We’ve been testing e-Residency community features
Here’s what e-residents thought of them — and what will happen next.
Estonia’s e-Residency programme is going through a period of exciting changes as part of an initiative called e-Residency 2.0. The aim is to shape e-Residency in a way that provides even more value for e-residents, as well as citizens and residents of Estonia.
One part of that change is the development of community features, which we’ve been trialling with over 800 e-resident volunteers for the past few months. We can now share the results of these trials so you can see what we’ve learnt and how that will be used next to support the e-resident community in a way that adds more value to everyone in our digital nation.
The story so far
I’ll start with a quick recap about how we reached this point.
Estonia became the first country to offer e-Residency more than three years ago so that people from around the world could apply to join our digital nation by receiving an Estonian digital ID card and then accessing our country’s e-services.
As people beyond our borders began collecting their new digital ID cards, we realised that e-residents most valued their ability to use it to establish and manage an Estonian company. That’s because Estonian companies are EU companies that are trusted globally and can be run entirely online from anywhere with low costs, minimal hassle, and with access to business tools that are often not available to companies registered elsewhere.
As a result, there are now approximately 50,000 e-residents from 150 countries and they’ve so far established around 5,000 companies.
Over time though, we also realised that e-residents thought of e-Residency as being much more than e-services. They wanted deeper connections with their digital country and with other members of it — whether citizens, residents or fellow e-residents. Many of them were already finding their own ways to connect both online and offline with each other, as well as travel to Estonia and learn more about the Estonian people. Some are even learning Estonian!
In fact, one of the key benefits that e-residents provide to Estonia is by conducting business with other Estonian companies, such as by hiring their services.
So earlier this year, we asked: What if e-Residency was not just about accessing valuable e-services? What if it was also about accessing a valuable e-community? E-residents could then use the programme not just for starting and managing a company, but also for growing it globally.
At the same time, we were working with design students from the Estonian Academy of Arts who conducted extensive research to map out the main pain points of being an e-resident so we could fix them. It was clear that providing tools to support e-residents as a community could deal with those pain points and provide more value to them in a wide variety of ways — from learning about how to use the programme to raising the profile of their companies and making the connections they need to grow them. Equally as importantly, this could provide citizens and residents of Estonia with better opportunities to make their own valuable connections with e-residents.
Before launching community features for everyone, we selected a white label solution for a trial involving e-residents because that enabled us to test a full community platform with a wide range of features and see how e-residents use them — instead of investing in development with only assumptions about what features would work best. Following the trial, the ideal outcome would be to proceed with that white label solution for everyone, but only if it fully satisfied our objectives and wouldn’t restrict further developments needed in future.
It’s important to note that Estonia’s progress as a digital nation isn’t based on having the most advanced new technology. It’s about how we use technology to improve our processes – whether as a government official or a user of those services – and therefore add more value to people’s lives. In a similar way, we are not just developing community features as new software. We are developing these features while also learning about how they can be used to change our processes.
So far, this work to support the e-resident community had been part of our routine commitment to continuously improve the e-Residency programme, as is normal for all Estonian state services. However, the development of community features gained added significance during the trial when the e-Residency 2.0 initiative begun.
This is an ongoing national process involving Estonians across the private and public sector so the future direction of the programme as a result of this initiative has not yet been decided — but it is clear from initial feedback that there is wide consensus about the need for increased connections between citizens, residents and e-residents, as well as the belief that e-Residency is about more than e-services and for more than just business. You can read more about their feedback here:
The trial results
A total of 835 e-residents signed into the trial community platform and created a personal profile there when it was opened for testing at the end of July. They then had the opportunity to search a database of e-residents around the world, create a company profile, browse other company profiles take part in forum discussions, private message, share details about their trips, and access resources related to e-Residency.
In addition to monitoring the platform, inviting feedback in the forum and exploring different ways for our team and other stakeholders to engage e-residents, there were four main ways to assess the trial.
The first is through the platform’s own data, which could provide us with an overview of the extent to which users were visiting the platform and using different features. We also conducted a survey that 166 users took the time to complete (including almost everyone who created a company profile). This provided more useful data, but also open-ended responses with their (very) honest opinions and suggestions. In addition, we conducted independent user testing in which an Estonian company specialising in user design gave their own assessment. Finally, we tested another new initiative alongside the platform for e-resident ‘community leaders’. These are e-residents who want to go above and beyond to support our digital nation and in return receive extra support from the programme to do so. These new community leaders are among the most experienced at growing companies through e-Residency so were able to provide in-depth feedback about what improvements were needed from their perspective.
We’re happy to share as much feedback as possible — the good and the bad — but for this article I’ve just pulled out the stats that give the clearest indicator of the overall picture.
Let’s start with the big one — the net promoter score (NPS).
This is an incredibly effective assessment technique that is based on a simple question: How likely are you to recommend this to others? The results fall between -100 and +100 so a score above 0 is generally considered to be good and a score of +50 or above is excellent.
The community platform received an NPS of 33 during the trial.
E-residents like engaging with each other and we already have plenty of examples of e-residents who used the platform during the trial to make connections that helped grow their businesses. This is very encouraging because we know that finding customers is always going to be a much greater challenge than starting a company.
E-residents consistently told us throughout the trial that the thing they most wanted to do using community features was connect with like-minded people — whether e-residents or Estonians.
