Author Details:
- Name: Stan Gromer
- Title: Director, CS Technology and Innovation
- Company: Upwork
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
Over the past few years, the Upwork Community has evolved from a modest set of 4 forums into a dynamic ecosystem. In recent years, we've expanded to include over 100 groups, hosted hundreds of events, and built an entire Academy, along with a variety of support resources. As the organization’s needs have grown, so has the role of the Community. It now serves a wide array of use cases, enabling cross-functional collaboration and addressing the needs of Upwork’s freelancers, clients, and internal teams.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
Upwork is the world’s largest online marketplace connecting freelancers with clients across a wide range of industries. The Upwork Community plays a vital role in supporting this ecosystem, offering freelancers and clients a space to learn, collaborate, and grow. Over the years, the Community has expanded from a few forums to an interactive hub featuring groups, events, an Academy, podcasts, and AMA sessions. With resources like learning paths, expert insights, and peer-to-peer support, the Upwork Community enhances user engagement, skill development, and success on the platform, fostering a global network of professionals thriving in the freelance economy.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Over the past few years, the Upwork Community has evolved from a modest set of 4 forums into a dynamic ecosystem. In recent years, we've expanded to include over 100 groups, hosted hundreds of events, and built an entire Academy, along with a variety of support resources. As the organization’s needs have grown, so has the role of the Community. It now serves a wide array of use cases, enabling cross-functional collaboration and addressing the needs of Upwork’s freelancers, clients, and internal teams.
Our Community team consists of the Moderation, Community Programs (Groups, AMA, Podcasts, etc.), and Community Product team (focused on technology for Community, Academy, Events, Certifications, and Chatbots), while our Academy team is comprised of Coaching & Events, Academy Content, and Certification.
This solution was created to address key challenges:
- Scaling: Accommodating a rapidly growing community.
- Versatility: Providing an array of support and learning resources across different functions within the organization.
- Engagement: Enhancing user engagement and retention by integrating education and support tools into the platform.
- Integration: Bridging our educational content, events, and support features into one cohesive experience.
What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved.
A major recent innovation was the development of UPCATS (Upwork Courses And Training System), a custom-built Learning Management System (LMS) on the Khoros platform, enhancing the Upwork Academy’s capabilities. What began as a basic knowledge base has evolved into a fully immersive learning experience, now offering advanced learning paths, quizzes, SCORM support, and robust analytics. This solution addressed our critical need for a scalable, flexible LMS while also pushing the technical boundaries of what Khoros could handle.
In addition to the LMS, we focused on integrating our Academy with the Upwork Community to provide a seamless user journey. Members can now move between the Academy and the Community to ask questions, get feedback on their Upwork profiles, and discuss best practices with peers. This integration not only supports learning but fosters engagement, allowing members to build relationships, share insights, and grow their skills.
Key innovations introduced with UPCATS and Community integration include:
- Learning Paths: Offering customizable courses that track user progress, with badges and certificates awarded upon completion.
- Quizzes and Interactive Modules: Enhancing learning through real-time quizzes and hands-on activities.
- SCORM Support: Integrating legacy SCORM content, allowing a versatile training system for multiple learning formats.
- Advanced Analytics: Utilizing Khoros APIs and Upwork’s Data Warehouse for in-depth tracking of user activity, enabling data-driven insights and personalization.
- Community Integration: Allowing members to create and share their own learning paths within the Community, promoting peer-to-peer learning.
We didn’t stop with just the LMS—Community engagement was another major focus. In the past year, we launched an AMA Series and a Community Podcast, both hosted and published using Khoros. These initiatives were designed to address the growing need for expert insights and live, interactive discussions on topics critical to freelancers and agencies, such as AI integration, video editing, client management, and proposal creation.
The Inspiration Podcast and AMA Series evolved from our blog, driven by community demand. Special location-based AMAs like "Croatia Vibes" and "India Vibes" brought in diverse perspectives from global freelancers, ensuring that we addressed a broad range of issues specific to different regions. Across 11 AMA events, we saw strong engagement with 1,856 total registrants and an average attendance rate of 40.67%.
We’ve also built an Education Marketplace on Upwork Academy, offering curated content from leading providers like Coursera, Jasper, and Udemy. This marketplace gives our users access to world-class learning resources, further empowering them to grow their careers.
