More Logins, Page Views, and Replies: How ACC Grew Engagement with Higher Logic Thrive

This case study is a summary of the customer story ACC shared at Super Forum 2024.

After an impressive 15 years of providing an online community to members, the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) sought member feedback and found that while community was an important benefit, the association needed to revisit the user experience.

An ACC power team, made up of Kerri McGovern, Senior Director of Membership, Ariel Moyer, Director of Practice Networks, and Netsy Tefera, Senior Product Manager, audited, strategized, tested, and relaunched on Higher Logic Thrive.

In the first quarter after launch, they saw a 7% increase in unique logins, a 4.065/5 rating from users on the new experience, and a 25% increase in community job board page views. ACC’s revitalized community is helping them support members with an organized, easy-to-use place to connect with each other and find information.

During yearly strategic planning, the team found that 50% of respondents to a member survey said that peer-to-peer networking was their biggest motivator for joining and retaining membership in the association. This prompted ACC to look deeper at their online community, their primary tool to facilitate this kind of networking.

The team found that members and staff both faced issues that had built up over the lifetime of the community. ACC had almost 500 communities that were open, including one from the 2009 annual meeting that was still getting activity in 2023.

Ariel said, “This cluttered environment created white noise and kept members from finding what they were looking for.” Members were missing relevant information, events, and communities, which kept them from realizing value. To help members overcome these blockers, staff had to manually create workarounds, and members still weren’t engaging as much as they hoped.

Kerri, Ariel, and Netsy wanted to provide members with a more organized, easily-searchable way to connect with each other and find what they needed in the community.

The team conducted extensive planning, where they thought deeply about the desired community user experience. Netsy, who led this effort, explains, “We wanted members to feel connected, that they feel like they belong and they’re engaged, the content is relevant, and they can find the information they’re looking for easily and quickly.” After all, Netsy added, “We want them to come back to the community. It is one of the most important and valuable platforms we have for our members, and we want to make sure they spend time there.”

After they completed the planning phase, they selected Higher Logic Thrive to support this new iteration of the community.

Revitalized community management.

The team’s first step after choosing Higher Logic Thrive was to establish a set of new community management practices. They audited their existing communities, reviewed naming conventions, and categorized their remaining communities into groupings for easier navigation. To cement the work they’d done, they documented policies for community creation and deletion.

Consolidated events into one calendar.

They also addressed another member concern, which was difficulty finding events, and took advantage of the Higher Logic Thrive Community events page, an out-of-the-box integrated calendar to view, add, edit, and find relevant events within the community, so that members had one place to check out network and ACC headquarter programming.

Integrated communities with AMS.

The team wanted to use their AMS, NetFORUM, as the source of truth for member data, so they used the Higher Logic Thrive integration to sync community records to their AMS.

Increased personalization for different member groups.

The team came up with six main personas they could use as a framework to create more personalized experiences for their 46,000 members. After deciding on a wireframe for the community they all liked, they experimented with the components they could display for specific user types.

In addition, ACC also uses Higher Logic Thrive Jobs to display applicable jobs to the relevant communities. For example, members of the compliance and ethics community see compliance and ethics jobs in that space.

Conducted usability testing.

Once they’d created the final design, the team conducted usability testing sessions. One thing users identified was that a button labeled, “Create,” which led them to create a new post or blog, made them think they’d be accidentally creating a new community based on where it was placed. The ACC team used this feedback to change the button to “create a post.” Kerri added, “Higher Logic Thrive is really, really easy to make these kinds of changes in, and you can do it on the fly very quickly.”

The team believed their existing branding didn’t reflect the vibrancy of the community, so they redesigned the community’s branding using Higher Logic Thrive web design features.

In addition, they revised the experience for logged-in members. They added:

– A button for members to update their profile page in their AMS, which syncs to their community.
– Feature card that promotes upcoming product launches or other benefits, like a tutorial video they created for how to navigate the new community.
– Personalized content for the member’s type based on security groups.
– Quick links that share top resources like how to adjust email settings.
– An activity feed that members can filter by community or content type.

Before

After

After a period of launch promotion, which included email, website content, social media posts, and cross-promotion across their other applications, the ACC team started to see results come in.

Immediate interest and activity.

Members showed interest right away. The team’s three-part email series promoting the launch had a 20.5% open rate, which Ariel noted was higher than normal for them. Members also took action. Logins increased by 25% in launch month, and this included existing and new users—1,100 new users accepted terms and conditions.

In just one month after launch, they saw the highest number of thread replies they’d ever had in the past 15 years. The growth didn’t stop there, either: Unique logins increased by 7% for the quarter.

Ariel said, “Our marketing efforts and the beautiful flexibility of the new Higher Logic Thrive site immediately started paying off.”

Positive user ratings.

The team also used CrazyEgg, a behavior tracking tool, to assess user activity and get user feedback. Based on the data from the tool, the team can tell that users are able to find what they’re looking for, register for events, and have high satisfaction.

Their ratings verify this behavioral data:

– Users highly rated their new experience with a score of 4.065/6.
– Navigation was significantly improved, scoring 4.230/5.
– Event registration was made easy, scoring 4.1/5.
– Most open-ended responses were positive about the new platform.

Increased traffic for Higher Logic Thrive Jobs.

In addition, ACC has also seen higher traffic to their jobs board, which is a feature of Higher Logic Thrive Community. Kerri said, “If anyone’s looking for non-dues revenue, this is a great way to drive traffic to your jobs board.” Here’s how it’s performing:

– 25% increase in page views to community jobs board.
– 14% increase in job searches.
– 29% increase in logins.

Kerri added, “Soon, we’d like to launch a career community where we can display jobs as well. We want members to see career content and jobs on the community, which takes them to the job board, which helps them find employment, and brings them back here to continue to grow.”

Ariel, Kerri, and Netsy aren’t done yet. They’re continuing to work on making meaningful connections between members and taking advantage of all they can in Higher Logic Thrive over the next few months.

The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) is a global bar association that promotes the common professional and business interests of in-house counsel through information, education, networking opportunities, and advocacy initiatives. They have 46,000 members globally in 113 countries, 60 chapters, 21 practice area networks, and 85 staff across the globe.