So at first glance, this is all very positive.
When we looked at the open-ended answers from e-residents alongside this though, we noticed that the keyword most commonly used was ‘potential’. E-residents consistently explained that they believed the platform would grow in value and so would recommend it to others, but it was not yet ready in its current form. That’s partly because they believed that the community would come to life more once more users joined over time, but it also related to fine-tuning the user experience and improving the features.
In particular, the ability to interact with other users on the platform was not as user-friendly an experience as you would expect to find on other social networks or internet message boards. That’s not the fault of the white label supplier. It’s simply that they offer a wide range of features and do not specialise in forum software.
Despite this, we also asked e-residents which feature they valued the most if we were to only develop one of them and the forum turned out to be the clear winner.
This came as a surprise at first because there are already plenty of places online to discuss e-Residency, like the Estonian e-residents Facebook group for example, which is where many of the testers came from. That’s why we initially focused on the tools that should be added to this platform rather than improving the simple interactions that take place within it.
Yet when people were asked what they liked most about the platform then they consistently said it was their fellow users (their ‘tribe’ as one person put it), not the features.
The feedback also highlighted how the forum could be tweaked in order to improve on what the Facebook group and other message boards offer too. In particular, e-residents want to ensure that good answers to questions are more visible so that people don’t even need to ask the same questions again. The solution can involve a combination of voting answers up or down, providing a directory of key questions, and being able to clearly assess who is giving the answer. This issue of credibility came up often during user testing relating to how content is presented on the platform. The users valued having a diverse community, but also wanted easier ways to find ‘official’ responses or responses from users with the most experience.
Another key question was about how often e-residents thought they would use the platform.
More than three quarters of users indicated that they would return at least once a month, while more than half would return weekly. Just 1 in 7 thought they would return every day though.
We don’t particularly see this as either good or bad. The feedback indicated that e-residents wanted to come to the platform for specific purposes to support how they use e-Residency, rather than browse endlessly on it to pass time. If they are applying for e-Residency or starting a company then they might spend a large amount of time there getting advice and support, and if they are looking for customers and partners then we want the platform to be there for them too, while at other times they might check in less frequently when business is running smoothly but still always value having a personal and company profile there for others to find.
About one third of users created their own company profile on the platform during the trial, but the whole company directory was very popular across all users and even led to some acquiring new business. It was the second most popular feature after the forum, although the experience of creating a company profile was rated much lower than actually browsing them. There were also issues highlighted with the ease at which you could browse company profiles though based on criteria such as industry, physical location or what their needs are from the community. Again, this is not the fault of the white label supplier as they were simply not designing this feature for the complexities of a digital nation.
What else could we do better?
Suggestions included a range of different networking opportunities, both online and offline, more how-to guides, and profiles of successful e-residents and how they built their companies.
In response, we added an events tab and plan to expand the range of events that we can offer to include online networking opportunities. We’re also creating business guides and giving e-residents more opportunities to tell their stories. You can already now read this article or watch the webinar embedded about how Ian Wagner from the US created Stadia Maps, or read here about how Kirill is developing Nimi. Both of them are also e-resident community leaders.
Conclusions
We would like to launch a variety of community features for everyone as soon as possible and originally planned to have a platform live after the trial, but we are focused on the long term growth of e-Residency so we want to spend more time getting this right based on the feedback and data we received.
We now plan to scale up community features throughout 2019. We will be developing these features based on the trial results and the principle that everyone in our digital nation – including citizens and residents as well as e-residents – will be able to use them and benefit from them.
The first priority, as requested by e-residents, will be to launch a forum based on the specifications that e-residents most value for sharing best practises, seeking support and finding business contacts. While many e-residents like connecting with each other on Facebook, e-residents want a forum that ensures good answers to questions are more visible so that people don’t even need to ask the same questions again. The solution can involve a combination of voting answers up or down, providing a directory of key questions, and being able to clearly assess who is giving the answer. This issue of credibility came up often during user testing. The users valued having a diverse community, but also wanted easier ways to find the most helpful answers from the most knowledgeable sources.
The second priority is providing Estonian company owners with the ability to create their company profiles in a way that helps showcase their business to as many people within the community and beyond as possible, including through search engine optimisation. To do this most effectively, we need these company profiles to appear in a standalone database that anyone in the world can access. While the forum will be open to as wide an audience as possible that wants to share advice, the company profiles will be for anyone who has both an Estonian digital ID and an Estonian company. For an example of how company profiles can be presented effectively, take a look at how our colleagues over at Visit Estonia connect Estonian companies with visitors looking to find things to do and places to stay across Estonia.
We believe that focusing first on the development of these two features are the most effective way to bring more benefits to e-residents and Estonians, but this also enables us to scale up community features over time.
In addition, many of the new processes we developed while trialling the community features will continue. For example, we will continue to meet up digitally with community leaders and give them the support that they need to help other e-residents, and we will continue to support new kinds of events both online and offline that bring e-residents and Estonians together — from webinars for sharing information to industry-focused networking. The development of community features will enable us to do those things even better than we can today, but there’s no reason we can’t start with them straight away.
In the meantime, we will continue to listen to the needs of e-residents as well as listen to Estonians who want to connect with the e-resident population. Please do comment below if you have any additional feedback about how we can support the community of our digital nation.
