Hi! I'm Aidan.
“I wrote this case study to reflect on my first year working on RØDE’s online community. I also wrote it to share with my network. There is a lot of stuff here. You don’t need to read it all. Promise!”
Problem
- RØDE wanted to develop a community around its brand and products
- Users wanted help with their products
The Challenge
- How might we build a community that aligns the goals of RØDE, and our users?
Strategy
- We flipped our thinking. Instead of dictating how our users should use the space, we just… did what they asked
- We empowered superusers, streamlined the support experience, and made sure the community felt valued
Results
- 12x membership growth in one year
- 80+ support requests resolved per month from community members
- High user engagement and a strong sense of positive brand sentiment
Key Takeaways
- Communities thrive when brands do the same things good leaders do
- Invest in your helpful members, and they’ll invest in you
In my job interview with RØDE’s marketing team, I was told the department faced a unique challenge: they needed to build a positive space around the RØDE brand when most users arrived frustrated with product issues. It was a real head scratcher!
Mostly, marketing departments that try “community building” fail, because a community can’t be bought, or bossed around. Communities aren’t magically what brands say they are.
When I joined RØDE, the company community strategy involved marketing-related activities, like sweet livestreams, gaming tournaments, and community hangouts.
The idea was, it would be separate from our product support experience.
No matter how many reminders the previous team gave our users about this, we received dozens of service enquiries anyway. How could we enhance brand messaging, if their only message was:
MIC BROKEN?!?
When I joined RØDE, the “go away” strategy didn’t seem to be working.
It was frustrating – they weren’t listening to me!
I’ll admit, when I first joined RØDE in March 2023, my thoughts really were this closed-minded about it.
Of course, as any designer reading this knows, the opposite was happening. They were telling me what our community was for, and I wasn’t listening.
Communities want help, not hype?
Their behavior made sense! It’s often faster to ask enthusiasts on Discord product questions than it is to wait for a support team to return your email. The community’s collective knowledge reaches a lot further than the information in our user guides, too.
I realised that I could achieve all our community goals, if only I could just get them the help they needed.
Put bluntly, the community was asking us:
If you aren’t going to do the bare minimum by helping us fix the issues with your products, why would we hang out on your livestreams or participate in your giveaways?
Most of the time as marketers, we create marketing goals to acquire users for a service. Instead, I realised I needed to provide a service to achieve community goals!
Our pivot
We had to ditch the idea of the community being just for our goals. Instead, we focused on what they wanted: a natural way to get support, connect with us, help each other, and build relationships.
We believed if we provided our community with the right structure, the right tools, and consistent community leadership, they would have a positive experience, find the answers they needed, and stick around for our giveaways and livestreams as well.
📈 Proving It
Our server stands out as being a very unique and powerful thing on the internet. Check it out!
What did we learn from making this all work?
🏠 What I Learned Building the RØDE Community
Community structure:
💜 Community Strategy (Respect helpers, give them tools)
Community content strategy:
🎓 Community Content Strategy (Learn from audience misconceptions)
Using community data:
😎 Using Community Knowledge (Yep, another guy making chatbots)
Creating custom solutions:
🗺️ Creating a Meaningful Community UX (with Discord)
Service design:
🪄 Service Design (Brands compete on user experiences)
Proving it:
📈 Proving It (Result- chart line go up!)
Misc.
🌐 Why Discord? ❔ Further questions for discussion 📜 Footnotes 👋 Meet the team- one other guy