Successful Community-based Advocacy Programs

Community Advocacy Builds Brand Equity

Eight characteristics the best programs share, a brand-equity model mapped to advocate actions, and profiles of twelve leading programs.

Since launching Structure3C in 2015, I've studied hundreds of community-based advocacy programs, and I built them firsthand at Dell and Autodesk. This is what the best ones have in common.

The most common missed opportunity is the role advocates play in building brand equity. The strongest programs attract, identify, and activate high-potential advocates who make extraordinary contributions for the brand, and that value compounds across the full customer lifecycle. I map those actions to Aaker's model directly, so the contribution shows up in the language of the business rather than as a support metric.

Most advocacy programs began as support-focused, platform-driven efforts. The best have moved past that origin to recognize every kind of contribution, serve the full range of community spaces, and center on the needs and careers of the people doing the work. The twelve programs profiled here, from Adobe and AWS to Salesforce and Unity, show what that looks like in practice.

The Essential Community Strategy Framework includes:

  • The eight characteristics common to successful advocacy programs, with real examples for each

  • A brand-equity model that maps advocate actions to the customer lifecycle (built on Aaker)

  • Profiles of 12 leading programs: Adobe, Airbnb, Atlassian, Autodesk, AWS, HubSpot, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, Strava, Tableau, and Unity

  • Program benefits and business impact for each, framed in the language of the business

  • A frame for evolving a support-era program into one that serves the full lifecycle and centers on participants

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