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2023 Customer Awards: JumpCloud - Best-in-Class: Community
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: Yes2022 Customer Awards: JumpCloud - Rookie of the Year
Company: JumpCloud Company background: To meet modern demand for hybrid-remote workplaces, organizations require a tool that centralizes user and device management for virtually all IT resources. This tool has to be cloud-based and able to control, manage, and secure remote users from a single admin portal, and needs to work across a device environment that is a mix of personal and corporate devices that run some combination of macOS, Windows, and Linux devices. For large companies, there’s often budget and IT teams available to tackle the challenge. But for small and medium-sized companies or enterprises (SMEs), admins often lack support, staff, and investment to connect users - securely - without adding onerous steps for employees. The JumpCloud Open Directory Platform unifies user identity, access, and device management for remote workers. Its centralized platform includes SSO, MFA, directory services, device management, conditional access policies, UEM, and integration with common SaaS apps for collaboration and HR, to cover the entire employee lifecycle. JumpCloud secures customers with an easy route to deploy Zero Trust security policies and integrates with virtually all resources including files, applications, networks, systems, servers and more – whether in the cloud, on-premises, or elsewhere – with protocol-based integrations and no on-premises hardware. The JumpCloud Directory Platform is already deployed in over 180,000 worldwide organizations, including over 1,800 managed service provider (MSP) partners. Its commitment to ease-of-use for both IT administrators and the employees they manage has resulted in rapid product growth, rapid hiring expansion, and rapid customer adoption. JumpCloud’s feature releases are based on requests from the IT admins who directly manage remote work to ensure that the JumpCloud feature set covers their needs. What JumpCloud offers: Easy user management for partners with zero-touch onboarding and one-click import from HRIS, Google Workspace, M365, and AD, with Multi-Factor Authentication and Single Sign-On options Device management is easier as policies can be applied to all major OS versions (Windows, macOS, Linux) while Mobile Device Management integration makes it simple to provision devices Protocol-driven access to all IT resources - cloud, on-premises or hybrid authentication and authorization through SAML 2.0, LDAP, and RADIUS - simplifies the process for MSPs to manage access control Conditional access policy engine - this provides a simple rules-based approach for admins to define policies on how and when users can access assets, applications, and services. Users can only access organization data from trusted devices and networks Mobile MFA integrated natively into the platform, in a simple “tap to authenticate” model at no additional cost Patch Management to reduce vulnerabilities from known software exploits by giving admins the control over the updates Biometric authentication JumpCloud’s mission is to Make (Remote) Work Happen, a mission that it has been pursuing since its founding in 2012. Recent world events may have forced SMEs to work with a “good enough” remote solution, but JumpCloud’s platform offers a long-term, cost-effective, full-feature, centralized solution that can be managed with ease. Contact: Becky Scott Title: Senior Manager, Technical Community Related URLs: JumpCloud Community JumpCloud blog JumpCloud on Twitter JumpCloud on LinkedIn JumpCloud on YouTube JumpCloud’s IT Admin Community Network The IT Hour JumpCloud Lounge JumpCloud resource hub Kudos Category: Rookie of the Year 1. Describe your company and your organization. JumpCloud is an open directory platform that enables companies to unify user identity, access, and device management for remote workers. We Make (Remote) Work Happen via a centralized platform that includes SSO, MFA, directory services, device management, conditional access policies, UEM, and integration with common SaaS apps for collaboration and HR, to cover the entire employee lifecycle. Our community team sits in corporate marketing. We’re responsible for our total community program, which includes our highly active Slack group, IT admin meetups, corporate social media handles, 3rd party forum outreach, influencer relations, and community champion activities—like our growing weekly IT Hour broadcast with replays on YouTube. And now, it includes the JumpCloud community. 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. We have many passionate users who love our platform, as evidenced by our highly active Slack group. But we wanted to do much more to reach IT admins where they are and do more than just another product community—we wanted to create an industry space where all IT admins are welcome regardless of what platform or directory they use. It’s tough out there when you’re a 1 or 2 person shop, so wouldn’t it be nice to find others and talk about challenges and solutions? Yes! We also wanted to create “one IT community to rule them all” so that admins don’t have to go to 10 different sites to find what they need. It’s a work in progress, but we are headed in that direction. A few years ago, we started with a small Slack group to connect JumpCloud users and help free-tier customers discuss work and solve problems. But it quickly outgrew the message limit and awesome answers were