Case Study:
Discord
One of today’s most popular social platforms, Discord is used by over a hundred million people worldwide to connect, talk, and hang out.
The Challenge
While Discord has maintained high levels of member satisfaction and growth throughout its platform, the community team needed a comprehensive understanding of the needs and motivations of community leaders and to explain the specific factors that contributed to server success. Research insights and expert guidance would allow them to drive further product adoption, improve the customer experience, and make data-driven decisions to ensure their organization's resilience.
The Approach
CMJ immersed with the Discord team for five months, leading a comprehensive research, strategy, and advisory process that included:
QUANTITATIVE & QUALITATIVE COMMUNITY RESEARCH, including a multilingual survey of over 11,000 respondents and interviews with key members in the United States and Europe.
NETNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK involving immersion into top-performing communities to assess community dynamics and behaviors in context.
MEMBER JOURNEYS to reveal key segment pathways, milestones, gaps, opportunities, and detailed recommendations.
CUSTOM STRATEGIC INSIGHTS AND ADVISORY WORK, clarifying opportunities to serve members’ real needs, foster buy-in, and relationship-building, and optimize strategy design. To ensure successful implementation, the CMJ team advised Discord through key strategy presentations and prioritization steps.
Outcomes
NOVEL INSIGHTS that immediately guided both short- and long-term decision-making across the organization, clarifying where to focus time, budget, and energy to deliver the most impact.
IMMEDIATE UX IMPROVEMENTS informed by the research, designed to meet retention and monthly active user goals.
ACCELERATED EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY within the organization, allowing cross-team alignment on the most impactful, data-driven decisions.
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“I'm blown away by CMJ's mix of expertise while also guiding this project with humor and compassion.”
— Kathryn Fink, Manager of Community Success