Asana is one of the pioneers of work management, creating a tool to give teams clarity on their plans, processes, and projects. Started as a side hustle in 2008, it launched publicly in 2012 with Facebook, Airbnb, and Twitter becoming early customers [4]. It has since gone on to achieve massive scale with over 42 million registered accounts, 139,000 paying customers, and 2.5 million users [1].
As it has grown it has layered in a community program, originally known as Asana Together, which has unleashed over 21,000 ambassadors to spread the word about Asana, both online and within their own companies [3].
In this deep dive, we dig into Asana's community program and how through smart reporting and internal PR it became a strategic imperative that drives massive business impact.
✔️ Origin Story: How Asana and its community program got started.
✔️ Cross-functional Impact: How its multi-faceted program delivers impact across the business.
✔️ Showing ROI: How they track and report to prove the ROI of its community program.
✔️ Return on Community: The value it creates for members and derives for its own business.
I’ve saved the juiciest part for the end, so let’s get into it 🍔
Asana was founded by Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, two ex-Facebook leaders who had seen first-hand the challenges with team collaboration [4]. Dustin says [5]:
“At Facebook, I was leading the engineering team there, and we were both just consistently shocked and frustrated by how difficult it was to coordinate.”
The problem was bigger than most companies appreciated, they found that 60% of knowledge workers’ time is spent managing work rather than doing it [6]. So they set out to build a tool that could reduce, if not someday eliminate, work about work [7].
“We ended up building an internal tool to help everyone track their work, and the results were really great. We recognized that the problem is universal, and so we left Facebook and created Asana,” explains Dustin [5].
They initially released a beta to the already 1,200+ signups they had on a waitlist ready to explore the product in late 2011 [4], going on to launch its paid product in April 2012 [5]. It grew quickly, and they went on to IPO in September 2020, valuing the company at $4bn [8].
Its work management solution was a new category of software [5]. It proved effective in helping teams orchestrate work, scaling from individuals managing their daily tasks to large, cross-functional projects including multiple teams of people [6].
It monetizes through a typical SaaS business model, charging on a sliding scale per user depending on features used, starting from $10 per user but with a free trial available. It has a hybrid go-to-market, with a strong, product-led self-service motion combined with a direct sales model. Land and expand is at the core of this, with customers typically adopting Asana for a specific use case within a team on a trial, converting to paid, and then expanding through new use cases and across departments. Its free-to-paid conversion rate is around 5% [6].
It seems to have the greatest impact among larger companies - its net-dollar retention improves from 125% for orgs spending $5,000+ to 140% for those spending $50,000 a year or more on Asana [6].
In its S-1 filing it shared how “our large, loyal customer base often shares their experiences, helping us acquire new customers through word of mouth,” [6] and so creating a community to enable and accelerate that was a logical next step. Former CMO Dave King brought in ex-Evernote Community Director, Joshua Zerkel, to elevate its community strategy.
Loved by its customers, Asana has created a thriving, global user community that connect over their shared passion for organizing work as part of its multi-faceted Asana Together program. This includes an online forum with over 500k members, a small army of 21,000 Asana Ambassadors, and between the community team and its members, they’ve hosted over 1200 events [3].
Its community got started in 2017 with the launch of its forum [9], although this was mostly a case deflection initiative and the forum was owned by the Asana support team at the time [18].
“When I started at Asana, there was no community program and there weren't really clear goals for it either,” says Joshua [10]. “The goal, put simply, was just create a community program and get it off the ground so that we could do things with it later” [11].
Those ‘things’ turned out to be [12]:
🖐️🎤
“When people are part of our community program, their accounts are healthier, they grow more quickly, they use the product more, they retain better,” says Joshua [13].
What they see when they dig into the data is a “big delta between companies that access community versus ones that don't,” explains Joshua. Simply put, “If we get people into the community program, they're going to be more successful with our product” [14]. Unsurprisingly, with such impressive business impact, community has gone from being a nice-to-have to “do things with” to a strategic imperative. Execs are “really excited about what we're doing,” says Joshua. “They're excited that we're engaging customers in a very meaningful, very direct way… they really see community as a competitive advantage” [15].
How they did achieve such a turnaround? Let’s take a look at the core parts of its community program and then get into how it proves ROI and reports its results to maximize buy-in.
