SeatGeek, which, everyone will know SeatGeek, and no-one will know Scribnia. And we kicked that off and that was my first entry into tech. And I ended up running that first company, Scribnia. I was the managing director and ran that company. And that just got me in the door and that led to more and more opportunities to work with different tech companies.

David Spinks: I ran community at a company called Zaarly for about a year, I ran community for LeWeb, which you may know was one of the biggest tech conferences in Europe for many years.

Harry Stebbings: Sure. Absolutely. Loic.

David Spinks: With Loic Le Meur. Yep. And helped Udemy kick off their first community program, and also started companies. So I started a company called Feast, which was delivering ingredients to your home, and you get this home cooking experience with videos that teach you how to cook.

David Spinks: And ultimately kicked off CMX six years ago, because throughout my career, starting companies and building community for companies, ironically, there was no community for community professionals. And so I would do everything I can to find other people who are doing this work and just get to meet up with them, ask them questions. I co-founded thecommunitymanager.com with a couple of friends, about eight or nine years ago as a place to just start writing about this stuff.

David Spinks: And eventually led to starting CMX Summit six years ago, which is our conference, as just a place to bring everyone together who’s doing this work, building community for companies. And so that grew, we bootstrapped it for five years. Last year, at the start of last year, we were acquired by a company called Bevy, which powers event programs, event communities for companies. And that’s how I’m here.

Harry Stebbings: And the rest is history. Speaking of communities today, every company in the world is thinking, “Shit, how do I move from physical to virtual events?” I want to dive into that because I think many are foundering and a lot of scratching their heads, doing it for the first time. So you’ve had a starting point, and expectations set slightly when thinking about the transition to virtual events. So when you think about maybe expectation setting for these companies, how do you advise companies to approach just how ambitious they should be when it comes to that first virtual event?

David Spinks: Yeah. It’s funny because I’ve been banging this drum of community for more than 10 years now, and all it took was a global pandemic, and all of a sudden everyone’s like, “Wait, this is important.” I’m like, “Yeah, I know.” And so there’s companies that have been doing this for a while, but even the ones who have been doing it for a while were probably still reliant on in-person events, and they’re trying to pivot. And then you have companies who weren’t really doing much in terms of community, or weren’t doing anything online and they’re kicking it off for the first time. If this is your first time doing that, I think just getting started’s really important.

David Spinks: It’s easy to overwhelm yourself and try to do too much, and launch a massive forum, and throw a huge virtual conference. But you can start in very simple ways with just simple discussion calls, kick off a Zoom call with your 10 top customers. People are craving community right now, they can’t connect with each other in person. And so they’re looking for any opportunity to connect with each other, and they’re all dealing with this epidemic. It’s affecting everyone, and so everyone has a lot of shared challenges and lot of things they want to ask each other right now. And so just start creating those spaces for them to come together, and a lot will start to happen organically.

Harry Stebbings: Can I ask, when you create these spaces for them to come together, and sorry, this is off schedule, but I’m intrigued, do you seed the discussion threads themselves, or do you let the discussions flourish naturally within the participants?

David Spinks: Ideally, it’s all happening organically, and you’re just sitting back and nudging the direction or facilitating. More realistically, you’re going to launch an online space and you’re going to have this vision of everyone showing up, and participating, and engaging. And then it’s just going to be crickets. There’s so many spaces for people to engage today, that to create a new space, you really have to put in the work and facilitate. And so in those early days, I think you really want to be creating a lot of the content yourself, be putting out discussions, be putting out conversations that you think would be interesting, and then don’t even wait for people to respond. As soon as you post it, message five people that you know, and already have a relationship with and say, “Hey, I just posted this question. I’d love to get a conversation going. Do you have a minute today to jump in and post a response?”

