Designing Community
Role - Project lead, community manager.
Skills Sharpened - Problem solving, user research, experience design, content strategy.
Status - LIVE
Summary
Personalization and testimonials are coveted for readers of thepointsguy.com. With no authenticated experience on site (and no near-term plans to build one), we evaluated existing platforms to create a premiere community for TPG: One that fosters learning how to travel better and more affordably, and offers a real value-add to our readers’ learning experience.
Our solution, a flagship Facebook Group called TPG Lounge, aimed to exist as an extension of the TPG site that couldn’t be solved onsite. By employing audience and social media best practices, we would empower users to have a dedicated space to talk points, miles, travel and engage with like-minded travelers in a setting that would produce a curated, personalized community.
Ultimately, our plan worked across multiple metrics, and today maintains over 100,000 group members across four specialized groups built on the success of the Lounge. Users report heightened satisfaction in their learning experience and sense of community, the groups have expanded the TPG brand umbrella and its impact. Other functional teams (from editorial to business development and SEO) continue to use these groups to create better content, track business partnerships, and improve onsite user experiences. It might be an interim solution before a proper onsite, native community exists, but it has been an undeniable success since its creation.
I led the creation, strategic management and growth of these communities and their users’ experience.
Planning
Problem-setting and research
At The Points Guy, we had a dilemma in 2017.
Our content, ranging from travel, airlines, points and miles, credit cards, and more, is thorough, even highly technical in some cases for the advanced audience that we’ve garnered since our inception in 2010. But with this detail came an inherent challenge: How do we connect the highly technical with the basics, and how do we give readers an opportunity to learn from each other?
At TPG, our audience ('“community”) is as important as the content that we produce. In fact, in the points and miles world, community is everything. Firsthand testimonials and tips, like in the larger travel space, drive conversation and dollars. However, our existing 3rd-party commenting platform, Disqus, failed to provide users with the experience they sought; it’s a commenting board, not a community. Non-TPG communities for points, credit cards and award travelers existed on Reddit and FlyerTalk, but these lacked curation and accessibility to most beginner or even intermediate points and miles users.
Disqus Comments
A comment board isn’t a community. Most questions go unanswered and users are left further confused.
Disqus Comments
A comment board isn’t a community. Toxicity, unhelpful discourse and obsolete front- and back-end UX drive users away.
The primary problem was that TPG readers were drawn away from engaging in potentially helpful conversation (like adding helpful comments) that would be of use to other readers because the only place to do so is often limited, anonymous, toxic and .
We hypothesized stronger community, testimonials and personalization would result in stronger brand trust, and, ultimately, a more resilient brand that other businesses would seek to partner with over time.
In other words, to quench the thirst of readers who wanted to hear from fellow award travelers, credit card users, etc., we needed to build a structured, reliable environment. One where users would feel more confident in their travel-making decisions, and, after seeing our community foster these feelings, come back for more.
We knew we needed to give readers a place to learn from each other and advance their knowledge and help others have the bucket-list experiences that they’ve achieved, too, but we didn’t have the resources to do this on the website; that is, we were’t sure how to do it, and where it would live.
Solution Overview
Strategy and execution
We sought a single space for readers to celebrate the benefits of what we write about everyday: airlines, credit cards, points and miles, travel and the people that benefit from using them strategically.
Our solution was to design a specialized Facebook community with the primary intent of giving onsite readers and Facebook users alike a place to be inspired by and learn from others, thereby personalizing users’ experiences to help them travel more and more affordably.
Within this community, users could ask questions, share experiences, and learn from each other to create a more holistic learning experience for the TPG brand.
Strategy
Lead by example to train user behavior to achieve brand and content goals: helping provide answers/solutions within the TPG ecosystem and syndicate conversations for articles and other onsite content. More specifically:
Create the premiere community for learning how to travel better and more affordably. After diving into our users’ behavior and interests through surveys and interviews, and researching the Facebook group platform itself, we decided on core values that would drive growth and constant engagement, offering a real value-add to our readers’ learning experience.
The group, TPG Lounge, would exist as an extension of thepointsguy.com; users would be able to talk points, miles, travel and engage with like-minded travelers in a setting that, we hoped, would produce a curated, personalized community.
We decided Facebook Groups would be an excellent platform to host our new communities, particularly given its vast userbase, basic toolset and TPG’s existing presence on the social media site. (Image courtesy of Facebook)
Execution
After designing the community itself around our hypothesized solution, we led by example to encourage desired user behavior. We populated the new group with questions and images meant to spark conversation, lift up our community members’ pragmatism, financial literacy, aspirational travels and sincere love of aviation.
