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, and integrated teamwork and mobile solutions help engage all project stakeholders in real-time. At Graphisoft, we also value collaboration, innovation, and user feedback to develop solutions that meet our clients’ needs. The Community has a major role in approximating the team at Graphisoft with our passionate userbase.
Contact: Rubia Torres
Title: Community Specialist
Related URLs: https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/International/ct-p/EN, https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC/ct-p/JP, https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Portugu%C3%AAs-Brasil/ct-p/PT-BR, https://www.instagram.com/graphisoft/, https://www.linkedin.com/company/graphisoft/
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?
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, provide food for thought to each other, and, in parallel, indicate Graphisoft's global presence. Through Khoros communities, we saw an opportunity to consolidate those scattered sources, and to support multiple Customer Success stages.
This year, we have joined forces with the Technical Support Team and stablished a clear workflow to both promote peer-to-peer support and, when necessary, direct users to specific channels. The moderators help analyze issues that are reported daily in our forums, raising awareness directly to support Tier 2 when a problem affects multiple clients.
In other fronts, we promote innovation and highlight creative/efficient use of our products through multiple user programs on Community – Graphisoft Insiders, Beta Tester program, periodic user contests, tailored user groups, webinars etc.
These initiatives that we launched and matured in the past year, together with the release of our Japanese and Brazilian sections, have proven to triple our userbase since first launch:
Date | Registrations | Growth | Elapsed months | Growth/month |
2021-09-01 | 16000 | - | - | - |
2022-06-01 | 30000 | 14000 | 9 | 1555 |
2022-12-01 | 40000 | 10000 | 6 | 1667 |
2023-06-01 | 50000 | 10000 | 6 | 1667 |
Launch of local communities
Graphisoft's flagship product, Archicad, is available in localized versions by country, due to local regulations, specific needs and workflows, and language. Based on the same principals, the Graphisoft Community launched in 2022 two local communities, Portuguese (Brazilian) and Japanese, as part of our growth project.
Brazil is the 6th most populous country in the world, and our local office was founded in 2012 . 10 years later, our Community brings Graphisoft headquarters closer to this market and other Portuguese speaking countries, strengthening the use of Archicad and other solutions, creating relevant content and providing meaningful exchange between users from different parts of this continental country.
Portuguese (Brazilian) growth on Graphisoft Community
Period | Completed registrations | Page views | Visits | Unique visitors | Posts | Kudos |
January – June 2022 | 554 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
January – June 2023 | 1.656 | 185,363 | 68,944 | 37,130 | 494 | 613 |
Source: Community Analytics
In Japan, we have a long history of offline user groups, in which users are passionate to learn from their peers and run professional discussions. These region based professional user groups went online in the recent years, but they were not in contact with each other for many years, therefore they couldn't share their best practices outside their region.
Starting a local online Community gave them a common platform where they can access more resources, collaborate, expand their network and engage with each other. While it's typical in Japan that they prefer the already known places and platforms, with the new features and user initiatives, they slowly moved and embraced their new home.
Japanese growth on Graphisoft Community
Period | Completed registrations | Page views | Visits | Unique visitors | Posts | Kudos |
January – June 2022 | 65 | 22 | 5 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
January – June 2023 | 425 | 149,664 | 56,427 | 26,830 | 517 | 1,697 |
Source: Community Analytics
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?
The launch of Graphisoft Community had the goal to unite our different knowledge resources and multiple discussion platforms, enabling easier, more democratic, and efficient access to information. Executive and local managers team quickly realized the potential of Graphisoft Community to reach a wider audience, grow our user base and reaffirm our global influence in the AEC industry. Based on results of our first year, business owners proceeded to support our growth project, expand our platform to cover additional languages. Our Phase I launched and consolidated our Portuguese (Brazilian) and Japanese sections. Now, in Phase II, we work to launch our German section, a major market for Archicad and Graphisoft, migrating a rich volume of content and welcoming an active userbase.
