[Repost] EP21: Turn “Members” into “Heroes” with Pantheon

Tessa Krissel is the Developer Outreach Manager at Pantheon and is incredible at creating normal users into passionate advocates. We broke down how she is building, scaling and measuring the growth of her community while making sure she is giving value back to that community. Tessa took a standalone slack group and transformed it into the “Pantheon Heroes” which focus on giving back to and lifting up Pantheon’s community. She explained it’s all about relationships when it comes to developer outreach but building the platform for having that relationship is key since you can’t personally chat with 1000’s of people a day. Here is a breakdown of some of the most effective methods that Tessa used in her program to grow the community:  User Missions- Each user decides how they want to contribute with “missions”, each “mission” is based around a certain area and members can suggest new ones that don’t exist yet. This gives each member a “role” essentially, whereas before you might not know what to post about you now have a topic to help take the mental load off of contributing. Points- They have gamified their contributions by offering points to people who contribute to that community. The community can then use these points to buy things like shirts, pantheon sites, access to the team and more. In terms of metrics, Tessa keeps a close eye on the Users, Missions, and Influence. More specifically she looks at For Users they look at both retention and participation in the Pantheon Heroes platform. Within the missions metric, they track the points-based system. Behind the scenes, they have values that associate to specific mission categories that help them better understand when missions are helping to grow revenue & retention on the Pantheon platform. And the final metric for the Heroes program is Influence. This metric digs into their influence outside of their communities. They work to break down how valuable it is to Pantheon is a user posts on a blog, social media or elsewhere about them. They don’t care how many followers you have, per se, they care more about the engagement of your followers & audience.