Company: Bunnings
Company background: Bunnings is Australia and New Zealand's leading retailer of home improvement and outdoor living products, and a major supplier to project builders, commercial tradespeople and the housing industry.
Contact: Jason Hill
Title: Community Manager
Related URLs: workshop.bunnings.com.au
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it in the last year? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.) What is the purpose of your community?
Bunnings Workshop is an online community for home improvement help and inspiration. It is a friendly and accessible place for our customers to get inspiration and advice for all their home improvement projects regardless of their skill level or previous experience.
Workshop was originally a standalone site so we could ensure the community was all about our members and their projects and not about us. It also ensured we could test and learn without any risk to the Bunnings brand. In the past 12 months we have rebranded as Bunnings Workshop, moved the community onto the Bunnings domain, expanded the Workshop team from two to four, and started the journey of integrating the community into the Bunnings digital ecosystem.
Changes have been driven by member feedback obtained via regular member surveys. We found 85% of members wanted more posts from Bunnings team members so invested in doubling the size of the team, including hiring one of our community’s most prolific and kudoed contributors. Members love getting help and inspiration from other community members, but surveys showed that Bunnings team members are seen as a great source of D.I.Y. ideas, knowledge and how-to advice.
We have also had success this year by publishing more proactive content. In addition to our very popular Project Gallery which features the best community-authored projects, we publish step-by-step How to guides with full lists of tools and materials. These are typically based on the most popular projects shared by members or some of the most popular discussion and search topics. We also collate our most popular projects in Top 10 articles. This proactive blog content has been wildly popular with members. Our articles represent just 0.25% of all posts on Workshop, but have garnered 17% of all pageviews.
2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations?
We have had a deliberately slow, patient and strategic growth plan for Workshop since conception. Our goal was always to slowly and cautiously introduce the Bunnings brand over time once we had a strong foundation of members and content to ensure that the site would remain focused on our members and their projects. Our regular member surveys had shown us that the time to start integrating the community had come.
Our community roadmap for the past year featured the top-level goals that Bunnings wanted to achieve from the community, and our objectives for this year – how we needed visitors and members to behave to achieve our goals. Under each objective, we listed our strategy – how we could influence visitors and members, and the specific tactics we would execute.
Our strategic objectives for the past year were:
- Members share more quality projects and D.I.Y. advice
- Members ask a growing number of D.I.Y. and gardening questions
- Members and visitors consumer more community content.
Key metrics were tied to every strategic objective to ensure that we could measure the success of our tactical execution.
3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible.
The Bunnings Workshop community has enjoyed spectacular growth and success in the past year.
There was a huge improvement in Net Promoter Score in our most recent member survey compared to the previous year. It is now 34.1 compared to a previous score of 1.6. Over 50% of members are promoters. Customers say Workshop is friendly and welcoming for all regardless of skill, experience of knowledge, and describe it as full of good ideas and advice.
Bunnings Workshop is inspiring our customers. 70% of members were inspired to take on a DIY project because of Workshop content in the past 12 months, with 40% starting three projects or more.
Bunnings Workshop is also proving very helpful to our members. 50% of members got assistance from Workshop content when needing help with a project in the past 12 months.
Because Workshop is providing the help and inspiration that people need, it is driving sales. From tracking online sales data and extrapolating in-store sales, we estimate Workshop has led to over AU$8 million in Bunnings sales over the past 12 months.
Community growth has also been impressive despite no significant change in promotion. The number of members has grown by 50% in just a year. Unique visitors are also up 27% year-on-year and pageviews up 21% YoY. Most of the growth has been organic. Traffic from organic search has grown from 15% this time last year to 36%.
We now have an extremely strong foundation to build upon in the year ahead.
