Ed Giansante for Community Pros Yearbook 2025

Speakers: Ed Giansante, Head of Community, Persona

Ed Giansante: All right, some reflections here for 2025. I think we're in this paradox of AI and community where some people still think that AI is against community and community being like that last resource for the human connections. But I'll tell you, like, both combined is like the best thing that happened to me this year and I think it's just the beginning. There's so much more. So, my lessons here are one, use AI in your favor. I was able to host 81 events in 2025, being like a single person in the community team, so just myself, and generate over seven figure in ROI, so that's a pretty good result given it's like a single person running a lot of this, plus all the things that happen in the background, other things that are not events related. So, my take here is, AI can help a lot of scale. It's just the beginning. Don't be afraid of it, you know, go all in on it, but the second thing related to that is intentionality and the fight for attention. I've noticed that if we go and sponsor, for example, a podcast in a very known publication, you're gonna get like 1 minute tops, maybe 30 seconds even of a slot, and that is gonna go out to like maybe a couple 100,000 people that you don't know if they're decent or not. It's just like a shot, a bazooka shot for 30 seconds. If you host a dinner, you get 3 hours of highly curated prospects with you, 3 hours of attention versus 30 seconds, and then you tell me which one is better, which one is more likely to give you like some outcome. So, that's my take for 2025 and that's where I've learned things and how to be intentional when I think about communities.

Ed Giansante: We'll become the architects of trust infrastructure. If you think about 2026, there are more AI tools, more relationship tools, networking, network platforms, connection, products that are being built... More creative events, more creative experiences, and I feel there's maybe three shifts I can think about, for 2026. One of them being, engagement metrics. Forget that. Think about trust metrics. I think that's important to think about our members feeling, feeling helpful, feeling useful, our members helping each other, being useful to others. It's more about like you serve. And then make that happen versus you're trying like, you know, dictate or share like that information. So I think that's one, moderators will become more curators, and I think that's already something that we see. Maybe we're gonna forget being like community architects or all these fancy titles and we're gonna go back into being the OG, you know, moderators. But I think curator is a good word to define, you know, how we're gonna be, you know, creating these opportunities, these touch points, talking about like matchmaking, making sure that people feel that there's value in where they are because there's so many more communities being created and I think that the problem with that is that it's going to go back into being shallow and you want to make sure that there's something bigger than that. And the third thing is moving from platforms into networks. It's not about community everywhere, it's about networks. It's how all the dots connect. It's about how everything that you're running, all connect to each other. There's no like loose dot in what you're doing, and that's very important because that's where you can see the ROI, that's where you can see high impact and better use of your time, and you can use tools for that, you can use, you know, maybe your own manual resources, but it's very important, and I feel like even with Persona, we're growing a lot and we're becoming more of a network than a platform. Very, very important, you know, forget like owning like a single channel or think about channels as like separate entities. And honestly, forget the battle for like social media person versus community person. Think of networks and think about like your skill sets for that. So that's my take.