The success of Graphisoft Community and trust of business owners relies on our great results and steady cross-functional collaboration. We have brought colleagues from different teams to work with us and launch programs on the Community. Here is a quick overview:
- Design Team
Graphisoft Insiders brings together a selected group of AEC industry experts, enthusiasts, and users who share a deep passion for our solutions. We are selecting participants based on diverse experiences in practice/project types and delivery methods. Candidates will provide our Design Team with constructive feedback and their technical expertise in several usability tests, across Graphisoft products and services. - Product Team
Graphisoft Insiders Panel: a smaller, hand-picked group, part of the Graphisoft Insiders program, composed by users who are ready for an elevated level of insider activities. Panel members help validate our solutions through workshops, webinars, and forum discussions, enjoying direct interaction with the Graphisoft team.
Tech Preview and Beta Tester programs: user groups with the goal to provide the opportunity for users to test our flagship product, Archicad, in a real environment before the go-live. Selected Community members get to know the new features and uncover possible bugs and usability issues in a controlled setting, helping to improve the quality of the product before the actual release and growing engagement. - Technical Support
Direct contact with users, major issues quickly reported and identified, collaboration with experienced users, moderators, and local technical support (Tier 1) to assist users before they need to contact/use headquarter resources (Tier 2) - Professional Services Team
The team manages Graphisoft Learn, our online learning portal that hosts a variety of video tutorials and interactive lessons. The team is periodically collaborating with us to host webinars on Graphisoft Community, promoting their new learning paths, certifications, and course bundles. Additionally, we collaborate to provide community members with Graphisoft Learn vouchers as preparation and reward in our contests. - Customer Engagement Team
The Education Team assists several students on Community, especially clarifying questions on licensing. The team is also shares content for and by students in our knowledge base.
In the case of our Portuguese (Brazilian) section on Community, the cross-functional collaboration has even greater impact, especially due to geographic conditions. Our local programs Partner, Certified Trainers and Ambassadors have worked closely with the community platform to consolidate previous projects and reach a greater audience in such a large country.
- Partner Program: we created content that helps partners to pass on valuable information to clients: company's products and services, frequent questions about licenses, Welcome Guide, training guide, job positions forum, and more.
- Certified Trainers Program: using the contest feature, we launched a competition (so-called challenge) to encourage these power users, introducing Community to their students and on social media, answering questions, and writing articles for local needs. Rewards include goodies, Community badges, and social media promotion.
- Ambassadors Program: aimed to engage students on promoting Archicad and other Graphisoft solutions, the ambassadors program has now a presentation guide on Community, helping participants to communicate with university managers and professors.
Now, on the Japanese side, we launched their section together with the 4th annual USERFEST, a shared user initiative in partnership with Graphisoft.
Earlier this year, more activities and user collaboration was brought to the platform, such as the How to Use Archicad blog, the BIM Consultation Room and the Archicad User Group, tailored for regional groups to meet regularly, exchange their learning and stablish connections.
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.
We are proud of our overall growth in the last year. Here are some charts:
The Brazilian community gathered relevant information for the three mentioned programs and enabled interaction between participants and between participants and other users.
Getting closer to the people who work to promote Archicad in different parts of Brazil, for example, helps us to bring raise brand awareness and reach more clients. We had a report from a user who won a community challenge and got a remote internship in another state of Brazil through our job positions forum, for example.
The Community platform gave new opportunities for the Japanese user groups as well, to evolve and collect many of the existing services and customer engagement events they already liked. The first big achievement was the USEREVENT at launch: the new platform helped to communicate and involve over 400 people in a hybrid environment during the event. Since this time the platform was shared with a wider audience, we could even connect Japanese customers with their international peers via contests (Community challenges).
Graphisoft Japan is actively promoting and sharing news via Graphisoft Insights, our commonly branded blog on all languages available in our Community. The team is actively working along with the user group leaders to move the conversations from Facebook to Community, where one of the tool is an exclusive content, called "Archicad User Group Magazine", which is a monthly publication from users to users. They also start new groups on Community directly, and their most recent initiative collects over 200 construction professionals (please note that zenecons (ゼネコン) are quite popular in Japan) into a user group hosted on Graphisoft Community. Over a 100 members joined the discussions online and started building this new group. As a follow-up of the successful hybrid event, USERFEST is already in the planning phase for this year.
Special Thanks: Patrick Weltert
Case Study Opt-In: Yes
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