They had big goals for what the community could achieve. At Asana, most customer marketing focuses on the Executive and VP level, so its community programs were set on activating ICs, and those at Director level and below [19]. They thought a community would help get members to connect on how to use the product better, and more effectively, and to spread knowledge of it within their teams [11]. They wanted people to engage with their brand online, talk about Asana, and engage with them offline, too. “Our function is in a unique spot where we can help drive each of those things in different ways,” says Joshua [16].
Joshua was experienced enough to know that it wasn’t just about what he and his team thought they should do, though, it was about what the business wanted and needed from them, too [10]:
“The first thing I did was gather all the key stakeholders, I think around 20 senior leaders at the company at the time, and just asked them, what do you want from this program? What are you expecting it to deliver? And each of them had a different answer.”
That group included stakeholders, as well as execs, and leaders from every single customer-facing team, as well as those who could benefit from increased customer exposure, like product, too. Those conversations gave him a clear understanding of the varying perspectives and expectations the business had about community [17]. There was a lot the team could do, and that people wanted, but Joshua needed to show his leadership and set out a clear strategy for what was realistic. As Joshua notes: “Your job is not to cater to every team’s needs — it’s to balance what you have to offer with the variety of asks.” Adding, “I had to take a stand at some point; I have limited resources. So I said, ‘Here’s what I can do, here’s how we’ll track that, here's how we’ll grow over time, and here’s how we’ll be able to help the other teams at Asana'” [17].
The result was Asana Together, a multi-faceted program that started with four core elements [6]:
The goal was to connect with the people who are most excited about the brand among its customers and to connect those people with each other, too [18]. As Joshua explains, “Even in the world of B2B, which can feel, frankly, very dry in many cases, as it turns out, people still want to feel like they're part of something” [19]. With its four-pronged approach, members can network with Asana experts and other customers in its forum, as well as at live events and in its Slack as part of one comprehensive program [20]. It’s an attempt to meet customers where they are, enabling them to contribute in the way they’re most comfortable, explains Joshua [18]:
“Some people are forum people, others will never go to a forum and just want to meet in person. Others want to feel like they're part of something special and exclusive, like a membership program.”
Launched on Feb 14, 2019, they seeded the community by initially inviting around 100 people into a pilot version that enabled them to set the culture, quickly learn from any mistakes, as well as stress-test the platform [17]. The program grew steadily, hitting 1,000 members 11 months later [22], and 2,000 by December 2020 [21]. Meanwhile, its forum, which launched earlier in 2017 celebrated passing 100,000 members in March 2022 [9].
Over the last year or so, though, growth has accelerated. As of November 2023, its site reported 5,300 Ambassadors and 236K forum members [4]. Just 3 months later, it's now at 21,000 Ambassadors and 575K members [3]. Around a year ago they also dropped the Asana Together name, now just referring to it as Asana's community, citing internal confusion around having a specific name for something that everyone just called the community anyway.
Asana utilizes a Discourse-based forum. While it was originally under the support team, it has since been folded into the wider community program and has become more than just a ticket-deflection tool [25]. “We share information about new releases that are coming. We give opportunities for members to participate in contests, and share their user stories and use cases,” explains Joshua. The intent is to make the forum feel alive, and not just some transactional thing where folks go to ask questions by fostering non-product discussions, too [25]. This is furthered by its Forum Champions program, which celebrates passionate Asana users who have a deep understanding of the product. Forum Champions help to facilitate conversation, take care of technical issues, and escalate bugs, but they’re also a valuable source of feedback, too. Champions are incentivized with an onboarding kit that includes Asana swag, access to priority support, training, as well as a private space in the forum to connect with other champions [26]. Joshua adds “We give them special webinars… and hold special events just for them,” as well [23].
The forum is available in 6 languages: English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese [4], and “We let the community respond before the Asana team,” says Joshua. This helps to “build that sense of knowledge and discovery among the people who are actually using the tool” [23].
Certified pros are people who provide consulting services around the Asana product [18]. They help provide services beyond Asana’s own offerings, supporting those with custom requirements. They’re a useful aspect of the program, as “They spread the word about Asana, especially in places where Asana will likely not have a physical presence anywhere soon,” explains Joshua. For example, “we have certified pros all across the Middle East, in Africa, in Russia, in parts of Asia where we don't yet have a presence” [27].
Asana has also utilized certified pros to supplement the support offered by its customer success team. For example, they ran a pilot where they offered customers an hour consultation with a certified pro. They provided a walkthrough of their Asana instance and answered any questions they had. In doing this, Asana could “make sure that customers were getting helped in the way that would best suit their needs without adding additional resources to the customer success team,” says Joshua [18].
