*This post is part of a new series highlighting communities both established, and brand new to the Khoros platform. Subscribe to the "Customer Stories” label to be notified when a new post is added to this series.*
The following responses were provided by Bryan Jennewein (bjennewein), Director of Community Engagement at Splunk:
Please share a bit of history/background about the Splunk Community.
The Splunk Community first launched nearly eleven years ago and today over 12,000 monthly active members visit our site to engage, learn, answer questions, and give back! Most prominent among our community programs has been our Splunk Answers program, which is a community-driven online forum where members can ask questions and get answers about Splunk’s specific products, capabilities, best practices, etc. In addition, our community has grown to include programs for our MVPs (SplunkTrust), local groups (Splunk User Groups), and product feedback (Splunk Ideas).
Why did you choose to migrate to the Khoros Community platform?
With the growth of our community, our company, and the breadth of helpful content available, we knew that it was time to invest in updates to support our incredibly passionate users and welcome new members with open arms. We wanted to create a central hub for all of our community programs to intersect, and we wanted to grow our existing programs, like Splunk Answers, while also launching brand new programs and new community features.
In short, we want to help our entire community connect, collaborate, and share knowledge in every exciting way we can. Khoros, for us, represents our investment in bringing our entire community the technologies and capabilities to enhance their experiences and grow the support, education, and connection (and fun!) our community engagement programs provide.
The ability to both migrate our existing programs to Khoros and launch our new programs on Khoros was key in our decision. We needed a platform that could provide the diversity of interaction styles we wanted with the ability to scale and grow as fast as we have been.
We chose to migrate to the Khoros Community platform because of its rich features and capabilities, the ability to migrate our product Q&A forum, and the ability to launch new discussions, new content capabilities, and gamification elements, while quickly linking to our User Group and Idea programs.
What was most important to you and your Community team during the launch project?
Several important factors guided our project, and most important among them was not only preserving but also enhancing our community members’ experience while we executed a major migration from our legacy platform over to Khoros. More than 100k questions, more than 140k answers, millions of comments, and more than 12k users is… A LOT… of content to move. In addition, we wanted to usher in a brand new intuitive user experience that was consistent with our company branding. It made for a “hefty” migration, and we wanted to make sure we got it right.
Next, we wanted a clear vision for our future. Given the breadth of new capabilities we were ushering in, we wanted guidance on how best to hit the ground running with launch… and then keep running. So we needed our project to include helping us think through our community strategy, moderation, promotion, engagement, and more.
Finally, we wanted to be able to execute with confidence. This meant keeping our project teams aligned as far as time, deliverables, and costs. We chose to partner with Khoros for this, and together we were able to execute our entire project scope (and then some!) on time and at budget.
Goals:
- Increase adoption of Community as a Support channel
- Foster engagement (user contributions, on-site activity, etc)
- Make Community an effective solutions channel through improved content
Community features live today:
- Forums
- Blogs
- Premium and Native Gamification
- Leaderboards
- Labels
- Tags
- Top Labels component
- Unanswered Topics component
- SSO implementation: OAuth2
- Top-Level Categories
Splunk Community Team:
- Bryan Jennewein bjennewein Director of Community Engagement
- Brian Walker brwalker Sr. Community Experience Mgr
- Patrick Pablo ppablo Sr. Community Content Mgr
- Evania Zhang Evzhang Community Content Specialist
- Anam Siddique, asiddique, Community Content Specialist
- Michelle Schlachta, sensitivethug, Community Content Specialist
- Jason Hupka jhupka Sr. Advocacy Mgr
- Renee Woods runrenchi Community User Group & Events Mgr
- Dylan Steele steeled Global Head of Corporate Messaging
Khoros Team & Contributors:
- Launch Project Manager - JenniferTh
- App Engineers - EricJ, WillB
- Community Strategists - JennyW, KellySt
- Designers - EricaRya, SaurabhV
- Migration Engineers - TsvetanK, BoyannaD
- QA - RodrigoR
- Tech Lead - MattV
- Web Engineer - lucas-gresta
- Account Executive - AnaliseS
- Customer Success Manager - JamieDi
- Khoros Care - MichaelaL (Implementation Advisor) and AmandaB (Learning Advisor)
- Khoros Ops/Support Eng Team - WeiS and mso
- Technical Account Manager - KelleyM
What’s next?
Splunk already has big plans for more enhancements on their community, such as Salesforce Connector integration, Bevy integration, and additional design work.
Many thanks to Jennifer Thomson (JenniferTh) for co-authoring this post!
Atlas users, please take a moment to check out the Splunk Community! Reply to let us know what you like best about it!
