Community Management

SQUARESPACE

Throughout my nine years at Squarespace, I led multiple initiatives in the community management space ranging from community forums to educational webinars to social media support. Below, are some of my most proud accomplishments!

Community Forums

As the Sr. Team Lead of Community, one of my core responsibilities was overseeing the health and success of the Squarespace Forum.

Forum platform migration

In October 2019, we launched the new and rebranded online community, Squarespace Forum. The goal of this project was establish the forum as a go-to resource for inspiration, connection and knowledge-sharing. To achieve this, we needed to move to a modern platform that offered collaborative moderation tools, enhanced user engagement features (gamification, clubs, featured posts), and improved security features (Single Sign-On).

This was an eight month project where I functioned as a project leader and subject matter expert, heavily involved in developing our MVP (minimum viable product) outline, researching and testing potential platforms, coordinating the engineering needs for migrating the forum data, and overseeing communication to our users, the project team and C-level stakeholders. It was a company-wide success that brought the community experience and team operations to the next level, and one that I am proud to have been part of.

Increasing community membership and engagement

One of the team’s 2021 goals was to increase forum membership and valuable engagement. My role focused on developing the team strategy and delegating responsibilities to leverage a collaborative effort.

The strategy was three pronged:

  1. Help users find what they’re looking for more easily by improving the new member onboarding flow and email/DM touch points (UX Design), updating the content categories on the homepage through user research, and leveraging Featured and Pinned posts.

  2. Encouraging valuable engagement by rewarding helpful contributions with reputation points and badges (gamification), offering advanced permissions to Super Users and increasing their visibility with a leaderboard, introducing Clubs for users to connect more deeply on a certain topic, and seeding posts to spur conversation and sharing.

  3. Marketing and promotion - learn more in the following Forum Marketing and promotion section.

Forum marketing and promotion

With the goal to increase forum awareness and membership, I developed a strategy to highlight the forum across three mediums:

  1. The Squarespace customer onboarding email drip for when new users register a Squarespace account

  2. In Help Guides that address a topic outside the scope of customer support

  3. Social Media posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram Stories and LinkedIn.

We tracked clicks using UTM links and found that the most forum visits came from social media posts, while the largest sign ups (conversion) came from the Help Guides.

         Webinars        

Meeting our customers where they are, both in their website journeys and geographically, was a cornerstone to the Squarespace Webinars program.

Globalizing the webinars program

When launching the webinars program in 2016, sessions ran between 10am - 5pm for United States timezones. While the US was the company’s largest market at the time, we knew that there were thousands of customers we were not serving. With that, I spearheaded the project to globalize the webinars program, increasing our reach, registration and attendance counts.

This initiative included:

  • recruiting and onboarding team members from our Portland, OR and Dublin, Ireland offices to ensure global timezone coverage

  • developing the global webinar schedule, which meant determining which sessions would run at what times and understanding which timezones those sessions would serve

  • analyzing program data and using insights to adjust our strategy moving forward

Webinars platform migration

This year-long project is one of my most savored because of how well the Community team collaborated throughout the project’s many phases and in seeing each team member level up in their autonomy and ownership. Not to mention, we had a lot of fun along the way and were so thrilled with the outcome of our new platform!

This project employed my:

  • Project Management - This involved outlining the achievements for each phase, designating timelines and ownership, identifying resources available and those needed, projecting risks and how to minimize them, leading bi-weekly check-ins, and in drawing on my attunement to details, developing our MVP (minimum viable product) document as the guidepost for the feature sets that would resolve current pain points and support us in bringing the program to the next level.

  • Delegation - leveraging my team members’ strengths to delegate the operational aspects of registration, system settings and data capture to the customer experience aspect of creating the webinar console, to the documentation aspect of creating resources for the team on how to accomplish our core tasks within the platform.

  • Communication - using synchronous and asynchronous communication methods to align all parties and receive deliverables, accounting for the fact that we had team members across time zones and third-party vendors to coordinate with.