Despite being the fastest-growing segment of the community program [27], the Certified Pro program is no longer run by the community team. Instead, it transitioned over to its partners team who are better set up to support such a program [11].
Asana also runs an Ambassador program. This is intended for people who are the Asana enthusiasts on their team. They get extra resources and assets to help with their own deployments as well as support them in bringing Asana into their team [10]. Essentially, the program is there to make “sure that the people who love it and use it have the right tools to talk about it,” says Joshua [7].
The program was initially invite-only, the Asana team would pick and invite individual users to join [28]. However, they soon opened things up, and now after you reach a certain threshold of feature usage and time in the product, users get a notification inviting them to join [28]. This came about through the deepening of its partnership with R+D and product teams and is what's driving the recent uptick in growth - they're leveraging Asana's massive user base through automated triggers that encourage engaged users to get involved. They also use promotional banners on its web properties, promoting the program to those using key learning materials, such as the Asana Help Center and Asana Academy [22]. Periodic email and social promotion of the program and referrals from colleagues in Customer Success and Sales, drive its growth, too [27].
The Ambassador program isn’t just reserved for experienced users, though, it’s there for anyone with a passion for the product. There’s a brief application and a ten-minute course to take, and after that, you’re in [16]. They’re given access to Asanaverse, a resource hub exclusively for Asana community members that includes event recordings, downloadable resources, and training content. Ambassadors also get tools and assets so they’re able to advocate on Asana’s behalf.
For a feature release, for instance, the Asana team might share with them social assets, a one-page guide overview of the feature, a short video, and a list of talking points [27]. Of course, members are then free to express and explain the feature in their own way. To guide this, ambassadors are provided with brand guidelines for how to talk about Asana, but as Joshua says, “At the end of the day, we can't control it.” It’s “my team's job to make sure we're giving them as much of the correct information as we can with the hopes that they will take it in the most authentic way that they can back to their own audiences” [25].
Insider knowledge is important for some, so Ambassadors sign an NDA, and Asana shares details of upcoming roadmap items before their public release [27]. “We typically invite them to a webinar”, says Joshua. There “they can not only see the new product or features that are coming, but we invite someone from the product team to talk… about why we developed it… and here's how we incorporated your feedback into developing it” [27]. Access to the team and other experts is important, so there are both private Slack groups and private forum threads just for Ambassadors where they can share tips, tricks, and workflow ideas [29].
In return, Ambassadors can take courses from the Asana community education library, as well as unlock access to Asana’s community swag store, called Narwhal Necessities [29]. Ambassadors get opportunities to showcase their expertise and lead Asana networking meetups in their local community, too [27]. Joshua notes that “We've seen really interesting events and member activities spun up in places that we don't support because we don't have people there,” so it has helped to improve the reach of their marketing efforts [30].
The final core component of the Asana community program is called World Tour, their community events program. It’s “a way for us to really build that in-person” connection says Joshua. It is delivered as a mixture of workshops, learning talks, and meetups, where they get to “meet customers on the ground… and show them how to use Asana” [25].
Back in 2019, there were no community events, by the end of year one they hit 70, and by year two, 150. Now they can run over 200 events per year [18]. These events are a chance to go beyond its online resources, and give people hands-on assistance with Asana, explain the features, and help teams be more effective with the tool [10].
Remarkably, the program is managed by just one person, Logan Wallace [18]. This is made possible through their extensive use of their own product in which they’ve created a sophisticated system. “We built out the template, we refined it, we continue to refine it over time, and now it's something that we can easily repeat and redo,” explains Joshua.
The events themselves are hosted with Bevy [31]. They’ve essentially made a turnkey process for anyone on their team to run an event with every step and action accounted for so everyone involved knows what they need to do next [16]. The result for attendees is a slick, professional experience. Scalability was built into the process from the outset. They target events by city, and each one is not wholly unique - there are repeated aspects that enable them to spread to new cities easily [18]:
“Every week there's a stand-up, where for whatever events are happening in a given region, we check-in, we look at the template to see what tasks are due, see where everyone is at, what they need to work on,” says Joshua.
With that said, they cater each event to its locale. Whether it’s a custom Zoom backdrop depicting nearby landmarks [25] or featuring local customer stories and localized language. “So if we're doing something in Australia,” says Joshua. “We're going to translate it into Queen's English rather than American English” [11].