David Spinks: And so you’re manufacturing the example that you want others to see. So when someone new joins a group, now they see activity, they see people engaging, they see thoughtful responses in there. And now, that sets an example for them to be thoughtful in their responses and start posting. And it just puts out the message that this is an exciting place to be. It’s the same reason that a bar might only let some people in at a time, in order to create a long line, so it looks like it’s in high demand. Same kind of thing for communities, if people show up and it just looks empty and it looks dead, that’s not going to feel like an exciting place to participate, but if you start to create that experience of engagement and excitement in the community, then when people join, they’ll feel drawn into that group.

Harry Stebbings: So, as I said there, we write these schedules and then we just go completely off script, but I much prefer it that way. In terms of the platforms, I’m really intrigued. How dependent is the success on the platform choice that you make? Because you could do anything from a WhatsApp group to a Telegram group, to a Slack channel, to any of the collaboration tools that we have today. How dependent is success upon the platform choice?

David Spinks: Yeah, it’s a big question. If you already have an engaged audience, and a lot of people who are trusting the brand, aware of the brand, engaged with you, it’s going to be easier to launch your own owned platform. Maybe you kick off a Discourse forum, or you use one of the enterprise platforms, and you bring people to your site and your community, because they’re already engaged, because you already have an audience, that’s going to be easier.

David Spinks: If you’re starting from scratch and people still don’t know who you are, and they’re not fully engaged with your brand, and your team, and your product yet, maybe you don’t have a lot of users yet, it’s going to be really hard to get people to participate in a new space as well. You’re just creating a new habit, and people are so used to going to big social to interact now, that it’s hard to get people’s attention. And so in that case, it might be better to go to where they are already, which might be a Facebook group, Slack is really popular because people are already in there, Discord is really big for gaming, and use that to build the community. And then, once you have that engagement, once you have an engaged community, the community is the people, it’s not the product. And so once you have the people engaged, then it becomes easier to move them to different spaces that maybe they otherwise wouldn’t have.

Harry Stebbings: Totally get you. Can I ask, in terms of those groups and communities that you build in those initial days, how do you think about optimal size? Because you want enough where there’s enough discussion and enough content going around, to where it feels like the velocity of thought is high, but you also don’t want too much where there’s apathy and too much noise. How do you think about the optimal size in those early days?

David Spinks: Smaller is often better, right? A good quality group of 10 people is going to be much more valuable to someone than a hundred people that weren’t as curated, and in an experience that isn’t as intimate. And everyone knows that, like you go to a dinner with 10 really awesome people, this is the best experience, right? Everyone loves that kind of experience.

Harry Stebbings: Totally.

David Spinks: But then you go to the meetup with a hundred people just casually drinking, and it was open to anyone, that’s not nearly as valuable. It’s not as facilitated. You don’t get to talk to people as deeply. It doesn’t feel as curated. And so in general, I think smaller is better to start, and then you want to grow it incrementally. So if you’re looking at an online group, maybe ten’s a little small, unless you’re in a WhatsApp group, or a chat space that works with a small group, but let’s say you did a Slack or a Facebook group. You’re going to want more people than that, I would say maybe 50 or a hundred’s a good starting point.

David Spinks: And then you want to grow it gradually. So you don’t want to overwhelm it, right. Going back, I keep using bar examples, I don’t know why. It’s on my mind, I guess, I haven’t been to a bar in months, but you ever go to a bar, and you’re with friends, and it’s not that crowded and you’re having a great time, and you can hear each other and you have space to move, and you can get a drink quickly, and then rush hour hits. And all of a sudden it’s packed with like 500 people, and you can’t get to the bar and you can’t hear each other, and you don’t have space, and it no longer feels like it’s there for you? That’s what it feels like when someone kicks off an online community and they have a hundred people in it, and then they invite 500 people into the group. It just completely overwhelms the community dynamic that you had in there.

David Spinks: And so maybe a good rule of thumb is to keep it to like 50% growth each week, or each month, or even 25%. So if you have a hundred, then add 25 more each week, and then you can welcome those people properly. Everyone who’s in the group can contribute to welcoming them properly. And you create more of what feels like an organic growth, rather than a manufactured growth.