  • Technical knowledge - serving as an SME (subject matter expert) for the technical needs of the Community Team while also learning from the Engineering team and leveling up in my understanding of implementing Single-Sign on.

Content Creation

As the Squarespace tool suite grew, an opportunity to restructure our content offerings and dive deeper into topics emerged. Serializing content would allow us to:

  • Meet our customers’ requests of going deeper into certain topics

  • Support product adoption by showcasing how these new tools would serve our audience’s needs

  • Create additional touch points with customers who return to learn about other topics

  • Lessen the operational lift when updating our content due to product releases

In serializing our content, we introduced 2 new offerings that consistently sold out along with an internal roadmap of the content to come for each new subject track. We also introduced new interactivity during the sessions, such as polls and a resources widget, which added to the impact of these overhauled sessions.

     Social Media     

Meeting customers where they are - on social media - was a core part of our support strategy. I oversaw the social support team, establishing policies and procedures, helping developing the company voice, and creating fun engagement with customers and other brands!

Super Bowl social support

In 2014, Squarespace ran its first Super Bowl commercial. In preparation for the largest traffic spike we’d yet to experience on our front site and social media, the Super Bowl task force worked together to:

  • create a separate help desk queue to funnel all Super Bowl related inquiries to in order to track impact, as well as easily identify and tend to other customer inquiries during the game

  • draft canned responses for common questions and comments we anticipated

  • properly staff the social queue to ensure we met our SLA (service-level agreement) within the 24 hours following the commercial run

Day-of, I was on staff to monitor our social accounts, reply to customer Tweets and comments, and be a Customer Operations point of contact for any issues that might arise during the game.

While it’s always a day of intensity, it was such a fun experience to work on the Super Bowl campaign and collaborate with the other team s (Marketing, Communications, Engineering, Legal) on such a company milestone!

I’m grateful to say I continued working on the following four Super Bowls campaigns.

Marketing and promotion of Community team initiatives

  1. Webinars Trailers - we collaborated with our in-house Video Team to create trailers for our various webinar offerings. Get a taste of our trailers and catch me on screen for the Getting Started with Squarespace webinar.

  2. Forum promotion - I worked with our Marketing Lead to create social posts promoting the new Squarespace Forum with its updated focus on discussions and knowledge-sharing.

Social media support operations

Throughout my years as the Community Team lead, I worked on various projects that shaped the company’s social support guidelines and policies, including:

  • Developing the company voice and guidelines

  • Outlining the parameters of what we can address via social channels to ensure customer data safety & compliance

  • Spearheading communications during platform outages

  • Collaborating with the Social Media Working Group to tend to PR matters when they arose

Chris Laine and Debbie Millman at a 2018 Lesbians Who Tech event hosted by Squarespace.

      Events      

Along with leading the Community team’s webinar and forum initiatives, I often collaborated with our Marketing Events and Partnerships teams to represent Squarespace within the community and share the power of Squarespace with new audiences.

Fireside Chat host with Debbie Millman

In anticipation for the 2018 Lesbians Who Tech Summit, the organization teamed up with Squarespace to host a panel discussion with four notable designers in the NYC Tech industry. To kick off the evening, I had the honor of hosting a discussion with writer, educator, artist, curator, and designer Debbie Millman on the Courage of Creativity.

Webinars for special audiences

In collaboration with the Marketing and Partnerships teams, I facilitated special webinars for audiences such as the employees of ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, a Girlboss event, Apple Store employees, and an in-person workshop for Fordham University business students.

Sponsor Partnership events

In 2018, Squarespace was a sponsor of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. My team and I spent the weekend showcasing the power of Squarespace portfolios to creatives taking a break in between screenings and discussions.

Chris Laine facilitating a workshop for the women of Weiden+Kennedy, 2018

Chris Laine at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2018.

Let’s discuss how I can support your organization and initiatives!