Additionally, our enterprise team approached us to help set up resources for office hours and webinars for enterprise customers. Leveraging the events functionality on Khoros, we quickly stood up a comprehensive events platform that goes beyond a traditional Zoom page. The solution not only provided a space for live webinars but created a library for on-demand content that enterprise customers can continually reference.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Through the implementation of UPCATS and other key initiatives, we’ve seen significant business outcomes that demonstrate the value of our Community and Academy solutions, as well as their impact on both users and internal stakeholders.
- User Engagement & Completion Rates: Since the launch of our Academy’s learning paths, we’ve supported over 1 million users, with 250,000 completing their first learning path. Our focus on increasing completions has paid off, with 32% of users now completing their first learning path, a significant jump that demonstrates how effective our learning experience has become. The introduction of features like quizzes, interactive modules, and video libraries has enhanced the overall learning experience and driven this growth.
- Community Retention: A direct result of our emphasis on engagement, our Community retention rate has doubled from 8% in Q1 to 16% in Q3. This increase was driven by proactive outreach efforts, including a new monthly newsletter, which has attracted over 200,000 members. This initiative, powered by Khoros, has exceeded our expectations in terms of participation and engagement, creating an additional touchpoint that brings members back into the community for further interaction and learning.
- Content Expansion: In addition to learning paths, we’ve expanded our educational offerings with video libraries, third-party content from leading providers such as Coursera, Jasper, and Udemy, and coaching sessions. These offerings have increased the breadth of educational resources available to our community and have strengthened the connection between learning and career advancement.
- Scalable Growth: UPCATS not only solved the immediate need for a scalable LMS but also opened doors for future growth and innovations across Upwork Academy. Its success has laid the foundation for us to continue evolving our learning and development initiatives, providing a model that other parts of the organization can build upon.
By integrating our Academy and Community platforms, we have created a cohesive experience that empowers users to not only learn but also engage with one another, driving higher levels of participation, skill development, and job success. The combination of these features has not only increased user satisfaction but also provided tangible business benefits, such as improved talent retention and enhanced value for both freelancers and clients on the Upwork platform.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Learning and development opportunities via a new AI Education Library are critical to ensuring talent on Upwork are operating to their greatest potential. We see a strong correlation between completing an Upwork Academy learning path and getting hired. In fact, independent professionals who complete a learning path are up to three times more likely to be hired within a month of submitting their first proposal or project, compared to those who do not complete a learning path. Through these initiatives, Upwork is continuing to connect clients with faster, better and more flexible talent, while attracting skilled professionals by giving them access to the tools they want and need to supercharge their work, including training on how to fully leverage the tools provided through our platform.
By combining our AI/Chatbot and Community teams in early 2024, we’ve significantly improved our deflection and self-service rates. Over the past 18 months, we increased our deflection rate from the low 50% range to 80%. This was achieved by guiding users to Community for support, where many questions are resolved by existing resources or peer assistance.
We also implemented a seamless integration allowing the Community team to escalate complex cases to Zendesk with a single click when needed. Additionally, personalized user journeys have led to faster resolutions and greater self-help success, as users are directed to the most relevant resources based on their needs.
What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved?
Khoros stands out due to its flexibility and ability to be customized to our specific needs. Beyond the out-of-the-box forum features, we built an entire Academy/LMS on the Community platform—something we couldn’t achieve with any other platform. Khoros allowed us to innovate, from repurposing the Ideas board as a Known Issues section to launching coaching programs, blogs, and groups. Its versatility ensures we never have to say “we can’t do this,” enabling us to creatively solve problems and scale our offerings seamlessly.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Khoros’ flexibility and robust integration capabilities were key to addressing our challenges. The platform’s customization options allowed us to seamlessly build complex systems like UPCATS (Upwork Courses and Training System) directly on top of the Community, blending traditional community engagement with an advanced LMS.
Another standout feature was the ability to integrate multiple functions—such as learning paths, events, and support—within a single platform. This helped us not only scale quickly but also maintain a unified user experience. The ease of API integrations and bulk data access enabled us to build advanced analytics dashboards and customize user journeys based on real-time data.
Finally, the support from Khoros’ customer success team was invaluable. Their ongoing guidance allowed us to push the platform’s limits, creating solutions like interactive learning paths, AMA events, and podcast series, all while keeping everything under one roof.