To drive the user experience and to best provide an accurate representation of the breadth of content covered on the TPG website, we focused on curating content, and required all new posts be screened by our community manager (me) and a team of hand-picked moderators that I managed.
Design for autonomy, lead by example, make it scalable.
Like any UX design process, testing was essential to building the best experience. We asked for regular feedback from the growing community to refine the experience we were building for them.
To ensure members of all skill levels could benefit from the community, participate, and to be certain that we followed through on our commitment to a personalized experience, we launched weekly “threads.”
#BeginnerTuesday, #WingviewWednesday, #CreditCard411, #StateYourDestinationSunday provided community members the opportunity to ask questions they may be too timid to ask to the entire group, and posting weekly with a hashtag (#) was one way we created a centralized conversation while integrating Facebook search best practices.
By doing so, we facilitated pragmatic user-to-user interaction; users answered their own questions, allowing our full-time team to take a back seat and work on other projects.
Once again, we designed the experience and led by example to foster the user behavior we sought.
Results
It worked!
The TPG Lounge has become the largest and one of the most-active communities dedicated to points, miles, credit cards and award travel on Facebook.
The group functions as designed: it operates almost entirely autonomously in its service to those within it. Users answer each others questions, report behavior they deemed unacceptable, and post high quality, highly engaging posts to the group without being told to do so. And , it’s become a cross-functional resource for our editorial, business development, product and design teams.
Like any design, iteration is imperative.
In 2019, we shifted our strategy to incorporate more personalities and firsthand experiences from both the community and the TPG team. We found new ways to leverage our incredibly passionate and opinionated community to drive user interaction and facilitate conversations about the most hot-button issues in the world of travel and points & miles. It worked, too.
By taking stances on issues related to our core areas and encouraging healthy debate, our engagement rate spiked—with an active community some 20% above the benchmark for most other groups. We doubled down on promoting authenticity, first-hand accounts, mixed content (humor and hot-takes mixed in with technical tips and information) and community-staff interaction. In short: since mid 2019, we’ve kept it real.
In fact, the TPG Lounge has become a unique destination. Our editorial team has written hundreds of articles using information gleaned from this community to help other readers—from community-sourced tips on using points to travel across the globe and pro-tips on packing light on a budget to lengthy write-ups about how readers used their points to circle the globe in first class; the social team has leveraged stories into top-performing Instagram content for the @thepointsguy account; with just a tiny full-time team, we have trained our community to answer tens of thousands of questions about points, miles, credit card and travel best practices because they want to.
Almost every day, members of the community report on bucket list trips they’ve accomplished because of what they’ve learned in the TPG Lounge, and the feedback loop that we’ve created. Even our editorial, data science, product and SEO teams use feedback in this group to inform strategic decisions across all of TPG’s verticals. The business development team leverages our large engaged audience to potential partners. We continue to use key learnings from this community to grow others on Facebook—including TPG Family, TPG Small Business and TPG Women, with a combined 120,000+ members of dedicated, highly engaged users. Indeed, TPG wouldn’t exist without the active community it’s apart of.
This group, the community that has grown from it and the taller tentpole they’ve created are the latest extension of that.
Carefully designed UX is inseparable to its success.
In short:
We achieved our goal
We designed a community that solved for onsite technical limitations (lack of personalization, structure and community) while bringing new users under the TPG brand umbrella. Constant user feedback proved instrumental in our experience design and iterations to this day.
The 100k+ member communities are leveraged beyond social
Including the editorial, product design, business development and SEO teams, and the groups serves as a model for many other Red Ventures businesses.
Key Takeaways
Design for mutual benefit.
Find and iterate on the intersection of user experience & audience development. We trained user behavior by carefully designing the space, the rules and the examples that users see and model their behavior after. Make no mistake, this is a full time job. This is especially important when you can’t customize the platform itself.
Messaging is key.
“If you build it, they will come” only works if your target audience sees the value-add of the thing you’re building. For new brands, digital designs and community spaces, how you message a potential user’s benefit from using it is nearly as important as the product itself. Use what you know about your audience to build a messaging strategy that encompasses what you do, and what users can become by using it.
Make it personal.
Take stances, make jokes and create identity. Designs, like brands, need to resonate emotionally with their users. Tap into your audience’s identity to make your product a part of your users, and integral to the stories they tell about themselves.
Custom functionality is better, but…
The right experience design approach can make nearly any platform work. We use the tools Facebook made available to community creators, and they work, but as an experience designer, I see the immense benefit of a custom community platform.