How to Scale Organically | A Series on Community Building (3/3)
In this last edition of the series, we dive into how we have turned our members into brand ambassadors without any marketing budget.
Welcome back to Talent First. With this edition, we will close the community chapter, it could have been much longer and much deeper, so happy to keep the conversation going offline if you are a community lover. Our last article focuses on our organic growth during the last 4 years. Thinking that we have spent 0€ in marketing to grow our community and being able to reach 20.000 members, is something that it’s hard to believe.
How have we turned our members into brand ambassadors? How did we incentivize organic referrals and sustain them over time?
In the previous editions, we discussed how we improved our operating model to increase efficiency and profitability as well as our journey to build a leading global brand. The last couple of editions have been about community, you can access them here.
When looking back at our community journey, something that stands out is the role our members played in expanding the community with us. Some of the key components have been already discussed in the previous 2 editions, in this one, we dive deeper into a few key organic initiatives that changed the game completely.
The underlying principle to what follows is clear, you should envision a community that in the best-case scenario runs by itself. This means that from the very early phase, always aspire and design a community where members can easily take ownership, propose new ideas, innovate, and steer the agenda.
Insight 1: Let your members shape the community from day 1
We still remember very vividly the first weekend organized in Spain, a few selected and passionate members joined the team for a retreat where the core topic was shaping the future of Nova as a community for top talent. Back then, we were approximately 300 members in Spain and started to have a vague idea of how Nova was meant to grow.
We were far from a defined solution, this is why we decided to go into the forest, literally, with a selected group of early members to co-create the future of our vision. Besides the unique memories and solid relationships, we built over that weekend, all of which remain, we got out from that weekend with a clarified picture of the role that Nova could play in the country.
Most importantly, we had involved 30 bright professionals and leaders in making Nova a success, they felt as part of the journey and it’s not a coincidence that most of them are still some of Nova’s most engaged members and some also became investors.
Insight 2: Don’t be afraid to be demanding
We commented on doing things that don’t scale in our first article when we introduced the founding members’ approach, those manually selected members whom we involved early on when we launched a new market.
Beyond the founding members, we have always been demanding with our members about the importance of nominating someone during the year.
For the first 3 years, nominating new members was mandatory to prove commitment, but that is not all. We also wanted to make sure members valued their nominations and realized that was their tool to influence Nova’s network and potentially change the life of someone. This is why nominations have been always limited to a maximum of 3 per year, quality over quantity as always.
This determined two important consequences:
Members only nominated when they had high confidence that a person could become a member, increasing the quality of the applicant's funnel and reducing our time invested in non-qualified candidates.
Once the nomination rule was established, organic nominations were an annual routine each member went through and proudly compared how many of their nominations were accepted. It almost turned into a natural way of contributing to the community's growth.
Insight 3: Let your members share the rewards of your successes
Our ambition has always been to grow the network internationally and as fast as possible. When you are a startup, fast often means resources. In 2021, we reached the point where we validated many of the most important assumptions behind our business idea and needed capital to keep investing in the product. Besides looking around for business angels or seed-stage funds, we had the idea of launching a members-exclusive equity crowdfunding campaign as a tool not only to raise capital but also to create an even deeper bond with the more senior segment of our members. We did a lot of the things the campaign manager advised against:
Our campaign manager was pushing to open the investment opportunities to the entire world, however, we wanted this to be only open to current members. We wanted to signal that we had a high degree of trust and we only extended this opportunity to them.
We set a minimum investment of 500€ even when best practices invite you to set the lowest possible, like 10€. This was decided because we wanted our members investing to feel they had skin in the game. While 500€ is not a huge amount, it still makes you care more about your investment compared to a small symbolic amount you might give just for support.
This crowdfunding campaign has been a great initiative, not only because we reached our goal of €500K, but more importantly because many of those investors have opened doors to new customers, members, and investors.
The equity crowdfunding is only one of the many ways you could tighten your members’ incentive for the community's success. The last one has been launching the Nova Points, a gamification system that rewards good behaviors and gives our members a new tool to pay for their events within Nova or donate to a good cause.
Insight 4: Make sure your brand becomes a signal of value
We extensively covered our brand story in a separate article, but it cannot go unmentioned when sharing our secret sauce to organic growth. The brand of Nova has been one of the key determinants in our growth journey. Today if you visit Nova’s LinkedIn page, you will be confused to see that it looks like we have 5000+ employees. This is because members proudly add Nova’s logo to their LinkedIn profile to make sure it gets seen by others, they know the world associates Nova’s membership with merit and excellence.
This organic sharing of the membership certificate has been the multiplier of our growth making our members feel special and even more so every time a stranger would reach out to them to ask for a nomination to join.
This trend has been leveraged to its maximum potential when we ideated the Nova 111 list, our scientific-based list that yearly scouts and awards the 111 best professionals and 111 best students in a given country. The Nova 111 quickly became the most credible merit list in Spain, Italy, and Sweden thanks to a transparent selection process.
Being featured on the list is now a big honor that all winners share proudly on their social media and CVs. This has fueled our growth, especially on Linkedin, to heights that were not imaginable beforehand.
To give you a benchmark, the Nova 111 list release reaches about 6 million unique viewers and the direct cost in marketing is 0€.
We have now reached the end of our series of articles where we explored some of our learning, mistakes, and successes on the journey to build a global merit-based community our members proudly belong to.
If you have more questions or reflections happy to connect and keep the conversation going. In the meantime, you can visit our website to learn more about what are the benefits of becoming a Nova member.
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