Harry Stebbings: Can I ask a tough one? Do you cull people who don’t engage or who don’t consistently show themselves to be a meaningful part of the community?

David Spinks: Usually, no. It depends on the format. Let’s say you did bring together 10 people in a discussion group, and it’s noticeable that someone is not participating, that they’re not showing up, that they’re not engaging. Then I might call that. And I might say to that person, “Hey, it seems like maybe this isn’t the best fit for you, so totally cool. But we want to make sure that we keep this group really focused. And so we’re going to keep rotating members out based on engagement.” You might be able to do that in that small group, just to keep it really high quality. In a larger group, it doesn’t matter. You actually want to have people, even if they’re passively engaging in these large groups, because that becomes an audience for those people who are creating, that makes them want to create.

David Spinks: So there’s the 90-9-1 rule is this old study on large online communities, and it basically said that 90% of people will passively consume in a community, 9% will be responding and engaging, and 1% will be creating. And so realistically, every community is going to have a very small percentage of people who are actively creating and contributing, and then a much larger percentage who are passively consuming. And then there are people who just go completely inactive. And at the end of the day, unless you’re paying per user, or some meaningful metric to you, you can just let those people do what they do. And you can also run campaigns to try to reengage them. So everyone plays a role in the community at all different levels of activity.

Harry Stebbings: Can I ask, we mentioned the different levels of activity and we mentioned some different behaviors there, in terms of very active, responsive, and then creating. In terms of guide books, or guidelines, when initiating people into the group, how important is it to have almost a guide book, a set of rules? “This is how the community operates.” How important is that, versus letting it be much more free flowing?

David Spinks: It’s absolutely critical. There are communities out there that prefer to just be completely free flowing. I think we’ve seen that historically devolves into some pretty bad behavior. And I think it’s really important that you have a lot of intention in any community space that you create. And so there’s a concept called setting the container. And I think that applies to anything from a small discussion group, where you’re trying to essentially explain, “Here’s how to participate in a quality way, and here are the rules that will make sure everyone feels safe and comfortable participating here,” right? So it’s not just rules, it’s not just what not to do. It’s also being explicit about, “Here’s how to contribute in a great way. Here’s the kind of behavior we encourage in this group.” That’s going to guide people to know how to participate in a quality way, that they may not have realized, or may not have been comfortable doing that before.

David Spinks: And so it’s really important to have that. That said, you should always be open to evolving and changing and learning from your community members. And so maybe someone one day recommends a different kind of guideline, or they do something within the boundaries that you’ve set, and you realize, wow, that was a great way of approaching this problem. Let’s turn that into an official guideline or rule. So you can constantly adapt and evolve your guidelines, but you always want to be intentional about how you want people to participate, and how you don’t want them to participate in the community.

Harry Stebbings: We’ve spoken quite a lot about discussion groups there, and I think a lot of companies in particular, are scratching their heads in terms of how to really encourage engagement within the community. I’d love to hear your thoughts, having seen so many different kinds of viral and vibrant communities, in terms of really, what cool methods of engagement have you seen really work well in virtual events?

David Spinks: Yeah, so the world of virtual events is evolving rapidly right now. And I honestly think everyone was sleeping on the value of virtual events before, and now that they don’t have a choice, everyone’s getting a crash course in it. The default has been the Zoom call. The Zoom webinar, the traditional webinar. Have a speaker, everyone watches that speaker. There’s a chat feed where they can respond, or ask questions, or talk to each other. And maybe there’s a Q and A at the end. It’s pretty one way, right? It’s one person broadcasting to a lot of people.

David Spinks: That’s not really going to be a virtual event in the same way that a physical event, you have the opportunity to meet people, to turn to your neighbor and talk, to network. And so the really great virtual events are incorporating more opportunities for those attendees to engage, to participate, to network with each other. And so, events that do this really well have a combination of different formats. They do have speakers that are presenting and educating, and then they have speed networking, so icebreaker.video is a really great tool for this, or if you use Hopin. A lot of these tools have speed networking built into it, where each attendee gets randomly matched up with another attendee. Icebreaker does a good job of giving discussion prompts for them as well. And you can choose the time that it rotates out. So you can do three minute talks, or five minutes talks, or seven minutes, and then it fades out then at seven minutes, and you get matched up with someone else. So our community loves that, that’s been really effective.

