Community and Advocacy Teams Share the Same Customers. Do They Talk to Each Other?
Picture a customer who answers questions in your community every week. She shows up to events. She helps newer users get unstuck. Then one day she gets an automated email from marketing asking her to "join our advocacy program" and be a reference.
Two teams, one person, and no coordination between them. That's more common than it should be.
This week I joined Jeff Ernst, founder and CEO of SlapFive, and Sunny Prabhakar, a go-to-market leader at Bevy, on a CMX panel moderated by Cat Nilsson about what happens when community and customer advocacy teams start working together. Here's what stuck with me.
Why these teams drift apart
Community has always had trouble finding a home in the org chart. I've seen it report to support, customer success, product, and marketing, sometimes in successive years. Sunny sees the same pattern. Advocacy, by contrast, usually lives in marketing.
Different homes lead to different scorecards. Jeff put it well: too many advocacy teams are judged on counts of peer reviews and case studies, what he calls "activity-based metrics rather than outcome-based metrics." Community teams have their own version of this with member growth and engagement totals. The two groups start working together when both commit to shared outcomes like win rate, retention, and net revenue retention (NRR).
Look for the helpers
Community gives advocacy teams something they rarely get elsewhere: evidence of who is already acting like an advocate. Sunny noted that without community data, advocacy teams often wait for a customer success manager (CSM) or a salesperson to suggest a name. Community signals let them act before anyone asks.
Raw activity isn't the right signal, though. As I said on the panel, "It's not sufficient to identify advocates just based on the pure level of engagement within the community." The person liking every post isn't your best candidate. To borrow from Mr. Rogers: "Look for the ones who are helping."
Advocacy has to give something back
Jeff's statement about advocacy was possibly the most useful of the hour: "When advocacy is done right, it is a two-way exchange of value between the company and the customer." Speaking opportunities, visibility, and reputation-building should benefit the advocate at least as much as the company.
Sunny added that the most valuable thing you can offer is "access," which he ranked "even more than the T-shirt, more than the free conference ticket." I often describe community as the backstage pass to an organization. Early looks at products and real conversations with product managers are what keep people involved.
Jeff also drew a line on rewards that I agree with. Swag in exchange for acts of advocacy is what he calls "paid advocacy," and it doesn't last. Recognition that helps people build a reputation for their contributions does. Communities aren't as flat as we like to pretend. "There is a social hierarchy, lightweight though it may be, in communities," and giving subject matter experts room to stand out is a strong motivator.
Governance before dashboards
Everyone wants the data connected. Sunny made the case for a single source of truth, because members don't care which tool they're in: "They know they're on your company's platform."
But connecting everything first creates its own problem. As I put it, "I make a distinction between having a warehouse of data and a curated museum of dashboards that are going to help me make better decisions." Community and advocacy leads should agree on which signals matter, and what they mean, before anyone builds a report.
Where it goes wrong
The biggest failure mode is ask fatigue. Good intentions from two teams add up to a customer buried in messages. Jeff described the worst version: a signal fires and an automated email sends a promising customer a form and a list of demands. The better version starts from what the customer wants. His example is product feedback cohorts, with one condition: "You absolutely have to close the loop by showing them what you've done with their feedback or they won't do it again."
This is where I hold a firm line. You can't treat community like it's a leads list. It's a place where trust is paramount. Advocacy teams that understand this will be welcome partners. And community teams should recognize that the advocacy side "is not the evil empire." Both want members to succeed.
The first conversation
If your community and advocacy teams haven't really talked yet, start with three things:
Learn what the other team is accountable for. Jeff described a workshop where a community manager needed 50% membership growth, and the advocacy lead discovered few of their advocates were in the community. Within six months, a new cohort of senior customers was active there.
Compare lists. Bring your top 20 community contributors and top 20 advocates to the table and look at the overlap. Treat what you find as a small experiment, not a new program.
Agree on how often one person can be asked for something. Coordinate the asks before the customer has to.
Jeff closed with a JFK paraphrase aimed at advocacy teams: "Don't just think about what your community team can do for you. Think about what you can do for the community." That applies in both directions.
