Dan Rodman for Community Pros Yearbook 2025

Speaker: Dan Rodman, CEO, Co/Unity

Dan Rodman: Hey, yeah, I think a really interesting lesson that I learned in 2025 was around ambassador program design, and I saw some other programs that were leveraging and utilizing more extrinsic motivators, financial payments and things like this, and I think those programs which declined over the course of the year. You know, there is an element to if you're paying ambassadors from a certain perspective, then they become more of contractors than they do ambassadors because they're just there then for the money versus looking at how do you tap into more intrinsic elements, how do you think about building more belonging through these programs. And I think that was something that we learned and iterated on and had quite a bit of success with, so that's a great one for 2025.

Dan Rodman: Yeah, this is an exciting one because I'm super stoked for 2026, 2027, for the future, especially for community professionals. I think with the rise of AI we're seeing more and more products that are more easy to create, more easy to build, more easy to market, because you can leverage these different AI tools. And so we'll see this flood of more SaaS products of different things, and an increase in marketing, an increase in ads, and an increase for our eyeballs on the internet. The attention economy is going to be trying to get as much of our eyeballs as they can. And I think we as community professionals realize that the cost of acquisition is going to be increasing quite a bit here in the future with this AI, with these new tools, with these new products. And so what does that mean for community is retention side of things. How do we build loyalty and community is a great answer for that. It's a great solution for that. And so the LTV, the lifetime value, is going to be something that community can really help sustain from a business perspective. So it's starting to make a lot more sense from a business point of view to leverage and utilize community for loyalty for these components of retention. And I think that's something that a lot of projects are going to open their eyes up to and brands and whatnot. So I am super excited to be working in this space alongside so many other amazing community pros, so I'm super stoked for it.