David Spinks: And then just a small discussion group. When you have a speaker broadcasting to everyone, no-one else is getting to meet each other or discuss the content. And so using breakout rooms, using smaller group discussions, is a really awesome way to make it feel more like a real event where they’re getting to meet people. They get to participate in the discussion, they get to bring their questions and hear from others. And so that’s a really valuable way of making your virtual event more engaging.

David Spinks: And you can combine these things, right? So we do, CMX Connect is our global event program that’s run by members of our community. We have over 60 chapters around the world. And for all of the events that we do, we combine all these different elements into one event. And so we might have 30 minutes of speed networking to start, and then we’ll have a speaker talk on a topic, like measuring your community, or running virtual events. And then we’ll break out into discussion groups, so that people can discuss that topic amongst themselves, and share their own challenges and their own lessons. And we might mix up that order, and mix and match different formats, but you can think it as modular like that, you have these different event modules, and you can combine them to make a more holistic experience for your community members.

Harry Stebbings: I’m really pleased you mentioned Hopin there, it’s one of our favorite platforms. So, really pleased to hear that. And you also mentioned discussion groups, and I’ve heard you say before that one of the key rules is, it’s under 10 and over 30. Explain this ratio and rationale to me here, David.

David Spinks: So it’s just a way of remembering how to make a discussion group really valuable. And it’s not a hard and fast rule, but more of a guideline. So under 10 means less than 10 people. We’ve all been in discussion groups with 15 people or 20 people, and there’s just no way that everyone gets an opportunity to have their voice heard, not everyone’s going to get to participate in the discussion. If you try to involve everyone, you just don’t get to go very deep. And so I think ideally discussion groups are generally six to eight people. I think 10 is about the most you want to have, so shoot to have less than 10 people per group.

David Spinks: And then over 30. So this depends, but generally, especially if the entire event is a discussion group, 30 minutes is just not going to be enough time. You want to have enough time for people to introduce themselves, for you to kick off the conversation, and then really give people opportunity to bring their challenges, bring their voice, be able to respond to each other, be able to get into conversation. And just so many discussion groups, especially virtual ones, which just take a little bit more time to really facilitate and engage, they get cut off at 30 minutes, and that’s when the conversation usually starts getting good. And so, just making sure that you have ample time for people to have that discussion, and you keep the group small enough that it can be a meaningful discussion.

Harry Stebbings: Totally with you there in terms of giving it ample time. You mentioned the facilitation, there. I’m interested, because it’s a tough role, being a facilitator. What’s the most important role for a facilitator to enforce, in your mind?

David Spinks: I think it’s about equity of voice. I think their job is to identify who hasn’t had a chance to speak, and making sure they create the space for those people to speak, and their job’s to see when somebody is taking up too much airspace, and moderate and facilitate and say, like, “Thank you so much for sharing. It’s been really great to hear from you. I’d love to hear from other members of the group. Harry, what do you think about this topic? Anything that you’d like to share?”

David Spinks: And so without that moderation, every single discussion group I’ve ever participated in has devolved into one person talking a whole lot, and everyone else is having to sit there and listen. And when people participate in a discussion group, they don’t feel like they’re in a position of power or authority to moderate themselves. And if they did, it might feel very, they’re bringing conflict to the group. And so first of all, every discussion group should have a moderator, a facilitator. You should never have an unmoderated or unfacilitated group. You always want to have someone who’s responsible for facilitating the discussion, and it’s that person’s job to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to share their voice

Harry Stebbings: Totally with you in terms of the voice equity. There’s one element, which is always challenging, which is that terrible, awkward silence, especially when you throw an open question out and everyone’s waiting for everyone else to answer. I’m interested, in terms of the awkward silence, what’s the right way for the facilitator to act and engage in those awkward silence moments?

