There are a thousand reasons you might want your community team to consider using Pensil
You might have many reasons to explore Pensil as a community platform for your team. Maybe you want to create different groups for various use cases, such as coaching, mentoring, courses, forums, live classes, etc. Maybe you want to design your community to match your branding and integrate it with other tools you use. Maybe you’re looking for a white-labeled, developer-friendly, and scalable solution. Maybe you’re curious about the benefits of all-in-one community engagement.
Whatever your reasons, you may need to persuade the decision-maker for your team that it’s worth it to give Pensil a try. They may not know much about Pensil or all-in-one community platforms in general. They may have doubts about security or performance. They may be satisfied with the status quo and resistant to change.
You know the potential of what Pensil can do, and the advantages that the flexibility and convenience can bring to your team. Here’s how to get the rest of your company on board.
First, you want to be proficient enough using Pensil that you can talk about it with confidence. This will enable you to explain what it is and how it works effectively to your boss and other decision-makers at your company. Since you’re leading the initiative, you’ll probably be the main person for questions when it’s implemented, so the more skilled you are, the better.
You may already know how to use Pensil, but if you are new to it, there are plenty of tools to help you learn. You don’t need to be an expert, but that’s one of the biggest advantages of all-in-one — you can get comfortable using and speaking about it relatively quickly.
The best resource out there is Pensil Help Centre. There are tutorials to get you started if you’re a complete beginner.
There is also a huge community of community builders and Pensil users you can use as a resource. These are great resources to improve your knowledge and skill with Pensil and demonstrate to your boss how much support your team will have in learning it once it is adopted.
When you have a clear understanding of what your company’s internal pain points are — you’ll be able to make a more compelling case for why Pensil is needed if you can show that you understand the problems you’re trying to solve.
Take note of the pain points you’ve observed, and talk with your manager and the rest of your team to understand where they see room for improvement too. Once you have a list of pain points, you can create a persuasive case for how Pensil will solve them.
Some of the most common challenges include:
The people making decisions about software for your company may have doubts or misunderstandings about all-in-one or still see it as the limited tool it was 10 or 20 years ago. You need to get them comfortable with the idea that all-in-one has become a serious, professional solution that can be trusted with a critical community asset like your business’s main community. To do that, explain what all-in-one is and how it works.
Link the benefits of Pensil and all-in-one solutions directly to the pain points you have identified. To convince leaders at your company to adopt a new tool like Pensil, you want to show exactly how it will solve problems and bring better workflows to your team.
At its core, all-in-one community platform enables anyone to build and manage a community regardless of their technical experience level. Community builders can use it to take ownership of their community as an important community asset. Designers can use it to customize their community without having to rely on engineering. Even engineers can use it to integrate and scale faster and more easily.
Next, show your boss that Pensil is a professional-grade tool that can unlock a lot of opportunities for your team. Provide them with Pensil’s resources that demonstrate how secure,performant, and [high-quality] the communities it creates are. Explain the features of Pensil and how these benefits directly solve the pain points your team is experiencing.
Our team at Pensil is committed to providing you with resources and helping you and your team figure out if Pensil is a good fit. Use us. We’ll help you advocate for Pensil and get everyone involved in the decision at your company on the same page.
We’ll get you resources and hard numbers that are specific to your community needs, and give advice and talk your team through any questions they might have. We’ll even provide alternative recommendations if Pensil turns out not to be the right fit for your company.
At Pensil, we want to partner with an organization at a strategic level and figure out what their community goals are, what their broader business goals are, and how the community plays into that. At the end of the day, every single business is different. Every single use case is going to be different. And so our job is to customize that experience to make sure it is tailor-fit to the needs of that business
With the support of our team, you can provide hard numbers to understand the impact that the adoption of Pensil would have on your community. Decision makers will want to see solid evidence for the benefits of Pensil and real numbers showing the financial implications for your company. Our team can work through your goals as a business and as a team to figure out where Pensil can add value.
The financial impact of a community is more than just the cost of the technology that’s used to power it. It is also the people, time, and resources involved. To calculate the total cost of ownership for your community, look at how much time is spent on community management, moderation, engagement, and content creation on top of the cost of the technology. Additionally, it’s important to look at the return on investment reflected in retention rates and revenue generated.
All the teams affected by your community should weigh in on the decision to select a new platform, including engineering and IT. To convince engineering to try Pensil, talk them through the impact of its workflow on their team. Give them detailed information on the technical and security side of the platform, so they know it’s performant and secure.
Tell them how Pensil can reallocate engineering time to your product rather than the community. When community builders are able to contribute directly to the community, engineering doesn’t have to spend as much time on making simple community changes. This frees up a lot of engineering time to focus on building advanced features and working on your product.
They may have reservations that all-in-one is meant to replace engineers. It isn’t. In fact, engineers can use it. Developers can work within Pensil to integrate and scale those elements with far less effort than they would if they were coding by hand. Pensil just means they don’t have to spend hours on building basic community pages or making simple changes. Developers will also always be essential for things like security, integrations, analytics, event tracking, and the creation of the more complex elements that give a rich user experience.
For security and technology data, talking with our team will provide you with a dedicated technical solutions engineer. We’ll explain Pensil’s hosting, integrations, and security and compliance features in depth to your engineering team.
You may have an easier time convincing your company to try out Pensil if you make it clear that it doesn’t have to be a full-scale migration. Even smaller use cases will mean your team can begin seeing the benefits of all-in-one community platform.
Explain to your boss all the things that your team can build with Pensil.
Your team can begin using Pensil for campaign-specific micro-communities, individual landing pages, and more, without affecting the main community. Strategically, those pages can have a huge impact on your ability to jump quickly on opportunities, respond to community trends and feedback, and explore new strategies. That explosion of creative possibility on your team can serve as a test case for the wider adoption of Pensil at your company.
You will still want to get on board with Pensil Enterprise rather than trying to work with an entry-level plan that isn’t designed for enterprise-level needs. It won’t be expensive to get started, and Enterprise comes with a huge array of resources, access, support, and enterprise-grade security and features. All of those will be important to make your use of Pensil successful.
In the end, you want to convince the people who make the purchases at your organization to get excited about the possibilities of Pensil. It isn’t just replacing an existing system; it’s opening up a huge array of new opportunities for engagement, collaboration, and growth. All-in-one introduces new features, new integrations, and exciting new workflows that empower many more people at your company to contribute to your community.
The way you get people excited is to show that Pensil can get the job done, and in addition, it allows you to anticipate and meet tomorrow’s needs successfully. You can improve your community efforts and simultaneously free up engineering resources that will help your company grow.
Show your company how Pensil will allow your team to have the ownership, flexibility, and creative expression to engage. Then show them all the exciting things your team plans to do with that engagement and growth.
Get in touch with a Pensil Enterprise representative to begin the conversation.
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