Launching a Business Community: Q&A With Commonwealth Bank of Australia

As part of its goal to be the bank of choice for Australian women in business, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) launched its Women in Focus online community in late 2011.

I spoke with Ana Kostoska about planning the community, and the approach CBA uses to encourage participation.

Ana is senior manager, women’s communities and partnerships for Women in Focus at CBA.

Jon Hoel: Can you tell us about the purpose of the community?

Ana Kostoska: We wanted to engage the communities we do business with in a more innovative way, and make the resources and expertise of the Commonwealth Bank more accessible.

The community gives our members (who don’t need to bank with us to join) a platform through which they can network with other businesses through our business directory or by contributing their viewpoints and expertise through articles, personal blogs, discussions, or events.

We structured the community around three core value propositions – to inspire, inform, and connect.  We deliver on these by sharing stories of achievement (InspireMe); delivering the tools, insights, and expertise that help them to make the decisions that lead to success (InformMe); and by connecting them to a business directory and expanding their network of opportunities (ConnectMe). We also publish events where they can meet face to face, and allow our members to post offers to each other.

JH: How did you plan pre-launch recruiting for the community?

AK: We believed that an open approach to accepting content was a unique proposition in Australian social business communities, so we built our pre-launch marketing campaign around our InformMe space, asking business women to blog using our campaign message – Gurus, blog now. That campaign was run only two months before our soft launch, before we had released our community name and URL to the market.

Our campaign invited articles to be emailed to us on one of six business topics. We were overwhelmed with the response we received through our main partner marketing channels Business Chicks’ magazine and website, and the Telstra Business Women’s Awards network.

We chose a soft launch approach, and in the early months invited our partner communities and event attendees to join so we could take feedback at this critical stage. We then officially marketed the community through our three page print campaign with Business Chicks featuring three of our first contributors to the community.

JH: How large is the community?

AK: Three months after our October 2011 marketing launch, we’ve reached 2,500 members, and thousands more that are consuming content but not registered. We also launched our Facebook and Twitter communities at the same time.

JH: How do you measure community health metrics?

AK: The metrics you measure a community by need to link strongly to your strategy, and help you make decisions. We judge the health of the community on a set of high level metrics linked to our strategy to inspire, inform, and connect: unique visitors and social media sharing, membership activation, contributions of and expressions against content, as well as read counts and shares.

JH: How are you resourcing the community?

AK: We have in our team a full time content producer, a web designer, and two operations staff. Every team member has a responsibility to monitor and engage in the community.

JH: How do you plan content and over what time cycle?

AK: We plan our content ahead, by at least three months, however we also review that to ensure that it stays fresh and up to date. All of our content is unique, and about half is contributed directly by the members. We have regular business guru contributors and also have over 50 blogs started by women in the community, published in real time and not part of our publishing calendar, showing what life and business is like in their shoes.

JH: Do you use any incentives to participate: rewards and recognition, etc?

AK: From October 2011 to March 2012 we are giving away $50,000 in prizes through competitions. We are inviting women to build not just the Women in Focus community, but also contribute ideas to build not-for-profit communities and Indigenous communities. We recognise all the Community Builders by upgrading their status in the community from Community Member to Community Builder.

JH: Who is eligible to join the community?

AK: The community is open to all women, wherever they live, whatever they do, wherever they bank!