The Linux Foundation is the nonprofit home of Linux and, in 2018, well over 100 other open source projects funded by member companies. That spring it hired Lisbeth McNabb as CFO/COO and Jamie Smith as CMO to deliver more value to existing members and grow new ones. They brought in The Artesian Network to establish an objective baseline of member value and design a Customer Success program around it.
Key Results
- Inside-out baseline in one phase: 30 interviews with 28 leaders, executive directors and program managers, over 24,000 words, turned into weighted, quantitative findings.
- Pinpointed where retention risk lived: Silver members, roughly 96% of the membership, got little proactive engagement between joining and the renewal invoice.
- A shared operating language: Customer Success became Member Success, run by Member Success Managers against a defined set of leading engagement indicators.
- From findings to operating model: a 12-month Member Engagement Blueprint by persona and tier, then biweekly Member Success planning with the CFO/COO through 2019.
The Challenge
The Foundation’s growth had outpaced its member operations. Membership had grown nearly 20-fold since 2009, yet by leadership’s own 2018 assessment there was no ongoing member engagement organization and no formal renewal or churn-management process.
Coverage was uneven by design. Six executive directors, each with a program manager, covered roughly half of revenue in a high-touch model. Eight program managers covered the rest far more lightly. Silver members, the large majority of the base, had the lowest renewal rates.
Member data was scattered, too. Depending on the project, contacts lived in Google Sheets, in Salesforce or both, and not every team trusted Salesforce as the source of truth. Meanwhile, LF was investing in LFX, a new member platform designed to take much of that manual work off staff.
Leadership wanted an objective view of member value before encoding the member experience in software. And two new executives, one owning retention and one owning new-member growth, needed the same baseline to work from.
What We Did
Artesian paired Principal Jonathan Buckley with Blynn Buckley, a Customer Success and voice-of-the-customer leader who introduced Customer Success operations at Cloudera. We worked in phases, with leadership sign-off at the end of each.
- Listened inside first. We interviewed 28 people across the Foundation, from Executive Director Jim Zemlin to executive directors, program managers and IT, completing 30 interviews by August 22, 2018. We converted the answers into quantitative results, weighting each by how early it came up.
- Exposed the value gap. Staff agreed on what LF delivers: neutrality, collaboration and open source expertise. But the most common answer to how that value reaches members at the Foundation level was that it doesn’t. As one put it: “Aside from adding Silvers to the mailing list, I don’t know that we do anything with them until the renewal invoice is sent.”
- Fixed the foundations. We recommended one source of truth for member data, with Salesforce licenses for every member-facing employee; a cross-functional group to govern Salesforce changes; wider use of Confluence and Jira; and fixes for dual invoices and true-ups so renewals could become a “non-event.”
- Defined what to measure. LF tracked churn, a lagging indicator. We specified the leading indicators to capture: voice-of-the-customer feedback, committee and event attendance, training completion, code commits, key-contact job changes and Member Success Manager input.
- Re-scoped when priorities shifted. When the platform build absorbed staff time in early 2019, LF deferred the member survey. We refocused on Silver membership and built a Member Engagement Blueprint: a 12-month proactive journey from onboarding to renewal, mapped for officer, marketing, developer and purchasing personas.
- Coached the operating owner. From October 2019 we ran biweekly Member Success planning sessions with the CFO/COO to scope the Foundation-wide plan, choose its top success metrics and define the member data LF’s new platform needed to capture.
The Member Success Shift
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Function | “Customer Success,” a borrowed label for one team | Member Success: a culture, led by Member Success Managers |
| Silver experience | The mailing list until the renewal invoice | A proactive 12-month journey by persona |
| Member data | Split across spreadsheets and Salesforce | One source of truth in Salesforce |
| Health signals | Churn, measured after the fact | Leading indicators: events, training, code, committees, VoC |
| Renewals | Dual invoices, true-ups, manual notices | A “non-event,” earned by year-round value |
The Outcome
LF got an objective, inside-out picture of its member experience before encoding it in software. By 2019 it was running the work as Member Success, with Member Success Managers as Phase I recommended, starting with Silver membership, where renewal risk was highest.
The engagement signals stuck. Today, LF’s LFX Organization Dashboard gives member organizations “a summary and detailed view of their contributions, event attendance, training, and more,” the same categories of leading indicators Artesian recommended tracking in August 2018.
Artesian held up an honest mirror to our member experience before we built the systems to scale it, then helped us turn member success from a team name into a way of operating.