CorelDRAW.com

The CorelDRAW family of products enjoys a passionate and active user base worldwide. The CorelDRAW.com team built a community that would foster the exchange of user-generated content and give members a single place where they can share information, learn from others, and discover each other's businesses. Ultimately, the community enables the team to listen to customers, engage in candid conversations and glean insights that have a direct impact on helping us develop better products.

The team also set out to prove that this could all be achieved with limited resources and budget.

CorelDRAW.com combines forums, blogs and galleries for design pros and hobbyists alike. Forums are available in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.

The project runs under a distinct set of criteria and rules:

• This is an environment for real conversations. No ads. No marketing speak. No store.
• The site provides users with a single place to share their work, knowledge and info about their businesses.
• The site gives the team new ways to listen to customers to understand their workflow, pain points and needs.
• The site gives team members a real face and voice with users.
• The site facilitates other forms of social media with links to CorelDRAW groups on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Plaxo, LinkedIn and FriendFeed.

Product Development — The team monitored and engaged in conversations with community members to prioritize which fixes they wanted to see in the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite Service Pack 1. This feedback was directly applied during development and as a result, the update has been extremely well received.

#3 on Google and #1 on Yahoo! —The site is easily found by anyone searching for information about the product. This success clearly demonstrates that communities can be grown organically, even without advertising spend.

More than 15,000 Members — Launched in May 2007, CorelDRAW.com had more than 10,000 members in the first year and added another 5,000 in the first three months of its second year. With a recent report [Deloitte, Beeline and SNCR] indicating that only 9% of corporate online communities have more than 10,000 members, the popularity of this community is a tremendous success.

CorelDRAW.com is a vibrant, self-sustaining community supported by users who are product evangelists and advocates. The forums are self policing and users are providing each other with support, rather than depending solely on CorelDRAW team members to answer questions.