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How Awardco Solved the "What Are Other Customers Doing?" Question for Good

“How are other companies solving this?”

 

If you’re in SaaS, you’ve probably fielded this question a hundred times. Customers are always curious about what their peers are doing—especially in a market that’s new or shifting fast. And while you can share examples and maybe drop a few anonymized stats, it’s never quite the same as hearing it directly from someone in the trenches.

Awardco felt this tension firsthand. As a leader in employee recognition and rewards, they understand the constant pressure organizations face to improve things like employee retention and engagement—those always-important, often difficult-to-pin-down goals. Their mission to “recognize the good” is grounded in their belief that recognition, when paired with the right incentives, can drive real change.

Through working with their customers, they realized something: there needed to be a better way for clients to connect directly. “We get asked all the time, ‘What’s everyone else doing?’” said Malachi Hopoate, Head of Client Education at Awardco. “We knew we had to provide a way for our customers to get those answers straight from their peers, without us acting as the middleman.”

That’s why Awardco built its customer community. Now, instead of relying on secondhand insights, their clients can easily exchange strategies, ideas, and solutions with one another in real time.

Malachi, along with Awardco Senior Client Education Manager Brandon Orme, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at their journey to launching a community—and there’s plenty you can take away from their experience.

Tackling the Creative Challenge of Awardco’s Customization

When it comes to providing customers with flexibility, Awardco is second to none. “If you can think of it, you can probably build it,” said Malachi. With so many ways to configure the platform, customers have room to get creative. But with that flexibility comes a natural need for brainstorming and troubleshooting. Has anyone tried this before? What results have you seen? What’s the best way to configure it? Will this break anything?

“Our customers were craving real-world examples,” Brandon explained. “Awardco’s so customizable that clients across different industries were using it in completely unique ways. For example, sales-driven organizations use it for sales incentives while manufacturers often set it up for safety promotion programs. And everyone was curious about how others were making it work.”

For Malachi and Brandon, the goal is simple: empower customers to take the wheel and manage their platforms without having to flag down support. It’s a noble cause, but also a practical one.

“As Awardco rapidly grew, so did the demand for support,” Brandon noted. “We were offering one-on-one help, which is great—until it’s not scalable. We’ve got help articles, videos, workshops, and adding a customer community felt like the natural next step. Our clients were asking for it, our CSMs were hearing it, and it felt like the right move for where we were headed as a company.”

Finding the Right Community Fit

When Awardco began searching for a community platform, they had a few key criteria in mind.

First on the list was keeping things manageable. With a lean customer education team responsible for everything from product documentation to training, and now the community, they needed a solution that wouldn’t overwhelm. “We were looking for a platform with moderation tools that a one- or two-person team could handle, while still providing clients with a seamless, engaging experience,” Malachi explained.

Another must-have was federated search. “We also needed the ability to pull in knowledge base content alongside peer-sourced answers, so when someone asks a question, they not only get advice from a fellow user with social credibility but also see the technical, step-by-step articles,” Malachi said.

Higher Logic Vanilla checked both boxes—and the overall value for the cost sealed the deal.

“The implementation process has been really smooth,” Brandon added. “Our implementation manager and community strategist have been amazing—super knowledgeable and hands-on. They made sure everything was set up perfectly before we took the reins, walking us through best practices and answering all our technical questions. Now, we hardly need to reach out. As customer education professionals, we focus on making our customers self-sufficient, and so we hold the same expectations for ourselves. Vanilla has made that easy. Plus, the Success Community has been a great go-to when we need quick answers.”

A Community Built by Users, Powered by Users, for the Users

When Awardco set out to build their community, they wanted it to be genuinely customer-driven—not just in participation but from the very foundation.

“One of our strategic decisions was to co-create the community with our clients, rather than building it in isolation and then unveiling it,” Malachi explained.

To make this happen, they formed a steering committee of six customers, selected based on factors like tenure and diversity of use case. “We’ve collaborated with them at every step,” Malachi said. “The committee helped craft the mission statement, set the rules of engagement, and even define the community’s tone.”

This direct involvement played a major role in the community’s warm reception when it welcomed over 200 beta users. The six-week beta program encouraged participants to complete weekly tasks and engage with the community. Throughout the process, Awardco gathered feedback through surveys, asking questions like: How easy was it to navigate? How valuable was the experience? The results were overwhelmingly positive.

True to form, Awardco made sure to celebrate these early contributors. “We’re keeping a bit of healthy exclusivity,” Brandon said. “Beta testers and steering committee members receive a badge that shows they helped build this community from the ground up.”

Even after the initial setup and testing, the committee continues to be a valuable resource. As Malachi noted, “There have been times where we’ve reached out to the steering committee and said, ‘Hey, this content didn’t get the traction we expected—what do you think we could do better?’ They gave us insights, we made adjustments, and it worked. Moving forward, we’ll continue to do the same.”

Malachi emphasized how important this level of involvement has been: “By giving our customers ownership and saying, ‘This is your community, we’re just here to support it,’ they’ve really embraced it. It feels a lot more natural than trying to manufacture engagement.”

Letting the Community Shape Its Future

When it comes to introducing new use cases to the community, Malachi shared they prefer to take a similar hands-off approach: “At the start, it’s about balancing organic growth with guidance. We don’t want to push too hard or hover like Big Brother. We’d rather let users lead the way. When we start seeing comments like, ‘Hey, it’d be great if we had this feature,’ that’s our cue to explore it.”

Awardco has already set the stage behind the scenes. Malachi explained, “We’ve structured potential new features in our Vanilla staging site, so when the time comes, we can go live quickly. It lets us deliver value fast, but also gives us the time to make sure we’ve thought everything through—without rushing into it.”

When they do expand, the team is excited about using Vanilla’s automation tools. “Automation is going to help a lot,” said Brandon. “For example, we’ll be able to automatically issue badges when members hit certain ranks, which is great. But what’s really cool is how automation will allow us to assign ranks based on specific member profile fields. This will help when we’re running product discovery or testing, as we can automatically assign members to specific groups or discussions based on their interests.”

In the longer term, the team also plans to use the community for advocacy efforts. “We’re starting to use profile fields so that when members sign up, they can proactively volunteer for advocacy opportunities,” Malachi explained. “This shifts advocacy from a reactive process—where we’re scrambling internally, asking, ‘Does anyone have a client who can XYZ?’—to having a ready-made roster of willing advocates. It’s going to save time and make finding the right people a lot easier.”

Invested from the Start

Awardco’s approach to building their community has been collaborative from day one, and it’s paid off in more ways than one. By giving customers a seat at the table, they’ve created a space where users feel genuinely invested. It’s not just a platform they log into; it’s something they helped bring to life.

“We like to think we had a hand in shaping the strategy,” Malachi shared. “But the real credit goes to our customers. They’ve embraced it fully, taking ownership of the vision and the community. It’s become their tool to strengthen their organizations and advance their programs.”

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