David Spinks: You just got to sit with it, honestly. It’s always tempting to try to fill in empty space. You always want to take out the discomfort for everyone, but I think a good facilitator is comfortable just sitting with that silence and letting others fill it in with their voice. And sometimes it’s just people wanting to be polite, and they don’t want to be the first one to speak, and they want to give other people a chance to speak. I remember in elementary school or middle school, not wanting to be the first one to raise your hand. People just are hesitant to be the first one to volunteer, but then once one person gets going, then it opens it up, and others want to share.

David Spinks: And so just being comfortable with those uncomfortable silences, letting it sit and letting people fill it in themselves. I’ll just sit there on the Zoom call and smile, and see them start to smile as they realize that no-one’s saying anything. And then inevitably someone, within 30 seconds, which might feel like a lifetime, but it’s usually only 30 seconds, someone will be like, “All right, I’ll go.”

Harry Stebbings: That’s funny. 30 seconds, as a facilitative before, 30 seconds does feel like a lifetime, I tell you, David. I do have to ask, though, when we do Q and As, as well, the awful moment is when you say, “Does anyone have a question from the audience?” And you get the really awkward, no questions. What do you do in those situations? Do you seed people in the audience? Do you have backup questions ready? What’s the right way to approach that really awkward element?

David Spinks: Yeah. I think that you really do want to seed it ahead of time, if possible. And you want to continue to remind people to post those questions. One really fun thing you can do is ask people to send in questions ahead of time. And if you’re doing it like a webinar or Zoom call, you can actually have them send in videos of themselves asking the question, and then you can pull in the video and play it live, so it actually looks like someone came on and asks a question and then you bring it back to the speaker to answer the question. So that’s a fun way to make it work on virtual events that you couldn’t even do elsewhere and offline, but seeding things upfront is really good throughout the event.

David Spinks: Reminding people, like, “Hey, just as a reminder, we’re going to be moving to Q and A in 10 minutes. So please put in your questions now, so we can get rolling right away.” Right? So that’s the kind of thing, because sometimes you open up to Q and A and you forgot to remind anyone that it’s coming up, and then they’re not ready to ask a question. And so you want to try to seed it as much as possible. And then when you get to that Q and A point, if you realize that there are no questions in there, don’t stop and say, like, “All right, any questions?” Just keep rolling through it and say like, “All right, well, I have a few more questions that we seeded from the community ahead of time. Please keep posting your questions here in the chat, but let’s dive into the first one.” And so you don’t have that dead air time. And so that’s different, right?

David Spinks: If you’re facilitating a discussion group, uncomfortable silences are really good. If you are putting on content, you’re performing, you’re creating, it’s like doing a podcast or doing a radio show. You don’t want dead silence on a TV or on a radio. It’s the same thing in your webinar, you don’t want to be sitting there live with 200, or a thousand, people watching you and just saying like, “All right, any questions?” That’s just awkward and that just looks like people aren’t engaged, which isn’t a good look. And so I’ll just keep rolling through it, and just go right into those pre-seeded questions that you’ve already pulled in, or prepared. Or just make it up, say like, “Oh, we collected these questions ahead of time. Let’s dive into that.” Even if you literally made up those questions right before the call.

Harry Stebbings: Trust me, David, with my over-excited British way, there is never an awkward silence in my podcast, but I totally agree with you there. I do want to ask this, so we have this event, and we want to know if it’s successful, and we need to measure it. In terms of measurement, I’ve heard you say before that there were two lenses with which to really measure the success of your event. What are those two lenses and how do you break them down?

David Spinks: Yeah. So in working with any community team, we map it out that you have two, what do we call them, dual objectives. So you have a business outcome that you’re hoping to achieve, and then a community outcome that you’re hoping to achieve. And you should be able, in theory, to achieve both with any sort of experience or program that you run. So if it’s a forum, you have your engagement in the forum, your monthly active users, your daily active users, your sense of community, you can actually survey people, you can get NPS, and all these ways of measuring the health of community. And you might be looking at something like reducing support costs, or collecting feedback on your product, or retaining customers. And so you have both the community and the business objectives.