getting lost over time. It couldn’t be found via search engines, so the content was harder to share. And, we couldn’t get the data we wanted to track growth and who the biggest superfans were. We decided to create a forum where we could host all of these discussions and content, while creating opportunities for connections. Take a technical product, add in passionate customers and users who love JumpCloud, then look at areas where these subject matter experts are underserved, and we have an opportunity for the community to become a type of outsourced IT brain—where everyone is able to share their experience and ask questions, regardless of skill level or years in the industry. We started with a strategy that informed what type of technology we would need in order to move forward. And then we evaluated several platforms before choosing Khoros as a partner who can help us execute on our long term strategy and plans. 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 goals were to launch in Q1 of 2022 and start with members of our Slack group (JumpCloud Lounge) and customers, expanding from there. The community has only been out of beta for a little over two months, but in that time we’ve seen customers and IT admins who don’t use our software join and post in the community. Adoption within the company is strong, too, with over 180 employees having joined to date. Executive sponsorship has been critical to many facets of the launch, and they’ve shown excitement about the community by making sure we give company-wide updates about our efforts for total community. Execs also supported a direct link to the community in top level links on our dot com page, which drove almost 1700 referrals to the community in the first few weeks after it was added. Our product team has gotten into the swing of things, launching some surveys and beta program sign ups. To date we’ve had great success with the number of companies who signed up, and the number of programs they volunteered for. Unfortunately I can’t share exact numbers, but it was much more popular than expected (by about 4x), so we’re looking at ways we can scale to other areas of the product team—not just for gathering volunteers, but leveraging community to gather feedback during the betas themselves as well. We also plan to leverage ideas for innovation once we can work out some back end processes and integrations (hint, hint, Khoros! 😉). We launched a customer award program this year, called the Jumpies. We’re using the community leverage nominations and the first round of voting. In fact, there’s a “community choice” category that will be chosen by the community members exclusively! This is an exciting way to expand customer marketing by gathering stories directly from customers around how they are using our products. Our content team has been a huge help in seeding content and producing helpful resources that IT admins can put to use right away in their day-to-day lives, which has inspired community members to add their own content as well. Demand for scripts has been high, with community members submitting some extremely useful homegrown scripts and templates already—so many that we created a repository for them and have plans to launch a KB to complement other community-sourced knowledge as well. We’re an open community, so we don’t require membership to read or search content. This was a conscious decision to avoid inflating our product signups, but also to allow for better SEO referrals and optimization. Users can become a member when they are ready to post or interact with content. Here’s what our community currently looks like when you are a visitor (with a few details scrubbed for privacy): And this is what it looks like when I’m logged in: We consider our launch a success with just under 12,000 visitors in our first 2 months after going live, with traffic and—more importantly—posts and activity growing daily. The forums aren’t stand alone, though. They are a complementary part of a total community approach that includes several programs. The first of these is our IT Admin Community Network meetups, which we launched on meetup.com. Longer term, we’ll have an element of the meetups on the community, using groups and events. We use a group hub to extend the conversation around our weekly IT Hour show. In the hub we post show notes, recordings, contest winners, and follow up questions. Each week we have a contest for the funniest comment on the latest news, and it has been a great way to engage our users and have fun. We’ve just started using group hubs and see a lot of fun things we can do with this content type. All of these different parts of the program show how quickly our company is adopting the community internally to support the IT community and the way we do business. We’re a Product Led Growth company, but we are also deeply focused on our community of IT professionals. As we continue to integrate other areas of the company like JumpCloud University and more MSP-related content, our total community program will continue to grow and provide value to all IT admins, regardless of what platform or open directory they choose. We’ll still focus on making (remote) work happen and building one IT community to rule them all.Re: Khoros Communities 19.12 Release Notes
Wendy_S I'm wondering if it has to do with permissions, but I'm assuming you're an admin & testing that way, so you would already have the right permissions for that to work. I don't know if it would use the "homeoffice" moniker or "home office setup" to accurately grab the group name.
