⚡ TL;DR (the full deep dive blog post is below):
Treat community as a value exchange, not a content channel:
it has to bring value for the organization and for the members, and if one side is missing, you do not have a community strategy; you have a broadcast channel or a support queue.
Design community around workflows, not vibes: the strongest communities become part of how people work, learn, decide, and solve problems. If your product or community is not embedded in a real workflow, advocacy will stay shallow.
Use hackathons as proof engines: a strong hackathon does not just “engage” people. It shows what users can build, which use cases matter, where onboarding breaks, which teams are high intent, and how the product performs in real conditions.
Recognize advocates based on depth, not volume: the person who quietly helps users every week may be more valuable than the person with the biggest audience. Build ambassador systems around real contribution, not follower count.
Silence from the community team can be a success metric: if the community team stays quiet for a week and members still ask questions, answer each other, and keep the space alive, the community is becoming self-sustaining.
Choose your platform to listen to this episode:
Connect with Gift and Yurii here
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gift-ojabu/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/yurii-lazaruk-community-consultant/
”There is an African saying and an African proverb:
When a chicken gets to a new environment or a new city, the first thing the chicken does is it steps one foot on the floor, raises the second leg, turns left, turns right to observe what is happening in that environment. Then it puts the second leg on the ground, and then it starts walking.
So when community members come to community, the first thing they do, why they jump into that community, is they tend to observe.
They tend to see how people are being engaged. They look at the Discord channel and look at how several people have been supported, they probably have asked some questions when they start, and they observe.
You need to be an active listener. “
Meet Gift Ojeabulu, an ML Engineer, developer advocate, author, speaker, and co-founder of Data Community Africa, one of the largest data and AI communities globally, who treats community not as a “soft skill,” but as something you can engineer, measure, and connect directly to business outcomes 🤩
In this episode, Gift challenges one of the most common mistakes in community work: confusing activity with impact, and explains why the real question is whether community interactions help members make progress and help the business make better decisions 🚀
🥽 Deep Dive: How to Turn Community from Engagement Work into Business Infrastructure
Most community teams do not struggle because their work lacks value. They struggle because that value is often difficult to explain inside the business.
A founder, CEO, or VP does not usually wake up thinking, “How many people posted in our Slack this week?”
They care about adoption, retention, customer insight, trust, revenue, product feedback, and market momentum. So if community leaders want a serious seat at the table, they need to translate community work into the language of business outcomes.
That was the strongest thread in my conversation with Gift Ojeabulu. Gift does not talk about community as a soft, feel-good function. He sees it as a system. In his words, “A community for business is… a two-way street.” It creates value for members, but it also needs to create value for the organization.
👀 The real problem: community value is often invisible
Many community strategies fall apart because they over-focus on one side of the value exchange.
Some communities are warm and human, but commercially vague. They create belonging, connection, and support, but cannot clearly explain how the work supports adoption, retention, product feedback, or revenue.
Others are too focused on business goals and end up treating members like leads. The community becomes a disguised sales funnel, and members quickly feel it.
The strongest communities sit in the middle. They help members solve real problems, grow professionally, connect with others, and use the product better — while also helping the business learn, grow, retain customers, and build trust.
That is where Community ROI begins: not with more engagement, but with a clearer value exchange.
⚙️ Community as a system, not a vibe
Gift’s technical background gives him a useful way to think about community. He compares it to an ETL pipeline: you bring people in, help transform their experience, and then load that value back into the business.
In community language, this means people move from curiosity to participation, from participation to learning, from learning to product usage, and from product usage to advocacy, referrals, feedback, or even revenue.
This is a much better way to think about community than only asking, “How do we increase engagement?”
Engagement is not the end goal. The better question is: what movement are we creating?
Are members moving from passive observers to active contributors? Are new users becoming confident users? Are experienced members helping beginners? Are community conversations creating product insights? Are advocates emerging naturally? Are customer success, product, marketing, or sales teams actually using what the community reveals?
That is where community ROI starts to become visible.
🧪 Hackathons as business learning machines
One example Gift kept coming back to was hackathons.
For him, hackathons are powerful because they show what happens when people come together around a real problem. People may arrive unsure or intimidated, but through collaboration, ideas start to spark. As he put it, “In the problem of humans collaborating together, ideas tend to spark up.”
For a business, that is not just a nice community moment. It is a live test of product value.
A hackathon can show which use cases people care about, where onboarding breaks, what participants build, which features create excitement, and which users are most motivated. Product teams can learn from it. Marketing can turn it into stories. Customer success can see where people need support. Sales can notice which problems are urgent enough for people to spend time solving.
But this only works if the community team designs the program with business outcomes in mind. A hackathon without follow-up is just an event. A hackathon with clear goals, captured insights, internal reporting, and next steps becomes a business learning system.
📊 Activity is not the same as progress
The same logic applies to almost every community activity.
A meetup, AMA, webinar, Discord discussion, ambassador program, or office hour is not automatically strategic. It becomes strategic when it is connected to a specific member need and a specific business goal.
Gift said it clearly: “Community is not an experiment of several activities without results.”
That line should probably live inside every community planning document.
Because it is very easy for community teams to become busy. There is always another event to host, another post to publish, another discussion to start, another member to welcome. But activity is not the same as progress.
The role of a senior community leader is not simply to keep the space alive. It is to understand what the community is helping people do, and how that progress supports the business.
😎 The best communities do not depend on the community manager
One of my favorite parts of the conversation was Gift’s definition of a healthy community.
He said that if a community leader can stay silent for a week and members are still asking questions, starting discussions, and helping each other, then the community has achieved something important.
