Company: Alteryx

Entry submitted by: Julie Hamel (Senior Community Manager)

Lithy Category: Marketing Champion

Alteryx is the leader in self-service data analytics. Alteryx Analytics provides analysts with the unique ability to easily prep, blend and analyze all of their data using a repeatable workflow, then deploy and share analytics at scale for deeper insights in hours, not weeks.

Our unique promotion

When we began conceptualizing the future of community at Alteryx in early 2015, we made bold investments to begin a transformation of the way that our customers and employees connect with each other, discover new solutions to complex analytical challenges, and contribute fresh ideas to the broad industry discussion. If we were going to successfully launch our new community and scale alongside our rapidly-growing business, creating an equally-bold awareness and adoption campaign was critical.

The Alteryx Community team dedicated significant resources in a short timeframe to design an aesthetic that translates well across the boundaries of digital and physical promotional efforts. The team did a fantastic job of creating a natural feel to long-time users of our products and appealing to the forthcoming generation of business analysts. This led to three major themes that define the core our campaigns:

- Be part of something bigger than yourself
- Take pride in sharing your knowledge
- Keep exploring

Below are examples of how we’ve applied that strategy to execute tactically in a number of areas. The resulting lifts in awareness, engagement, and satisfaction around community have been amazing.

Our strategy and tactics

Video - To introduce the Alteryx Community and pique interest around launch, the team employed little Dot with the blue hair in a fun and light welcome video, which later made 2015’s Top Videos from Video Brewery. It was an instant hit with Alteryx Associates, who previewed the video at a pre-launch Community 101 All-Hands meeting. Externally, the video was shared via social channels a few days prior to the launch to tease our followers and promote our launch date.

Swag – People love free stuff.

To raise awareness internally, all employees were provided with community superhero mugs and notebooks, where they were encouraged to help spread the words with our partners and customers. We continue to hand these out during the new hire boot camp alongside a Community 101 session to help employees get familiarized with the community and their roles in it. We occasionally send these out to customers to thank them for their participation as well.

Gamification – We’ve made great use of Gamification through an extensive collection of badges used to welcome members on their first visit, introduce them to new features, and to recognize their affiliations & status within the global community. Community Members who were migrated from the original community received the community founders badge at launch, which triggered email notifications to let them know the new community was live and thank them for their support. The competition to collect them all is fierce!

Contests - To help generate user content and create a fun & positive atmosphere we launched the 10 Things I love About Alteryx contest where we encouraged users to share reasons they enjoy the product and share tips with other community members. The 10 best quotes were gathered to create the first ever Alteryx Community t-shirt and the winner took away a GoPro!

Hangouts - Our community launch coincided with the release of version 10.0 of Alteryx Designer, so we hosted a live event using Google Hangouts allowing the community to get up close and personal with Product Management, executives, and our Alteryx ACEs (our superusers who beta’d the product) to hear about new features. Hangouts have become a regular part of our repertoire. Our customers love tuning in to hear the latest and interact directly with Alteryx staff and each other!

Our results

After our re-launch in September 2015, post count increased by 2000%, going from an average of 30 posts a month to 1,000+! The community received 10,000+ unique visitors who generated nearly 100,000 pageviews. Active members increased by 2,300%. Metrics continued to trend up in October, with traffic peaking on the day of our first live event as 4,000+ unique visitors stopped by the community.

Since then, we have hosted live Alteryx | Hangouts on a monthly basis, which have provided a great way for us to preview what we are working on, share tips & tricks, and connect with our members to recognize them for their efforts.

All of our efforts have had a major impact internally as well. Employees have embraced the community to support customers and collaborate internally. Having hundreds of champions to support our cause is a big key to our success. Employees make up only 1.5% of our visitors, but generate nearly 44% of posts and 38% of solutions (much of that in the internal employee-only area of the site).

The community as a whole has generated 14,000+ posts and 1,000+ solutions in just 6 short months. Its passion and rapid growth continue to amaze us.

Lithys 2016: Alteryx - Marketing Champion