Community Matters- in conversation with Akash Prakash
We at Community Folks have initiated a video-series called Community Matters to spread awareness around community management. Our mission is to let the ecosystem know about the impact of community and it’s thrust in bringing big change to businesses. The first in this series is our conversation with Akash Prakash, Head of Community at UpGrad, a leading online education service provider. He’s busy creating an integrated community of experts in Product, Digital and Data Science among others, at UpGrad Xchange.
Here is the link to the interview’s video- http://bit.ly/vlogep1
And the link to the interview’s podcast- http://bit.ly/CFKpodep1
Welcome Akash. Let’s start off with knowing what is the definition of Community for you?
For me, a community would be a group of people striving to solve the same problem and moving towards a similar solution. Although it might be a generic definition, but for me this is what resonates when I say the word community out loud.
Did you always know that Community Manager is what you want to be?
I actually became a community manager by accident. I was originally trained to be a civil engineer. In my first year I was hired as a project manager at Manipal Health Enterprises. When I travelled around, I discovered that the locations were in requirement of a business development manager. Since I had great communication skills, my Manager and Seniors enquired to me if I could close a few deals for them, and I did so deftly.
For a brief time there, I was dealing with the business development sector. After that I was sent back to HQ to be trained in Project Management. That’s when I realised there is a lot of value in communicating to others, you have to create value for the person you’re selling to along with creating value for the company you’re working for. So I thought marketing would be a great field for me to join.
And that’s when I joined Octane, a marketing agency that specialises in emails. while I was working here, I realised the dependency huge companies have on using emails and SMS. It’s a big part of banking, shopping, and what not! That’s when I learnt a little bit about marketing strategy. About 8 months into Octane I realised let’s take a pause from minting money, and let me learn a little bit more.
I knew digital marketing was trending, it still is, so I was looking to upskill myself in digital marketing. I was looking into people from DigitalVidya, Simply Learn, and of course UpGrad. Ronnie Screwvala was one of my childhood hero and I saw that there was this event happening in Koramangala, which was being addressed by him as UpGrad’s founder and I was there too. And I was instantly swooned. I immediately joined UpGrad’s course on Digital Marketing as a student.
I met this person Mukul, my ex-boss who was struggling with events, he was supposed to create a community but none among us knew how to do it. Since I had some event experience and a lot of free time, I told Mukul that let me help you with the events and we started working together. We started scaling, from 2 events a month to 6 and to finally 12 events per month today. That’s how he brought me on board as a community manager, and that’s how the whole journey started.
So, Akash, are you an introvert or an extrovert?
I was always an extrovert, but I see myself moving towards the introvert side lately. You have to talk a lot in one burst and then suddenly you don’t talk to anyone. One extremely important thing about community managing is that you have to be comfortable with talking to others. Because your role, is absolutely nothing without getting others on board. So according to me, you have to be an outlandish extrovert to become a community manager. Humour and entertaining
What were your expectations since you were first called to handle the event aspect of UpGrad?
In the beginning, our understanding of a community was to do a lot of events. For UpGrad as well for me, events was the first step to building a community. But now it has evolved into a lot more than just events, and I can take you through that the process.
We have already started tapping into it, and we have seen returns in multiple forms. It’s positively impacting our products, our students, and everyone who is engaged with UpGrad. People are proud that UpGrad exchanged the community build-up and the stakeholders at UpGrad are extremely happy that they have created something like this.
What do you account for, as the reason behind your scaling up from 2 to 12 events per month?
There are multiple reasons behind that, and I’ll just give you a glimpse through it all.
First of all, UpGrad is in the professional education field. Our founders when they started realised that there are these domains that are growing really fast but the current education system does not really have an offering to those who want to get into these domains.
Secondly, we would not want people to stop going to work, because you and I would both agree that we learnt a lot more on the job, so we wanted to supplement that. We wanted to create a very influential and experiential platform, where they could learn while working and apply it too. So we created online courses at domains like Digital Marketing, Product Management, Data Science, Machine Learning and AI.
It became common consensus among us that we needed to motivate the general audience about what these domains are. People around know the hype behind say, Machine Learning, but the have no idea where to begin. So if I come up to you and say hey, we are organising a workshop wherein you’ll get to apply a few concepts of ML under an expert, you will get to experience the reality on both sides of the matter, and know for yourself. So I’m going to talk to an expert in the field about how he can be an influencer and motivate a huge chunk of people willing to learn and contribute to his domain. Initially there were 4 programs in UpGrad, now there are 8 and more are sprucing up. We want to brand, market and evangelise each program, and that’s what we do though our community.
So do you think, for the success of UpGrad, community played an important role?
Oh yes. Most of the people we’re working with are from Bangalore. We have a huge amount of technical experts coming down to this place. This is our Tech hub, our Data Analytics hub, all our relevant audience is here. This is an added incentive for the students as they can interact with the experts free of cost and build a networking with the best.
A lot of other portals offer the same courses as you do. How would you say UpGrad is different and better?
Why I say we’re the only ones doing this sort of work on this scale is because we’re not just limited to the virtual screen, but due to our interaction through events, we build on a relationship with our students and clients. Let’s say you attended an event on ML 3 months back, and you realised a few things like why is Machine Learning so hot right now, and how to get into it. You also met me, our students, the whole team at UpGrad and you understand how to get into this field, connect with the experts. You get the motivation you needed to get on board the Machine Learning train. We provide you with the transition, the smooth road. And even though our programs are online, we provide a huge offline factor. And that’s helped a lot. We have a lot of students who have converted and that’s one way we make a positive ROI.
Is there an online community as well for UpGrad?