While the events are managed and staffed by the community team, they aren’t responsible for delivering all of the content. They run several different event formats. For panel discussions, for instance, which focus more on thought leadership between 3 or 4 guests (often customers), they’ll have a team member moderating [18]. While it’s often staff from their customer education and enablement team who run their workshops, answer the questions, and get people excited about what’s possible with the platform [11]. Although, sometimes these can be community members, too, where they’re experts on a particular topic [16].
In any case, the community team acts as facilitators, MCing the event, coordinating registration, managing the venue, etc. [18]. They include Customer Success (CS) and Sales in these events, too. CS are encouraged to invite the local customers they have relationships with. Sales do similar, so they’ll call down their list of customers and prospects and organize meetings around the events [11]. “We don't have revenue targets associated with our events because they're not designed to do demand or lead gen,” notes Joshua. “They do have impact on pipeline, but that’s a byproduct of the event” [18].
While lead-generating events are typically run by its revenue marketing team, Sales, or CS [18], the community team does partner with other teams on such events. Victoria Chin, former Head of Product Marketing, Growth, and Scale, describes how they partnered with community on a Learnathon. “So it was like an extended demo and teaching opportunity… that really drove stickiness and expansion because after this, they were inviting more users” [32]. Many of the speakers at this event were community members, too [16].
Their events can get between 200-300 attendees and the focus for the team is on community activation and generating social buzz [18]. Running events isn’t all rainbows and unicorns… but they can help. “We would bring a little brand mascot with us, a tiny little stuffed animal,” for example, says Joshua. “People would go crazy posting those on social media just to show that they were at an event” [25]. The events are also good for driving membership signups for its other programs, like the Ambassador program [18].
A number of the events are run by members of their community. These are more casual, informal meetups compared to the branded Asana-run events [18], but cover a variety of formats: workshops, panels, presentations, etc. “They're welcome to host whatever type of event they feel best suits both their passions and expertise, along with the needs of their local audience,” explains Joshua [18].
To make sure standards are high, Asana developed an event lead program where they provide training to would-be hosts, and provide them with templates, tools, and resources. For example, a guide that covers how to host your first event and suggested topics. The community team helps to promote these events and provide the registration pages as well [30]. “We also give them access to our members-only swag store,” says Joshua, which is run on Shopify and makes it easy for hosts to order swag for their own events [18]. Event attendees can sign up for a swag pack, too. These include various items, like sticker sheets, and “people go crazy for them,” says Joshua [25].
The community team is part of the Global Engagement Marketing program, which also includes lifecycle, and sits within the wider marketing organization [18]. The team is a global one and has a regional structure, including leads in EMEA, APAC, and Japan [33]. The team opted for that so they could make sure that different elements of their community programs feel authentic across different languages and cultural contexts [25].
These regional leads are responsible for organizing local events and engaging with customers in their local language on the community forum. They’re also charged with planning and executing region-specific programs, local member recruitment, onboarding, engagement, and retention, as well as aligning things back with the global programs [34]. For example, Joshua comments on how the community leader for Japan, Akiko Nagahashi, has tweaked things: “She's really tailored elements of our program to better meet the needs of our local customers, including having smaller meetup groups and developing Japan-specific swag, because what we'd created globally didn't really resonate” [30]. That relationship with regional leads is a two-way thing, though, and members of the global team are “constantly looking for ways for how can we experiment with an engagement tactic, and then how can we scale it to our counterparts all around the world” [18].
In addition to the regional community leads, they have a programs and events subgroup and a forum team. These teams are organized around community funnel stages with people dedicated to top-of-funnel community activities (like recruiting and onboarding people to community programs), while others focus on mid-funnel activities (keep members engaged), and they work closely with other teams, too. For example, those within marketing (like product marketing and marketing ops) [35], as well as cross-functional partners like Customer Enablement and Education and Sales on acquisition and expansion [17].
They also have a community associate whose job is to support the team’s manual processes and look for opportunities to streamline things, taking care of ops, coordination, and helping with analytics [18]. Within the larger engagement team, they have a dedicated analytics person who supports the community team as well, which Joshua describes as being an “absolute game changer” [18]. The impact of this can be seen in the comprehensive reporting process that the team has developed over time.
The results of community work are often indirect and it can be a constant struggle for teams to effectively communicate the value they’re delivering and prove ROI. The team at Asana has done a great job of tackling this, so let’s take a look at their overall approach, as well as some of the specific metrics they track and report on.
