Community programs thrive when all the signals live in one place. Integrations connect your community stack to the systems your teams already use, so activity becomes insight, and insight becomes action. Done right, integrations help you reduce support costs, lift retention, and prove real business impact. In recent market roundups, brands with active communities report meaningful gains in customer retention and continued investment in community technology through 2025. Your path to those outcomes starts with a tight, well planned integration strategy.
Below is a practical guide for Bevy customers who want to align community, product, marketing, and success around shared data.
Why integrations matter for community led growth
Most programs begin with scattered tools. A discussion thread here, a webinar there, a spreadsheet of advocates somewhere else. Integrations remove the friction between those touchpoints.
What changes when you integrate:
- Trust accelerates. Peer answers and user generated content surface across channels, so members get help faster and stick around longer.
- Adoption improves. Event attendance, session views, and forum activity flow into your CRM, so lifecycle teams can target education and onboarding at the right time.
- Support load drops. Accepted solutions and community tips are easy to find, which deflects tickets and frees your team for higher value work.
- Measurement finally clicks. Engagement, sentiment, cohort retention, and advocacy sit next to revenue and churn, so leadership sees the full picture.
The essential integration map
Use this checklist to design an integrated community stack around Bevy. Start with the minimum viable set, then expand as your program scales.
1) CRM and customer data
Goal: connect people, companies, and pipeline to community activity.
Common systems: Salesforce, HubSpot, MS Dynamics.
What to sync: event registrations and attendance, chapter leadership roles, forum participation, accepted solutions, NPS, product tier, renewal date.
Why it matters: you can segment by lifecycle, target at risk accounts with learning paths, and report on community impact next to bookings and churn.
2) Marketing automation and email
Goal: send timely, relevant messages that reflect community behavior.
Common systems: Marketo, HubSpot, Braze, Iterable.
What to sync: RSVP status, last attended event, content interests, geography or chapter, advocate status.
Plays: nurture no shows with a replay, invite power users to speaker programs, trigger re engagement if a member goes quiet for 30 days.
3) Identity and SSO
Goal: one secure login across your ecosystem.
Common systems: Okta, Azure AD, Google, SAML.
What to sync: roles, permissions, chapter leadership, company entitlements.
Outcome: lower friction for members and clean role based access for admins.
4) Collaboration and chat
Goal: meet members where they work and pull signals back to Bevy.
Common systems: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord.
Plays: send event reminders to a channel, capture Q and A highlights back into a discussion, route unanswered questions to moderators.
5) Analytics and dashboards
Goal: combine product usage with community engagement.
Common systems: Google Analytics, BigQuery, Snowflake, Tableau, Power BI.
Data to model: DAU or WAU, session length, event attendance rate, UGC ratio, accepted solutions, cohort retention, revenue influence.
Outcome: a single view of community health and business impact.
6) Social listening and sentiment
Goal: understand conversations outside your owned channels.
Common systems: Brandwatch, Sprout Social, Meltwater.
Plays: track topic spikes, flag emerging questions, invite members into relevant threads or events.
7) Surveys and feedback
Goal: keep a steady feedback loop.
Common systems: Typeform, SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics.
Plays: event CSAT, session rating, TTFP tracking for new members, public feature voting. Close the loop by posting what changed.
8) Payments and ticketing
Goal: support paid events or donations and reconcile with finance.
Common systems: Stripe, PayPal, finance exports.
Plays: issue member tiers or discounts, track conversion from RSVP to paid, attribute revenue to chapters or event formats.
A simple framework to implement integrations
You do not need to connect everything on day one. Follow this order of operations to avoid complexity and show value early.
Step 1: Define outcomes and KPIs
Pick three outcomes and measure only those for the first quarter.
- Reduce support tickets from repeat questions.
- Increase onboarding completion for new customers.
- Lift attendance and repeat participation across chapters.
Tie each outcome to one or two KPIs, for example accepted solutions, TTFP, event attendance rate, UGC ratio, 30 or 60 day cohort retention.
Step 2: Map events and properties
List the user actions that prove progress and the fields you will sync.
- Events: RSVP created, attended session, posted reply, solution accepted, survey completed, renewal date updated.
- Properties: plan or tier, role, region, chapter, product area, lifecycle stage, account health.
Document names and formats before you connect anything. Consistency now saves cleanup later.
Step 3: Connect priority systems
Start with CRM and email. Confirm that member identities resolve to the same person across Bevy and your CRM. Test a small segment first, such as one chapter or one region.
Step 4: Build one closed loop journey
Pick a single use case that touches every team.
- A new customer signs up for a chapter welcome session.
- Attendance writes to the CRM.
- If they attend, they receive a follow up with three advanced resources that match their product. If they miss, they receive a replay and the next date.
- Their activity updates the account health dashboard.
- If they post a question, moderators route an answer, and the solution becomes searchable content.
Measure completion rate, session engagement, and the change in support tickets for that cohort. Share the result with leadership.
