Technology for Online Communities - Your Tech stack

Let's talk about the technology piece. Technology and technology stuff. It's always the big question, which technology should I pick free versus paid and what is the best tool outside Guild, of course, but you know, it's not because of you here, but I have to say there is. Guild is a very, very strong platform for the use that I've been doing it and from the benefit that I've been getting it. But what about the technology? Best technology, what to pick, how to go about it?

Yeah, it's tricky and I think we should acknowledge that this isn't easy. But particularly now, of course, with accelerated digital transformation due to Coronavirus. All businesses are to some degree technology businesses now and you need to get used to digital and data and obviously event businesses have had to pivot to virtual events. And so, you know, a lot of the CREO group, it's talking about the different platforms and the different options and you know, not only is that sort of new and confusing, but the event. So you take event tech platforms, they themselves are changing every week. A lot of them are raising loads of money. They promise things, they are building things, they're buying things. They're asking themselves, well, should we stick to virtual events or should we grow into events? Full membership platform, should we add on elearning? Because people are looking at E courses and E learning. Meanwhile those platforms are doing the reverse and going, hang on a sec, virtual events is growing, let's add on an event tech module. And in between there's the poor old event organizer client going, where on earth do I go with all this? And it's, you know, there isn't necessarily a definite answer. You know, having agile ways of working means it's easier to change. And if you're smart with your data, you make it more portable, you can change platforms a bit more easily than you could in the past and you can use APIs to kind of smartly wire things up. I mean, ideally you need a good technical agency or support like you guys, or smart internal tech and data people. But there is, I don't know if you want to bring up that slide I sent you and this is almost a sort of thought piece and I'd be interested to get feedback from, you know, from the listeners on this because I don't think there's a definitive answer, but if. Yeah, this one. Okay, so I was thinking through here, you know, all the component pieces. So like top, if you were doing community or more than that, if you had lots of businesses looking at membership or subscription type models at the moment, because you know, it can be purely digital because it's a recurring revenue stream unlike events or lots of parts of events. So I was just here thinking what could the component parts of a tech stack for a membership or subscription model be? And at kind of bottom you got CRM and that might be part of that core member platform. It could even be separate. Like I know obviously you guys do a lot with HubSpot and the Salesforce and things. Sometimes you might want the core CRM to be separate actually to the membership platform. But in a typical kind of member platform you've got all of those other things. You've got member access management, payments, directory, content, content management, largely speaking. Then you've got along the top there event tech, community tech, which obviously where Guild would sit edtech and what I've called custom tech. So a custom tech is just like bespoke apps and things that you might build. EdTech is all the E learning, ecourses, accreditation, community, things like Guild, event tech obviously things like Zoom and know hop in and whatnot. And so the architectural question I think which is important to think through is based on your business model and your budgets and your roadmap and all stuff, you know what, how are you going to wire this stuff up and is it, should you, should you believe that there is an all in one platform that can do all of this for you? Because I'm telling you there isn't. There isn't even one for event tech, let alone all of this other stuff. But you might go, well this platform does enough of events that it kind of suits what we do or if we're event led business, it's got to be really strong and event tech and then we can wire up a WordPress site or something to do enough of the content. But I suppose I again from a Guild point of view and why I put community tech separately, a lot of these membership platforms would argue that we do community and they do, but they just do it badly. Just like EdTech. Yeah, we've got an E courses module and you go, you have but it's not as good as learnably or whatever other edtech and same we talked about events. You know, not many of these platforms do event tech really well and you know, we've seen even how hard that is and Zoom's done incredibly well obviously. So yeah, I'd be you know, really interested in feedback and obviously Ricardo, your thoughts on this. But and I say it is difficult and it's fast changing and fast moving and even these platforms are extending themselves up and across and down this stack. But I'd say these, I mean interest to know if there are any elements people think are missing from this. But to me these are the kind of component parts architecturally that you're having to play with. And what you're having to decide is, you know what which pieces are separate and if they're separate, how important is it that they are integrated via Single sign on APIs, batch processing, blah blah, blah or not or does it not matter?

Yeah, well, I wanted to add on to the technology element. Is that what I clearly seen, certainly the way that I advise people that I work with or I have conversations with is that there's kind of, it's kind of two sides of two types of things. Two sides of things. So generally what I've seen is that when you're having a community that is top of the funnel, awareness community, et cetera, et cetera, generally you will have access to a lot of free tools, the LinkedIn, the link, you know, all that Facebooks and all that sort of stuff, which allows you to spend a lot of money to try to get attention. But that has its downside, but I think and that goes back to having clarity as to what the purpose of your community is or what do you really want to serve. So but generally I would say, I mean I'm overly generalizing, not understand context of organizations. But I say top of the funnel is generally you can benefit a lot from whatever is free because it gets you basically at a flick of a button you're on right there are when you have bottom of the funnel customer communities or communities that start to be built around an event or post event for the peer to peer communications, then you benefit more for what I call the owned community. And that's where the technology that is available, you know, the Zapnitos, the Guild, the, you know, lots of other tools that exist out there that also have a free, a free mod that allows organizations to start growing and then as you progress and as you grow you could start. So almost you have almost like a quick switch on that. The benefit of having an owned, to me an owned tool or where you have 100% control of the community is that you can plug in that either your CRM as you highlighted and I think more so when companies decide to go for owned communities and what tech rather than a full functionality within the same tech, I would say more is how does this piece of technology interoperate or integrate with what I have? Because you have a tech stack already generally on the basis of a CRM predominantly or marketing automation platform. The ideal scenario is that you plug stuff in. Why? Because now the new tendency is that your sponsors, in terms of monetizing, you're going to be. You're going to be talking about the context. Okay. Ashley attended this event, came to these five webinars for more than 50 minutes. But also these are the discussions that he's been participating. And we can derive that there is a level of interest from his side on certain things. Without that API integration and how does that relate that you have nothing to sell.