James for Community Pros Yearbook 2025

Speakers: James Thornton, Community Manager, Typeform

James Thornton: One personal reflection from 2025 is that a lot of companies at the moment, especially smaller businesses, are challenged and stretched, so don't underestimate the power of your community in terms of being able to help people get their work done, get their jobs done, just by listening to their challenges and bringing together your community to help provide solutions. I think kind of customer support and customer success at scale is a huge opportunity, and I think inviting people as much as possible to kind of share what their pains are, and then opening it up to your community to kind of help share how they've solved those challenges is certainly, from my perspective, a very, very impactful thing to do.

James Thornton: Yeah, it's a good question. So, personally, I think for 2026, the concept of communities everywhere is still gonna be really key. I think communities are kind of increasingly fragmented. And so I think kind of one of the challenges is finding out where your community lives rather than just trying to attract them to your platform, or your channel or whatever is actually going out to where they're interacting online, and engaging them there and just finding where the touch points are. So yeah, I think, again this is something that we saw in 2025 that I think will continue into 2026.