“In community, at the end of the day, we're all trying to help propel the business forward,” says Joshua. So what they try to do is “show that our impact is not siloed in just this one marketing domain, that it's of relevance and value across the company” [18]. They do this by building a complete story around its community program, anchoring that story in the broader themes the company is focused on [11], and then socializing that story internally [17]. They put effort into getting the management team bought in so that they want to be part of community’s success and not a gatekeeper to it. As Joshua cautions, “You can't just say ‘We’re going to get people together and have fun!’ You might get a year of life out of that, but not much longer” [17].
Becoming community-led requires a culture change. It takes time and a concerted effort to enact this within an organization. Joshua did it through ongoing, consistent communication [18]:
“I'm the king of internal PR. So anytime there's an opportunity to appear at an all-hands or a company-wide meeting or departmental meeting, I encourage my teammates, I volunteer them.”
He adds that “I drive my team crazy with, frankly, how important the art of internal PR is for community work.” Given the lack of widespread understanding about how community can achieve business outcomes, it’s slow, hard, but necessary work. “I'm constantly talking with my team about what are some great stories we can pull out of the community to share internally,” notes Joshua [18]. It could be an experiment you ran where you can talk about the outcomes and learnings. Or a win you had, or an initiative that’s currently running. If there’s a “large public scale forum, I'm all over it,” says Joshua.
For those who interact with customers daily, it can be easy to forget that most people within a company never speak with customers. They want to hear about what customers are doing and how they’re responding to new features, campaigns, and other developments. Community stories are a great opportunity to get people excited about the customer. In telling these stories, you can also educate staff on the ways community can benefit the company. “It may not be immediately obvious how the product team could make use of community,” says Joshua. So “I explain to the product leads, ‘Hey, you're going to have a bunch of people that are happy to test out things at a moment's notice. You're going to get lots of immediate feedback from the people who care the most, and we're going to have people all over the world who'll be able to give you a variety of perspectives’.” Then it makes sense, and people begin to “sit up and take notice as they see how this could be of value to them,” explains Joshua [27].
The trick is to put yourself in the shoes of other team members and think through what it is that they care about, their goals, and how community can help contribute to achieving them. Plus, remember that other teams don’t have visibility into what you’re doing, so don’t assume they’re following along - instead spell out exactly what you’ve been up to and why [18].
Ultimately what the community team ends up reporting on are two sets of metrics [17, 18, 25, 28]:
They use a combination of Snowflake and Common Room to gather and report on this data. This data is what informs the story Joshua and his team then share with the rest of the business. “The data just tells part of it,” explains Joshua. “I need to wrap it up in a way that will really be digestible by each of the stakeholders. Because if you're on the revenue team, you care about one thing. If you're on the product team, you care about something really different” [10]. These data stories then get shared in a range of formats and cadences:
This took time to put together. It starts with determining the types of KPIs you’re going to need up-front, so you can make the right tooling choices, because that will determine what data you have access to and how easily you’re going to be able to pull data from external systems, like CRM tools, customer databases, and event management platforms [17]. Joshua notes that “We weren't at the beginning able to have business impact metrics,” [10] and that getting to a comprehensive solution was a challenge. “We're talking three plus years of work to get to this point where we can look and track these things,” [18] adding that “with a really far-reaching program like this, metrics can be challenging because there's a lot of surface area to cover” [10].
But their investment paid off, and they’ve been able to prove out the key impact of their community efforts, including [10]:
And ultimately they were able to show bottom-line business results, including improved product usage, team seat growth, and retention, in addition to the customer insights gained, and brand amplification that results from its programs [12]. Perhaps just as importantly though, Joshua has been able to educate others on how community delivers results. “When they send out an email campaign or make a product change, results come back almost immediately. It’s clear if something is working or not. But when we engage the community… it takes time to develop… Everyone needs to understand that distinction” [17]. Now, there’s a lot of interest from other teams within Asana in partnering with community, which Joshua puts down to the efforts they’ve put into explaining the value of community over the years [30].
Community at Asana started as a support tool - something to deflect tickets and reduce its support costs. But with time, a strong vision for what it could be, and an effective reporting process, its community program has become a core part of Asana’s go-to-market function that delivers impressive results. Whether it’s millions of dollars in pipeline, a 40% increase in product usage, increased account growth, or improved retention, community has become a competitive differentiator for Asana. As Joshua says, “When you have an army of people willing to advocate on your behalf, that’s marketing that you can never pay for” [23].
That’s it! That’s how Asana created an impactful community through advocacy - both within Asana and out in the world. To dive deeper, check out the sources below. If you found this useful, please share it with friends and colleagues, and subscribe. ✌