David Spinks: And it’s the same thing for events. You’ll have aspects of the event that you want to tie back to, are we building a healthy community? And in the same way as an online group or forum, you can send out surveys. “Do you feel like you belong in this community? Do you feel safe in this community?” Net Promoter Score. You can look at number of attendees. How many RSVPs did you have, and what percentage of them showed up? How many of those people were repeat attendees? So these are all kinds of things that show you, is your community happy, healthy, and engaged?

David Spinks: And then you’re going to have the business objectives. We use a really simple framework for identifying the business value of community programs. It’s called the SPACES model. So that breaks down into support, product, acquisition, contribution, engagement, and success. And so those are the six areas and you could probably figure it out from the name, but support is people supporting each other, answering questions, giving each other support with their technical problems. That tends to be more in an online forum space, but it can work in events as well.

David Spinks: Product is, you’re collecting feedback and insights on how to improve your product from your community members. So, did you collect that feedback at a booth at your event? Or did you have people fill out a survey at the event to help you improve your product?

David Spinks: Acquisition is growth. So this is actually a really key one for events, and everyone should be doing this, and every event platform should hopefully be able to help you do this. And so you should be able to say, who came to our events, how many people came, how many of them were new leads? How many of them were new prospects? How many of them were opportunities? How many of them ultimately closed to sale? How many of them were customers? And so that gives you a good idea of how your events are actually impacting pipeline.

David Spinks: Contribution is, if you have a platform, let’s say, Airbnb, you have hosts who are contributing to the platform. They run lots of events for their hosts, and they want to see that those events are helping their hosts become more successful at contributing to the platform.

David Spinks: Engagement is essentially customer attention. And so, are our customers more likely to be loyal, to stick around, customer lifetime value as a result of attending our events.

David Spinks: And then success is, customer success. It’s helping people be more successful at using your product, and growing in their career through education programs.

David Spinks: And so all of those can be powered by your events and your online communities, and you can tie any of those events back to one of those business outcomes.

David Spinks: And the last thing I’ll say there is just, we tend to think of these events as one-offs, right? We think of it as like, “This is an event and this event needs to drive this business value, this community value.” And that’s it. We look at it in that bubble, but what you should look at your events as, is touch points with your community over time. And so your goal is to build an ongoing, engaged community over years. And that event is just one single touch point amongst many touch points, that can include your forum, it can include your email, it can include events, in-person events, when those come back. It’s one touch point in an ongoing community member journey that people are having with you.

David Spinks: And so, think about holistically for your event program. Maybe you’re doing a big conference twice a year, and you’re doing regular meetups every month, and you’re doing office hours every week. Those are different kinds of events that you can create, and each one of those is going to have a different community goal, and it might even have a little bit of a business goal. Or maybe some of the events don’t have a business goal, it’s just about engaging the community, knowing that later it’s going to drive business value. And so when you think about it, now you start thinking about your entire community program holistically, and all the different events and touch points that might feed into that customer journey.

Harry Stebbings: I absolutely love that holistic perspective. And I really liked the breakdown there between the two different lenses. So I think that’s an awesome clarity to what is quite a murky, “How do I measure success?” I do, though, David, want to move into my favorite, which is the quickfire round. So, I say a short statement, and then you hit me with your immediate thoughts and I’m going to throw in a couple that aren’t in the schedule that you just mentioned because I’m too intrigued. So just roll with that. Okay. So you mentioned that RSVP to confirm in attendance, what’s a good measurement and a good success rate in terms of that RSVP to attendance of virtual events?

