SPACES Model of Community’s Business Value

As we concluded yesterday’s article, I mentioned some reasons why you’d need to communicate the Business Value of your community and its activities. Here’s another important reason to do this.

Your intended business model would inform the type of community that you build

Tom Ross gives a great example of the above. Imagine the following scenario:

You start a community around karate. You decide that your content strategy will be based on karate scenes from famous movies. You post short video memes of famous karate scenes on your social media. You build a considerable audience of 1 million followers.

You then decide a year later that you want to monetise. Your dream is to build the world’s best online karate academy. You want to sell online karate training courses and access to a team of top instructors. However, when you launch your academy, hardly anybody buys!

The issue isn’t your audience size, it’s that you built the wrong audience! It turns out that 99% of your audience isn’t interested in the hard work of learning karate, they just enjoy watching karate movies and memes from the comfort of their sofa.

If only you’d clarified your ultimate goal of building the world’s best online karate academy from day one. Your content strategy could have been providing free karate education across your social channels. This way you would have attracted a highly relevant, engaged community of potential customers for your premium academy.

There is nothing wrong with selling to your community as long what’s being sold is valuable and needed. However, communities are too often seen as cash cows. More often than not, the value a community brings especially to a brand would not be financial or sales.

One reason that community is becoming more important is that it’s becoming much easier to build products, but it’s always going to be very difficult to copy a community

The above is very true. Despite that, it is really important to define a clear, measurable ROI for a community when creating your community concept and strategy. The SPACES model is one of the best I’ve seen to plan, execute, measure and communicate the business value of the community.

P.S This model belongs to David Spinks and the CMX Team. For the most part, the words below are theirs. I have drawn from multiple sources for what’s below, favouring a certain wording over the other and skipping some steps entirely. I’d inform you of the reasons for my choices and look forward to yours.

SPACES Model: Six Business Outcomes of Community

The SPACES model was built to help businesses understand the different types of measurable outcomes that are driven by communities. This simple framework can be used to identify the key business objectives and revenue drivers for their communities. Let’s delve in:

All community programs drive at least one, but often multiple, of these 6 business outcomes:

Read the above gently. For each letter, imagine how a community focused on that business goal would be structured. You can also classify your community or communities you’ve encountered in the wild.

For example, open-source projects on GitHub would have communities focused on C: Contribution as members contribute more code to the project. An NFT project or any community in the web3 space often have initiatives on P: Product due to the decentralized nature of the community as more members make direct decisions on how the product is developed or business decisions.

How to Apply the SPACES Model

• Go through the section below this and choose a letter.
• Start with one area, master it and then expand to other areas. This would make it easier to clearly define and track community value especially if you’re just starting.
• After you’ve identified the area your community lives in/would be focused on, pick the metrics you would use. Remember to pick your metrics based on your objectives and not the other way around. (I’ve put some metrics in bold, those are the top used metrics for each category. Your choice should also depend on what strategies you can easily implement).
• Use your SPACES objective to determine your community strategy.
• Use the SPACES model to get buy-in for your community by clearly articulating how and where the community would add business value in addition to the metrics you’d use to measure/track that.

Various areas of the SPACES model and their metrics

S: Support

Customer service and support. The goal is to improve customer support and satisfaction and reduce support costs by empowering members to answer questions and solve problems for each other. It often takes the form of a support forum where members show up with product questions and the community answers them for them.

Metrics

• Case deflection (number of cases that are directed to an article and successfully resolved)
• Active users
• Conversation engagement (posts, comments, DMs, etc.)
• Number or percentage of answered questions
• Reduced customer support calls

P: Product

Ideation, Innovation, feedback, and R&D. The goal is to accelerate innovation and improve your product offering by creating spaces for members to share their feedback and discuss ideas that they’d like to see you apply to your product. You can leverage the community to identify the most important changes and save money and time on surveys.

Most common metrics:

• Product ideas
• Feature adoption
• New user-generated content
• Conversation engagement
• Customer satisfaction
• Number of event attendees

A: Acquisition and Advocacy

Growth, marketing, and sales. The goal is to increase brand awareness, grow market share, and drive SEO, traffic, and leads, by hosting online and offline community spaces and/or empowering ambassadors to create content, organize events, and authentically advocate on your behalf. This can drive massive growth and customer loyalty

Most common metrics:

• New customers
• New user/member signup
• Number of event attendees
• Active users
• Conversation engagement (posts, comments, DMs, etc.)

C: Content and Contribution:

Collaboration and crowdsourcing. The goal is to motivate and accelerate the contribution of content, products, and services on your platform, marketplace, or social network. This is a common objective for companies whose core offering is a community, or is inherently social and rangles from user-generated content to open-source platforms.

Most common metrics:

• New user-generated content
• Active users
• Conversation engagement (posts, comments, DMs, etc.)
• New user/member signup
• Number of event attendees

E: Engagement:

Customer experience, retention, and loyalty. The goal is to increase customer retention, average contract value, and customer satisfaction by giving customers a sense of belonging and organizing engaging and valuable community experiences.

Most common metrics:

• Active engagement
• Conversation engagement (posts, comments, DMs, etc.)
• Number of event attendees
• New user-generated content
• New user/member signup

S: Success

Customer success and advancement. The goal is to make customers more successful at using your product, resulting in increased spending, retention, and satisfaction, by empowering them to teach each other, help each other skill up, and grow in their careers. Success communities go beyond just fielding questions to actively drive increased product adoption and customer lifetime value.

Most common metrics:

• Active users
• New user/member signups
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer retention
• Customer satisfaction
• Conversation Engagement

While you do the above and to increase your chances of success, make sure to choose a letter that:

• Represents a priority to your business and teammates
• Your members will be motivated to contribute to
• You can measure the success and/or failures of

How was the article? If you use a different model, do share that in the comments below. Also, reach out to me with questions on how to specifically apply this model.

Sit Aside with me…

Two truths and a lie.

This is an icebreaker. You give three statements, one of which is a lie. Your listeners then guess which was the lie. This is a guessing game. How good are people at guessing actually? There is an art and science to it or just have fun, I guess.

Got a bit confused with dates but we’re on Day 8 of this Challenge,

Bell…🖋️