RWS Community Grows Active Members by 224% in Nine Months
RWS’ growth-focused community strategy is empowering customers and staff with self-service to drive faster innovation, improved collaboration, and enhanced user experiences.


Results
- 224%
Increase in active members in 9 months.
- 7.7%
Growth in content in 9 months.
- 10%
Increase in content views.
About RWS

Opportunity

Solution
The highly successful community is empowering RWS customers, partners, and staff to collaborate and drive innovation together. The latest innovations include:
- Gaining invaluable customer insights and ideas: RWS is better able to solicit feedback from customers and allow for ideas and recommendations to be voted up or down. New capabilities include filtering ideas by new, in review, accepted, or in production, plus bi-directional integration with Jira and comprehensive progress reporting overviews. These ideas are fed into the RWS product roadmap to provide direction on new services or products. RWS also uses advanced forum post analysis to identify sentiment and trending topics and extract product enhancements.
- Providing an improved forum for discussion and debate: Improved discussion forums enable users to create more engaging dialogue. The “Forum Finder” feature suggests the most suitable group for a post. Previously, the RWS team were moving up to five mis-directed threads per day, but since using the Forum Finder, it is almost zero. Other forum enhancements include additional topic-based forums and sub-forums, as well as problem solving and learning forums.
- Creating even more engaging community blog content: RWS is extending its use of blogs to create even more unique and newsworthy posts.
- Transforming accessibility: RWS has acted upon the guidelines from the EU Accessibility Act, making it easier for disabled and vulnerable users to participate in the site. For example, the company has added AI-generated descriptive alt text beside images to help users with visual impairments.
Benefits
Live for several years, this flexible, customizable community and self-service tools are driving real business value through better engagement, enhanced user experiences and reduction of costs via leveraging peer-to-peer collaboration. This is evidenced by:
- Growing demand for the community across RWS business units (BUs): Increasing numbers of RWS BUs are thrilled about the ideation functionality, and it has become one of the most used features. Over 18% of ideas generated from the community are being implemented in different operations. The Aurora BU, for example, has 588 members. The number of ideas in this BU has grown from 20 new ideas in 2022 to 202 new ideas in 2024.
- Increasing community activity, engagement and membership: In the period January-September 2024, active members grew by 224% and new members by 25%. There was a 7.7% increase in content and a 10% increase in content views, while unique Originators, Contributors, Engagers and Viewers rose by an average of 4.1%.
- Increased engagement: The Community Solutions Hub (Trados) is a group focused more on recordings of training provided to Trados members. It has 34,949 members as of 2024. The engagement rate is measured by the number of downloads, in this case 2,227 (equal to 6.3%).
- Faster innovation and business growth: The number of ideas generated in the Trados Focus Community has risen from six ideas under review during 2021, to 174 in review in 2024.
- Improved accessibility: The “alt text image generator” was implemented to align with the European Accessibility Act, providing text alongside images to help users with visual impairments. The total number of images processed by alt-text generator is 3,406 across 58 groups and 115 forums.