Company: GRAPHISOFT SE
Company background: Founded in 1982, Graphisoft develops Archicad, the industry-leading Building Information Modeling software solution for architecture and design. Our mission at Graphisoft is to empower teams of building professionals with advanced technology and accompanying know-how to help fulfil their mission: to create great architecture. Our award-winning solutions provide unrivalled open BIM workflows help building professionals to get the job done. Our integrated teamwork and mobile solutions help engage all project stakeholders in real-time. Our colleagues, partners, and users work with us in true partnership with the goal to change the world for the better by Building Together!
Contact: Gordana Radonic
Title: Global Community Manager
Related URLs: https://community.graphisoft.com/
Kudos Category: Rookie of the Year
1. Describe your company and your organization.
Founded in 1982, Graphisoft develops Archicad, the industry-leading Building Information Modeling software solution for architecture and design. Our mission at Graphisoft is to empower teams of building professionals with advanced technology and accompanying know-how to help fulfil their mission: to create great architecture. Our award-winning solutions provide unrivalled open BIM workflows help building professionals to get the job done. Our integrated teamwork and mobile solutions help engage all project stakeholders in real-time. Our colleagues, partners, and users work with us in true partnership with the goal to change the world for the better by Building Together!
2. Why did you choose to invest in Khoros and what was your experience before making the switch from a previous solution or investing in new technology.
Graphisoft customers were exposed to a wide range of sites hosting online forums, knowledge bases, blogs, and other sources. The key challenge with this fragmented landscape was how to bring together like-minded people, to enable them to share ideas, solve problems, and provide food for thought to each other, but also how to indicate Graphisoft's truly global presence. Therefore, we saw an opportunity to consolidate scattered sources and started to look for a state-of-the-art platform to host Graphisoft Community.
During the selection period among various vendors and solutions, our impression was that Khoros is one of the leaders in providing communities for high-tech software companies. Khoros' sophisticated gamification solution was clearly something we saw working for our customer base to drive engagement and provide us tools to acknowledge contribution and dedication. Besides this, having access to a vendor with vast experience in building communities and community management enabled us to start on the fast track.
Connecting various direct ways of engagement, such as connection to support and strengthening the peer-to-peer problem-solving capability between customers, was also highlighted when the Khoros community solution got selected.
3. What were your goals when investing in Khoros technology and what successes have you already experienced because of the investment? Were you able to gain traction faster than expected? Please include metrics if possible.
Our main goal with the new community platform was to merge our existing forum and knowledge base website, enabling easier and more efficient access to information. Additionally, we wanted to reach a wider audience and grow our user base by creating different activities and engagement besides the forum. Since September 2021, when we launched our Graphisoft Community, we were able to grow faster than with the old platform. Interaction through challenges - organized with the contest feature - and group hubs also brought a new and younger audience.
We have hosted three contests, one per season, which have been a new platform for discussion and knowledge sharing. This brought new users to Community and incited debate about the submitted works. Five articles from the Winter contest, Snow Globe Challenge, were published by the winners, allowing our very skilled and enthusiastic community members to contribute directly to our knowledge base. Their articles depicted step-by-step how to achieve the outstanding results of their entries – a digest of creativity, cleverness, expertise, and promotion of our product, Archicad.
The contest has proven to be a democratic tool where our target audience, architects, can freely share their ideas and support each other – either as students, beginners, or long-term users of our products and experts. The results can generate refined content for our knowledge base - bringing customers to the spotlight - and our social media channels.
"Oh wow! With so many good entries, I wasn't sure if I would qualify. It was great fun to participate in this competition! Thank you for making this interesting event!"
Kamen Nikolov, one of the winners of the Snow Globe Challenge
4. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community? Do you use your community for support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.? Has the community charter evolved in any way since launch?
The new Graphisoft Community platform is more than just a fresh look — we made it easier to collaborate with other members, including Graphisoft employees, through an easy-to-browse structure and improved search functions. Graphisoft Community merged the content from the previous Archicad Talk forum with our Help Center knowledge base articles, and the ability of new Khoros powered community to mark forum replies as accepted solution was a huge step forward to helpful answers, which also gave recognition to our active user members. With the idea to start the Graphisoft Insights blog in July 2022, we hope this will be the first stop for information, questions, and conversations about all Graphisoft products. Integrated gamification was a meaningful way to fuel the creativity of our community members, which are mainly architects, building, and creative professionals. Still, we developed that even more through creative challenges we set up through the available contest feature. The contest feature has become an important engagement tool for us, and we are making huge plans for interaction with our users and their creative feedback.
Easy access to know-how from both users and the Graphisoft team is the primary goal of our community. Still, we aim to provide more creative ways for users to share their workflows with our software solutions through challenges (contests) and live webinars, adding extra layers to existing written formats.
Our long-term plan is also to integrate support ticketing, which gives us
excellent feedback to drive our products’ innovations.
5. Tell us about how you are using your community and how you made it happen. Did you get executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was your process to gain this buy-in? How have you achieved cross functional support, added stake-holders and increased organizational adoption?
An important part of the Graphisoft community launch was building internal awareness and buy-in from various stakeholders within the company. We position the community as our direct engagement platform that is available for all. We formed a community team, managing the platform daily and assisting all colleagues who want to get involved in community activities. Graphisoft product teams are keen on involving end-users early in the design and validation processes. Having a specific group hub set up for beta testers provides tremendous value, getting feedback from a wide set of customers and enabling users to get in direct contact with the Graphisoft product team. In addition to that, we rolled out user group webinars through the Khoros event feature to be able to share our long-term goals and plans with a broader set of customers.
We are happy that our software development team recently joined in developing their first knowledge base articles and actively participated in a forum dedicated to 3rd party developers.
6. 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.
We would point out the success of our Beta testing group hub, which hosted more than 150 customers and provided an exclusive forum channel for discussions. Therefore, Community was a perfect medium for communication between users and Graphisoft's product managers and software development. That resulted in our ability to promptly react to users' feedback and influenced several product improvements before the final software release in July 2022.
This positive experience encourages us to involve users directly via Community in earlier planning and development phases.
Our following plans are to promote Graphisoft Community in our customer onboarding journey more actively.
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