Community managing is extremely tough, when I started I learnt everything by trial. A community online, essentially translates to a community offline. When I engage my community of say, 100 people through the online platform and intimidate them about the events and ongoings, maybe 20 of them show up to the offline event. So we’re communicating online and giving value offline. They both function hand in hand.
Are you using some specific ROI or metric system here?
Number one metric for me would be how many people, from the bunch of interested ones are talking about it.
Number two would be, of these people who spoke about it, how many actually turned up to the event.
Next would be individual domain strength, say data domain or product domain.
Next, I’m getting an expert to talk on these events. That expert community alone is another metric. You want as many expert as possible, because these people are gonna mentor you, down the road.
Also, there’ll be a bunch of people every month moving out of Bangalore, wishing to drop out of these events. And there’ll be people looking to add up to the team. We just got to make sure the second group is a lot larger than the first.
Okay, how does a typical day for Akash Prakash look like?
My role has really evolved with time. first half of 2016, I was mostly focusing on the doing events in the domains UpGrad was already present in. I would manage the stakeholders, the experts and try to set up the whole thing. You essentially have to do a lot of marketing. You do your events in the weekends, where your audience can catch up on with you, while the rest 5 days is where all the planning goes to. You’re always planning at least 10 days ahead. It’s always good to have digital marketing/ marketing experience when you’re starting out here.
Right now, my role is way more complex. I have a support team that helps me out in achieving these numbers and scale. Rather than doing more events, we want to make sure each event has a large impact. We are at this stage , where we are looking for people who can come up to us and say that they want to be a part of the team. So we make sure their presentation is up-to-the-mark, their session in introductory and engaging. There are a number of quality checklists we go through. We market them, then the event happens, there’s communication before and after the event.
So one of the biggest things about a community manager is that you have to be a collaborator as well. You really need to work with different teams and allot roles to people that they can pull off.
Moving at this pace, managing such a huge level, is there a burn-out at times for you?
Yes definitely. There are 300 people waiting to talk to you and listen to you, so there’s definitely some moments where you feel like taking a break from the computer and just sit.
You really need to learn how to delegate. If you are a community manager and if your stake holders are keen on having a great community, everyone needs to understand that you need to be a leader, with your own support team around you. That’s one way you can continue to achieve things.
How do you handle your burn-out?
So, we work throughout the week. But we have forced ourselves to take one mid day off. So Wednesday is when we take a day off and not talk to anyone about work at all. And then we meet up again on Thursday revitalised.
And most importantly you learn that you can’t do everything yourself. You learn to delegate, give more efficient time to what you have in hand, and change the downing trajectory upwards.
Is there some Takeaway that you’d like to give our viewers , maybe personal or career related.
One thing I’ve really seen grow in me has been the fact that I communicate better these days. So there are these people who are seriously paying attention to what you have to say, and you are a beckon for them. You have to set the context right for them, for that you need to know what’s going through their minds.
So I read a lot, try to keep myself updated in the domains that we are present in. I also try to read what a typical 25–30 yr old is going through, what his thought processes are through the changing seasons. I try to read a lot of blogs in this domain, and how I can improve my efficiency more, email marketing, Facebook marketing, how to create mini communities and extract maximum value from an expert by making sure that he too gets value, how to amplify each event that you do. Right now we’re working on making available online whatever happens in offline events.
Okay, let’s play a game called One Thing. I’ll ask you one random thing, and you tell me about it. What’s One Thing nice someone from the crowd has told you?
Community managing for the most part is a thankless job. No-one really understands the pain that we go through. So when someone comes upto me and tells me we’re doing a good job, like when an expert said, hey India really needs some Machine Learning Scientists. We can’t lose all of them to USA or Israel. And you’re doing a really great job in gifting India some Machine Learning Scientists. So that really peps me up and I make sure to include that in my next email to my team.
Or someone still in the third year, thanking me for making this valuable course available to them for free or else they couldn’t have afforded it. All this fills me up with a sense of responsibility that I better make their session worth it. Yes, so these things really give us that extra edge to do better than what we did yesterday.
That’s really wonderful. Okay next up is One Thing Horrible that occurred - what happened and how did you tackle it.
Okay, so sometimes you cannot predict the outcome of your event. So last week, we had this event where it was utterly packed with people, we didn’t have enough chairs, everyone was uncomfortable and because of too many people, nobody could actually listen to the speaker.
At that point of time I was just wondering oh my god, how do I fix this. Yeah, so it was pretty embarrassing and I felt bad, and so I’ve decided to move on to a new office where there’s a lot more space for everyone. You just have to be thick-skinned to be a community manager, and be on your toes to come up with some Jugaad ideas every now and then.
One Gyan for the Community Management Group?
Having a marketing background really really helps you. Because you know what’s happening then. And another is you need to be a great communicator. Effective communicating with your community as well as the stakeholders funding you is extremely important.
One Specific Trait for your Community Manager?
He should be a collaborator. He should know how to work along with a whole team, dividing work and growing alongside each member.
My final question to you is what according to you is the impact of a community? Do you think it’s important for a brand to invest in community?
I think it’s extremely important. I’ll give you an example of the US. The Apple ecosystem has different communities for its Back-end, Developer, Design, and that’s one way they stay at the forefront always. Similarly with Google. If you’re a designer, it is of utmost importance that you stay connected with other designers to know all the latest updates of your niche.
All I’m saying is, if there’s no community, you are not learning anything. US is already adopting this strategy, India needs to catch on too. I get it, it utilises money, but it is completely worth it. Community is the best marketing strategy you’ve got. With more people on board, it just multiplies. So whatever you do, you must always be a part of a community.