David Spinks: That range is going to be huge, because it depends on the size of the event, right? If you have a 10 person event, you probably want all 10, or at least nine out of 10 people to show up, because you personally invited them. If you have a big conference, it’s going to be lower and we’re seeing the range all across the board. Some people are seeing higher attendance rates than their offline programs were, some people are seeing lower rates, and so offline, historically we’d see for a free meet-up, or a free event, you’d see about 40% people show up. We just hosted CMX Global. We had 3000 people RSVP for that event and we had 2200 show up. It was about 70% showed up, which awesome. It was really cool to see that high of a turnout rate.

David Spinks: It’s hard to have a benchmark, just compare against your own events. So if you did a conference, how do you compare against the last one? If you do a meet-up, how do you compare against your previous meet-ups? And see what you can do to continue to improve that conversion rate by improving your emails, your communication flows, things like that, that might help people be reminded that the event’s coming up, and make sure they have it on their calendar, and that they’re ready to join when it kicks off.

Harry Stebbings: What a terrible question from me, I apologize for that. Benchmark- [crosstalk 00:30:08].

David Spinks: Well, it’s a terrible, “It depends,” answer, which everyone hates.

Harry Stebbings: Tell me, what’s the biggest misconception around virtual events?

David Spinks: There’s a belief that you just can’t build real community through virtual events, there’s just no way you can replace in-person experiences with virtual experiences. And that is true, that you can’t replace it, and there’s a hundred percent, many elements of in-person gatherings that we are just never going to be able to replicate virtually. Even if you got the VR experience perfect, and you have your haptic suit, and you could feel everything. And even then, it’s still not going to be the same as just being able to run into someone in the hallway of an event. It’s the serendipity that you miss out on.

David Spinks: That said, there are a lot of things that you can do to create really meaningful experiences that help people actually connect with each other, and form relationships and form legitimate bonds. And so you have to get creative, and you have to figure out ways of creating serendipity and connecting people with each other in ways that aren’t just a webinar.

David Spinks: You can replicate a good amount of things that you have in an in-person event. Will it do it a hundred percent? No, but there’s a lot of value that you couldn’t even do in an in-person event, because virtual events are just more accessible, for one. So people who may have not been able to travel, or afford a ticket, they can all come together in a virtual event in a way they couldn’t in person. So look for the unique values, or the unique opportunities that virtual events provide, rather than just trying to copy what an in-person event is.

Harry Stebbings: Totally agreed in terms of not being a copy of the in-person. Final one, but a really interesting one for me to hear is, obviously you have CMX, but of all the other virtual events you’ve been to, what has been your favorite virtual event, and what made it so good?

David Spinks: it would be the virtual Passover Seder that we hosted with our friends and family.

Harry Stebbings: Got you. And what made it so good was the bond between friends and family?

David Spinks: Yeah, it was awesome. It was a virtual Seder and, so Seder means order. And so it’s basically, you go through the order of Passover, and you read the stories and you sing the songs. And we had, everyone pulled up a virtual Seder, and they each read from it. So we rotate around. So everyone felt involved, everyone felt included, you drink a lot of wine during it. So it was fun. And so we used to host Seders at our house all the time, every year.

David Spinks: Obviously we couldn’t do that this year. So we did it virtually, but my family is in New York. I grew up in New York, I live in San Francisco now. And so they’ve never been able to be there for the Seder that we host. And this year they were able to join from New York. And we even had two other friends, from Australia, join us. It was morning for them, so they maybe had a little less wine than us, but it was really cool to be able to have our really close friends in San Francisco and our family involved. And just seeing that melding of different groups, that I think otherwise would have been really hard, because everyone would have just done it with their friends, or with their family, to be able to bring those groups together was really special.

Harry Stebbings: David, as I said, I’ve been an admirer from afar for a long time. So I can’t thank you enough for joining me today, and this has been fantastic.

David Spinks: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me.

Harry Stebbings: Absolutely loved that deep dive with David. And if you’d like to see more from David, you can find him on Twitter @DavidSpinks. Likewise, it’d be great to welcome you behind the scenes here. You can do so on Instagram @HStebbings1996, with two Bs.

Harry Stebbings: As always, I so appreciate all your support. And I can’t wait to bring you another fantastic episode next week.


Published on May 22, 2020

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