Step 5: Add governance and permissions
Decide who can create integrations, edit mappings, and export data. Use role based access and name owners for each data flow. Add a monthly audit checklist: sync success rate, field drift, inactive webhooks, PII access.
What to measure beyond vanity metrics
Follower counts and total members are not enough. Use a layered scorecard that combines quantity, quality, and business outcomes.
Participation and depth
- Active members: DAU, WAU, MAU for owned channels.
- Session depth: average time on event pages, discussions, or replays.
- UGC ratio: member posts vs host posts over time, aim for a rising member share.
- Time to first post: how long before a new member asks or answers something.
Quality and connection
- Peer to peer replies: share of questions answered by members, not staff.
- Accepted solutions: percentage of answered threads marked solved.
- Sentiment trend: positive, neutral, negative across threads and social. Log examples, not just scores.
Business outcomes
- Retention by cohort: compare engaged vs non engaged groups at 30, 60, 90 days.
- Event impact: registration to attendance rate, repeat attendance, chapter stickiness.
- Revenue influence: opportunities touched by events or advocacy, referrals from community links.
- Support deflection: estimate from accepted solutions and replay views before ticket creation.
Report weekly for operational signals and monthly for trends. Each quarter, present two wins, one learning, and one change you will test next.
Core plays unlocked by integrations
Use these repeatable motions to create momentum without adding headcount.
Smart onboarding
Sync product tier and use case to invite new customers to the right chapter welcome session. If they attend, send a one week check in asking what is still confusing. If they do not, send a short path to value resource and an office hours invite.
Advocate activation
Use activity and quality signals to score influence. When a member crosses your threshold, invite them to a speaker circle or beta group. Recognize them in a public thread and track referrals with a simple code.
Topic driven programming
Pull top questions from social listening and support tags. Turn those into monthly AMAs or micro workshops, then publish highlights and link back to the accepted solution thread. This creates a loop of discovery, event value, and searchable answers.
Re engagement for quiet members
Identify members with no activity in 30 days. Trigger an email or in app nudge with three options: a quick poll, a short tutorial, or a local meetup. Track which path brings them back and adjust the mix each month.
Data quality, privacy, and security
Trust earns participation. Treat member data with care.
- Minimize and label. Collect only what you use, label PII, and document retention rules.
- Access control. Use SSO and least privilege. Review admin access monthly.
- Consent and transparency. Link to your privacy policy, show what you track, and offer a preference center.
- Audit trails. Keep logs for integration changes and data exports.
- Backups and monitoring. Watch sync failure rates and webhook reliability. Fix small drifts before they become big problems.
How Bevy helps
Bevy was built for distributed, event centric communities that need real impact at scale.
- Events and chapters, connected to your CRM. Track registration, attendance, and engagement per chapter, then sync to contacts and accounts.
- Native analytics. See event performance, member participation, and chapter health in one place.
- Permissioning and roles. Let local leaders run programs while your team keeps brand and data control.
- AI assistance. Use AI to suggest titles, draft descriptions, summarize Q and A, and surface common questions to turn into evergreen content.
- Open integrations. Connect marketing automation, SSO, payments, surveys, and warehouses without heavy lift.
If you are migrating from another platform, start by mapping your key events and properties, then bring your most active chapter live first. Share the early results, then roll out across regions.
A 30 day starter plan
Week 1: pick outcomes, define KPIs, confirm fields, connect CRM and email.
Week 2: launch a single closed loop journey for one chapter.
Week 3: add surveys and accepted solution tracking, build a simple dashboard.
Week 4: publish a one page readout with outcomes, a member story, and next experiments.
Small wins compound. Keep the stack lean, keep the loops tight, and keep listening to your members.
FAQs
1) Which integrations should I set up first to drive engagement?
Begin with CRM and email, since those unlock segmentation, lifecycle outreach, and revenue reporting. Add SSO to reduce friction, then bring in surveys for quick feedback and analytics for a single source of truth. Collaboration or chat comes next if your members work there daily.
2) How do I prove the impact of integrations to leadership?
Pick one journey and one cohort. Example: first time customers who attend a chapter welcome session vs those who do not. Measure attendance rate, time to first post, accepted solutions, and 60 day retention. Show the delta and the related reduction in tickets. Tie this to pipeline or renewal where possible.
3) What are the most common integration mistakes?
Pushing every field without a schema, syncing before identity resolution, skipping consent and permissions, and measuring only top line counts. Avoid these by documenting events, testing with one chapter, and reporting on a small set of layered metrics that include outcomes, not just activity.
4) How can small teams get value without a large tool budget?
Use the native Bevy analytics, connect a single CRM, and run surveys with a lightweight form tool. Start with one chapter and one journey, then reuse the playbook. As proof grows, expand to listening tools and a warehouse. Depth beats breadth when resources are tight.
When integrations align your systems around member action, your community stops being a side channel and becomes a growth engine. Start with clear outcomes, connect the minimum set of tools, and build one closed loop at a time. Bevy brings the events, roles, analytics, and controls you need to make it work at scale.