How Moov grew its open-source members 190% with Common Room

Moov powers the payment experience by making money movement simple. It provides a platform for developers to easily embed payment functionality into their software without having to delve into banking protocols and the related maze of security and compliance requirements. In this way, Moov allows companies to focus on building great product and customer experiences, rather than toiling over payment functionality.

Starting from its early days as a single open source project, Moov has grown to 35 open source repositories and a community of over 3,800 of the best minds in fintech. At the center of that growth is Moov’s unwavering commitment to developers and the developer experience. “Moov doesn’t exist without our open source projects and the communities that contributed to those projects,” said Jared Jones, Head of Ecosystem at Moov. “Community is in our DNA. Everything we do as a company is to make that community stronger and more successful.”

Powering and measuring community growth

A community-led organization from the start, Moov is passionate about bringing together developers, builders, thinkers, and doers across the fintech space. But even with a company-wide focus on and commitment to community, manual community-building tasks kept piling up as it grew. It became increasingly challenging to keep up with all the conversations and activities taking place across GitHub, Slack, Twitter, Meetup, and more. The team couldn’t engage with the community in the deep, meaningful ways they wanted to, nor could they easily get a pulse on the topics that were most important to their members across channels and conversations.

And while the team knew the intrinsic value of the community, they lacked the ability to measure its impact on the business, making it difficult to secure additional resources to support the growing community.

The ecosystem team at Moov, which includes both community and partnerships, had been using another community intelligence tool, but it wasn’t delivering the value they expected. The team needed a solution that would allow them to become more intentional in their community strategy, curating engaging, personalized, and high-quality experiences—all supported by data—even as the community grew.

When the Moov ecosystem team found Common Room, they were blown away by its ability to swiftly find what matters most. Common Room provided the community intelligence platform that would help them keep Moov’s community strong.

Common Room allows the team to stay close to its community and continue to build meaningful, authentic relationships as both the community and the company grow. With Common Room, Moov is able to:

• Nurture. Segment the community to deliver relevant content and experiences based on members’ roles and interests.
• Discover. Quickly see new members as they join the community and easily personalize welcome messages, increasing member retention and future engagement.
• Collaborate. Facilitate a partnership between the ecosystem and sales teams to ensure community members are reached out to only at the right time and with the appropriate context.
• Measure. Prove with data the value the community delivers to Moov, both for reporting to leadership and to advocate for additional resources.

Creating engaging, tailored experiences for community members

As Moov’s community has grown, it’s been more challenging for the team to substantially engage with and give back to the community in ways that are meaningful to specific members. By bringing all of Moov’s community sources into one place, Common Room gives Moov a comprehensive view of each member and allows the team to segment the community based on roles and interests. “We want to be able to curate the best possible experience for our community members, rather than just having them jump in and figure it out on their own,” said Jones. “Common Room helps us segment the community based on what each member needs so we can provide relevant, quality content and experiences.”

While all members add their unique value to the community, the ecosystem team was particularly interested in the ability to find and cultivate one of its most critical audiences: the developers, engineers, and technologists who are actively maintaining and contributing to the projects that make the Moov platform even better. Common Room allows Moov to identify members based on how they have engaged with their repositories on GitHub. For example, the team can quickly find members who submitted pull requests, comments, issues, or stars. This visibility ensures that Moov can provide these critical builders with a great experience, immediately responding to pull requests and product questions as well as reacting to and recognizing their important contributions as they happen.

Gaining insight into new members and trending topics

The Moov team knows sending a welcome message to new members increases future community engagement. The Moov ecosystem team uses this best practice to greet every one of its new members, which historically has been a very manual process. Common Room has helped the Moov team easily see when new members join and send them more personalized notes while also reducing the time spent on the task—saving an estimated 100 hours annually.

With the "New and active" report in Common Room, Moov can quickly see all new members who have joined the community in a given timeframe. Because Common Room brings together member profiles across all of Moov’s channels—like Github, Slack, and Twitter—the team gets a complete picture of each community member and what’s most important to them, including things like their programming languages, the topics they’re passionate about, and their most recent conversations in the community. Looking forward, Moov is planning to automate some of these welcome messages with Common Room. This automation will ensure everyone who joins is welcomed into the community in a timely manner. Moreover, automating this very manual task will save the team additional time—hours that can be redeployed developing great community programs.

Additionally, by unifying Moov’s community sources, the ecosystem team can much more easily discover and follow the discussions happening throughout the community. Common Room provides intelligent categorization across these conversations, so the team can instantly navigate to specific topics including product questions, bugs or issues, account support, and product feedback. “Common Room does the hard work of parsing through and serving up serious or trending topics, so we can quickly understand what the community needs,” said Jones. The whole Moov team understands the importance of community and is eager to engage with its members. Common Room’s intelligent categorization allows Jones to direct the team towards the members and conversations that need the most attention or will drive the biggest impact for the community.

Helping the sales team have the right conversations at the right time

The ecosystem team’s welcome messages to new members also opens up a direct line of communication if that person wants to speak with someone at Moov. Jones has often heard back from members who are interested in deepening their relationship with Moov, but not yet ready to jump into a sales conversation. “They want to have their own journey into Moov and the community is a great place for them to do that,” said Jones. “Then when they’re ready for a conversation with sales, I can facilitate an introduction with the right context. It sets up that member and our sales team to have a more productive conversation and is a clear way the ecosystem team adds value to the company.”

For now, Moov has kept Common Room access limited to the ecosystem team, but they provide important context when sales is looking for additional background information about a company. The context that Common Room provides around members and organizations helps the sales team understand if it's the right time to reach out (or not). If it is the right time, the insights from Common Room help the sales team have a more relevant conversation based on the interests, questions, and needs that member has shared in the community.

Showcasing the impact of community to prove value and secure additional resources

As the ecosystem team lead, Jones reports to the Board of Directors quarterly on the impact of the Moov community. The reporting capabilities in Common Room allow him to easily provide a holistic view of community health and growth across Moov’s channels, including total membership and engagement over time, community responsiveness, and sentiment. For instance, he can show that membership in the Moov community has increased 190% in the past year with a 350% increase in total activities while maintaining over 93% positive sentiment. Moov wasn’t able to capture these metrics before Common Room. In the future, Jones plans to use Common Room to capture what company revenue can be attributed as community-sourced or community-influenced to further demonstrate the business impact of community to the Board.

In addition to quarterly reporting, Common Room gives Jones data to bring to the table when he needs to justify spending on headcount, tools, or additional programs. For example, Common Room helped Moov identify a spike in community engagement (150% increase) around their annual conference fintech_devcon—hard evidence that in-person events are correlated to community engagement in a real way. This data has allowed the ecosystem team to get resources to hold additional events, driving more high-quality and consistent engagement in the community.

Moov has plans to further enhance its community reporting with Common Room to demonstrate direct business impact. For the ecosystem team, Jones has specific KPIs that capture revenue contributions tied to the community; he sees an important role for Common Room to play in collecting and validating this data. Being able to clearly show the community’s impact on the business will make it easier for the ecosystem team to advocate for further investment, making Moov’s community even better for its members.

Most of all, the ecosystem team sees Common Room as enabling Moov to build stronger relationships with the software developers who mean the most to their open source projects. “I believe open source is a superpower. We need to continue to invest in the technical members of our community, supporting them and giving back to them, to keep our open source protocols world-class,” said Jones. “Common Room is my team’s superpower to do just that.”