Company: JumpCloud
Company background: JumpCloud® helps IT teams Make Work Happen® by centralizing management of user identities and devices, enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to adopt Zero Trust security models. JumpCloud has a global user base of more than 200,000 organizations, with more than 5,000 paying customers including Cars.com, GoFundMe, Grab, ClassPass, Uplight, Beyond Finance, and Foursquare. JumpCloud has raised over $400M from world-class investors including Sapphire Ventures, General Atlantic, Sands Capital, Atlassian, and CrowdStrike.
Contact: Becky Scott
Title: Head of Community
Related URLs: https://community.jumpcloud.com/
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how?
Objective: Build a public online community of global IT professionals that is useful, inclusive, and welcoming while creating awareness for JumpCloud as a brand that is helpful, relatable, and everywhere our admins are
We wanted to create an IT community that fosters connections and learning for IT professionals—a community of practice where members can share best practices, network, and showcase their expertise. We want to increase awareness for the JumpCloud brand by giving back to the greater IT community, but our primary goal is to be helpful. Since launching last year, we’ve evolved slightly to include in-person and virtual meetups, and a weekly livestream show (recaps are posted on the forums). Additionally, our product team now posts product release notes and recruits beta / early access participants from the community. Members have gravitated to the product discussion boards, so we have incorporated more internal resources from our Sales Engineering team to respond to questions / topics there—supporting both our customers and the broader IT community.
2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved?
We started by interviewing our customers and ideal profiles with our concept to see if a community of practice resonated with the audience, knowing that there were already some sites out there with similar—but not quite the same—topics. We worked closely with our UX team to perform the external interviews and spoke with internal stakeholders.
There was executive buy-in from the beginning—I was hired to create the strategy and own community. Once the interviews were complete, I put together a plan and presented it to the executive team. After approval, we chose a platform. A cross-functional committee helped with the process. Throughout the process of choosing a platform and preparing to go live, we’ve worked with teams across the organization to gain approval, forge partnerships, and keep stakeholders informed. After launch, we’ve continued to build on that momentum, creating a roadmap that includes input from a variety of teams: customer education, support / customer success, content, SEO/web team, tech writing, product, and more.
Support from our CMO and CEO have been critical to making sure that community is a key initiative throughout the company. But it has been relationship building with individuals throughout the organization, gaining their support, and then seeing them become advocates and help evangelize for us that have truly been key to continuing support internally.
3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible.
Innovation:
Early on, we used the community to launch a call for beta volunteers for 3 new beta programs. A total of 106 volunteers stepped forward to raise their hands; some volunteered for one, and some for all three. The result was 225 total betas, extremely successful in prioritizing which features were most important to our customers, as well as identifying how they would use them.
Customer Experience:
The product team regularly posts release notes on the community, giving them a direct line of communication with customers. It gives them the space to tell users more about features and not just what the feature does, but why it matters to them. Additionally, product managers are free to add screen shots, tell a story, and answer questions from users. Many of the posts are gaining a fair number of views and comments, compared to when we first started posting release notes.
We also post recaps of our weekly livestream show, the IT Hour, on the community. Our product managers are regular guests—and they get a chance to give demos of new features and answer questions live about the product, future roadmaps items, and get input on potential feature requests. It integrates well with our efforts to add content that’s referenceable and searchable.
Brand Awareness:
A year ago we created a script repository at the request of community members. Since then it has generated 31% of our total community page views and over 40% of our search clicks.
Member registration is at 86% of target YTD, without forcing users to register in order to consume content. And unique visitors is at 70% of goal YTD, due to both budget cuts and setting stretch goals for number of visits to the site via organic and paid search. We’re still pleased with the progress and will continue to set big, audacious goals as our team likes to call them.
Additionally, 51% of our community traffic comes from organic search, contributing to our team goal of creating brand awareness. Search is one of our KPIs, so having users find our site via Google is a key contributor to our metrics. A strategic partnership with our content team has been critical to increasing the amount of content on the site, allowing for a steady stream of new information for visitors and search engines.
Special Thanks: Mikala Martin
Case Study Opt-In: Yes
