Autodesk Inc is a Fortune 1000 company and the world’s 7th largest software company. Its products have revolutionized design and animation, won Academy Awards and helped bring SpiderMan and Lord of the Rings to life. The company is based in Silicon Valley and is best known for its flagship 2D design software product, AutoCAD.

A New Community

Like many software companies, Autodesk knows that running communities and user groups around its products and services is a critical part of its overall strategy for engaging product users and encouraging loyalty. The Autodesk Manufacturing Community website was launched in March 2006, aimed at the engineers and product designers who use Autodesk software to create 2-D and 3-D designs for manufacturing environments. The community website allows members to learn more about the software, stay current with their industry, share information, grow their network, and take advantage of a host of resources such as downloadable designs, discussion groups and tutorials. They wanted 8000 members by the end of January 2007, and engaged Sequentia in August 2006 to help them get there.

Bringing Them In

Sequentia began by conducting an audit of the website to ensure that the design and features were encouraging engagement of both new visitors and existing members. User-generated content such as blogs and podcasts were repositioned to create the right touchpoints through which the audience could participate and engage, fostering a sense of community. Incentives were offered to get the audience to participate in content ranking as a means of increasing visibility.

Growing the Community

Sequentia also delivered a set of recommendations for growth and engagement of community membership. This included applying best practices of community engagement such as providing a variety of levels of interaction and engagement for different types of audience, opening up access to content, and other engagement tools. Autodesk's web team incorporated the recommendations made by Sequentia and launched Version 2 of the community website platform in November 2006. The launch was supported by a robust acquisition campaign designed by Sequentia, including a James Bond-themed promotional contest to tie in with the launch of the latest Bond movie, to help drive new membership and referral mechanisms and enable the audience to spread the word.

Retaining and Engaging the Base

Critical to the success of any community is audience retention and engagement of the existing community members, as well as driving engagement, activity, and fostering retention. Now that acquisition was proceeding apace, Sequentia and Autodesk focused on engagement and retention and introduced a newsletter program designed to achieve the following objectives:

• create pass-along content with strong value
• create additional visibility/perceived value for bloggers and other content creators
• push activity to this content and to the website
• promote highly valuable content and accordingly the value of the community to the audience
• reinforce the variety of options for engagement

The open rate on the first newsletter was over 65%, had a tail of over 1000% and a click-through rate of over 20%. These strategic community programs, in conjunction with Autodesk's other efforts, helped Autodesk and Sequentia surpass all expectations and goals for the community, which reached the 8,000 member mark in November 2007 &mdahs; 2 months ahead of schedule. Today the community has reached the 14,000 member mark.