That is a useful reminder. A strong community is not one where the community manager performs endlessly. A strong community is one where members begin to create value for each other.
They answer questions. They share examples. They make introductions. They recommend tools. They refer each other to jobs. They become part of the support system.
From a business perspective, this matters because peer-to-peer value scales. It reduces dependency on the community team. It builds trust faster than brand communication alone. It helps new members see that the community is alive. And in product communities, it can reduce friction around adoption because users are learning from other users, not just from documentation or company-led content.
📣 Advocacy starts with real usefulness
Gift gave the example of Claude. He does not work for Anthropic, but he naturally talks about Claude because it became useful in his workflow. It helped him do things faster and better, so he became an advocate through experience, not because someone pushed him into a campaign.
That is a lesson many companies miss.
Advocacy is not something you manufacture with a campaign hashtag. It starts when people get real value from the product, the community, or the relationship. Then the company’s job is to notice, recognize, and support those people.
The community team should know who is helping others, who is sharing useful feedback, who is creating tutorials, who is bringing people in, and who is talking about the product without being asked.
These are not just “nice members.” They are trust signals, product signals, and business signals.
🎁 Recognition should mature with the relationship
Gift made an important point about recognition: it should not be random.
Swag can work, but only when it is useful and personal. A generic bag may be forgotten. A practical tool someone uses at a meetup can create memory, conversation, and an emotional connection.
But as advocates become more valuable, recognition should mature too. Serious contributors may value visibility, access, referrals, speaking opportunities, advisory roles, or even job opportunities more than another branded item.
This is where community becomes a trust system. You are not just rewarding people for saying nice things. You are building long-term relationships with people who already believe in the product, help the ecosystem, and create value for others.
🔁The missing layer: internal translation
The missing piece is often internal translation.
Community teams see valuable signals every day, but they do not always package them in a way other teams can use.
The product needs to know where users are stuck. Customer success needs to know what helps people adopt. Marketing needs stories and language from real users. Sales needs to understand what problems are urgent. Leadership needs to know how the community is reducing risk or creating opportunity.
This is why community leaders need a simple feedback loop:
community → insight → action.
Every month, the community team should be able to say: here are the top problems members are trying to solve, here are the repeated questions, here are the strongest use cases, here are the emerging advocates, here is what members are saying in their own words, and here are the actions we recommend for product, CS, marketing, or sales.
That is how community becomes more than an engagement channel. It becomes a source of business intelligence.
🤖 AI can help community teams find the signal
Because Gift works across AI, ML engineering, and developer advocacy, the conversation also points toward a larger shift.
Community teams will need to become more analytical — not less human, but more precise.
AI can help community teams cluster recurring questions, summarize discussions, identify themes, detect patterns, and turn messy conversations into structured insights. But the community leader still needs to interpret what matters, decide who should act, and protect the trust of the members.
AI can tell you what people are talking about. A strong community operator understands why it matters to the business.
That is the real advantage.
🌍The human reason community still matters
Gift’s own story brings this all back to the human reason why community matters.
He started building community because he saw a gap. Talent existed, but opportunity did not. People in Africa were learning data science and AI, but they needed more visibility, mentorship, access, and belief.
So he started sharing. Then he amplified others. Then more people started sharing. Then the movement became bigger than him.
His goal was not to own the movement. As he said, “My aim is to create, to put something down and spark a movement.”
That may be the best reminder for community leaders trying to prove ROI. The goal is not to choose between human value and business value.
The strongest communities connect both.
They help people become more capable, more connected, and more successful — and because of that, the business earns more trust, better insight, stronger advocacy, and more durable growth 💛
⭐️ 3 Actionable Steps to Success
1. Define the value exchange
“A community for business is… a two-way street.”
How to implement:
Write one simple sentence that connects member value with business value:
“Our community helps members ________, which helps the business ________.”
For example:
“Our community helps developers solve implementation problems faster, which helps the business increase product adoption and reduce onboarding friction.”
Use this sentence to filter every community activity. If an event, post, program, or discussion does not support either member value or business value, question whether it belongs in the strategy.
👉 Business impact: This gives leadership a clear reason why the community exists beyond engagement.
2. Measure movement, not just activity
“Community is not an experiment of several activities without results.”
How to implement:
Stop reporting only what happened. Start reporting what changed.
Instead of saying: “We hosted 3 events and had 200 attendees.”
Add: “42 members asked implementation questions, 18 got peer support, 7 started using the product, and 3 product friction points were identified.”
Use a simple monthly reporting structure:
What happened?
What changed in member behavior?
What did we learn?
What action should the business take next?
👉 Business impact: This helps executives see community as a driver of behavior change, not just a calendar of activities.
3. Design for member-to-member value
“If you as a community leader can stay silent… and members are still asking questions in that community… then you’ve hit your target.”
How to implement:
Do not make the community team the center of every conversation. Design rituals that help members create value for each other.
For example:
weekly peer questions
member-led demos
office hours with experienced users
“help a member” threads
intro posts based on shared goals
community showcases
member resource libraries
Track how much value happens without direct team involvement: member replies, peer answers, introductions, shared resources, and discussions started by members.
👉 Business impact: Peer-to-peer value makes the community more scalable, trusted, and less dependent on the community team.
💬 5 Quotes to Remember
“Community is not an experiment of several activities without results.”
“You have a community when as much as you are giving to that community, they are also gaining from you.”
“The community is a middleman from the community member to the organization revenue.”
“The goal of a community is bringing several set of people to communicate with each other, connect and provide value to one another.”
“If you as a community leader can stay silent… and members are still asking questions in that community… then you’ve hit your target.”
