State of the Parliament 2020

Welcome to our first public State of the Parliament report! It's our pleasure to share with you a summary of our activities, achievements, and impacts made over the past year.

A "parliament" is a group of owls, and we're all owls here. When we started sharing monthly reports internally, we adopted the term "State of the Parliament" after a new team member had referred to us as a "friendly parliament of owls" (thanks, Zach!). And when we started company-wide meetings as we adopted open book management, it only made sense to refer to those meetings as a Parliamentary Sitting.

Public product roadmap

In January 2020, we documented and shared our product roadmap for the first time. As a small team driven by customer needs and feedback, we didn't want to overpromise and underdeliver based on shifting priorities. Instead we shared our top priorities for the year, which for 2020 were:

• An integration with Let's Encrypt to make adding your own SSL certificate an easier, smoother process
  We completed the integration in May 2020, and you can read all about it in our release notes.
• Infrastructure updates to keep KnowledgeOwl scale-able and stable
  This project began early in 2020 and is continuing into 2021. We have begun working with CloudButton to better streamline and scale our AWS infrastructure.
• Adding support for multilingual knowledge bases
  Preliminary work was begun in 2020 and this project is upcoming in 2021. 

Company Retreat: Steamboat, Colorado

As a fully remote company with team members in 3 continents, we don't often get to see each other in person. Luckily we scheduled our company retreat for February and the majority of the team gathered in person before much of the world was locked down due to a global pandemic. 

We chose Colorado for a few reasons. First is that our company was founded in and is headquartered in Colorado. Second our two founders live in Colorado along with another team member. Third, we thought it would be fun to have retreats where we visit the local communities of other team members. Not only do we get to visit and support the local community of our team members, but it reduces our carbon footprint as we limit the amount of travel for company retreats.

Present at the retreat were Kate and Tysa (Maine), Spicer (Oregon), our Information Security Owl (Colorado), Stephen and Jerrard (Australia), and Marybeth and Pete (Colorado). Catherine (United Kingdom) was there with us in spirit!

New team members

We added four new owls to the parliament, ending the year with a total of 11 team members. This is our largest parliament yet!

1. Sorin joined us from Romania as support engineer and is now heading up our support efforts. If you email support, you've likely chatted with him!
2. David joined us from Pennsylvania as a web developer, focusing on what we call quick win features like Internal Notes and the File Label Library.
3. Deborah joined us from Manchester, UK to help with our blog and social media, and she's now our Documentation Champion. 
4. Zach joined us from New Hampshire as a support developer, and he spends his time fixing bugs and helping customers with advanced support on things like the widget, SSO, and the API.

Guest Blogging Program

In April 2020, Catherine, our community builder and resident illustrator, began a guest blogging program for our company blog. Since April, we've featured work from 9 guest bloggers and continue to develop the program.

Path to B Corp Certification

In May 2020, we began work on our B Corp certification by completing our first B Impact Assessment. To become a certified B Corp, an organization needs to obtain a score of 80. 

We scored a 23.5 on our initial assessment and wanted to submit for B Corp certification in 2021, so we created a plan. To improve our scores, we:

• Formalized policies and documented things that were never written down. As they say at Write the Docs, "docs or it didn't happen!".
• Started tracking metrics using surveys, spreadsheets, and other tools for documentation (like KnowledgeOwl!).
• Locked in our mission into our company's operating agreement, mission statement, and 5-year company vision.

Here's a brief overview of our progress in 2020:

• May 2020: 23.5 (Initial) 
• May 2020: 57.5
• June 2020: 50.6
• July 2020: 61.3
• August 2020: 78.6
• September: 80.3 (80 is the threshold for B Corp certification!)
• January 2021: 90.1 (submitted for verification - view our unverified 2020 Impact report here!)

Our goal is to become B Corp Certified in 2021 (requires a score of 80) and become eligible for Best in the World Honorees (median score of 131) when we re-certify in 2024.

You can read more about why we are pursuing B Corp certification on our blog.

Formalizing and locking the mission

One of the first steps we took towards B Corp certification was locking in the mission. We did this by updating our business operating agreement to formally take into account all stakeholders when making decisions.

The purpose of the Company is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which a limited liability company may be organized under the Act, and shall include creating a material positive impact on society and the environment, taken as a whole, from the business and operations of the Company.

We also formalized our official company mission statement, which was inspired by our friends at Zingerman's, who have taught the importance of a mission statement as your North Star:

We share the KnowledgeOwl experience
Making valuable knowledge base software
Giving great service to everyone we meet
With the belief that business can be a force for good
Being helpful and kind in all our actions
To make life better for ourselves,
Our teammates, our customers, And our communities too.

The mission statement has helped us time and again, from daily decision making ("Is this the KnowledgeOwl experience we want?", "Is this giving great service?", "Does this make life better?") to helping us focus on the big picture ("How does my job description fit with the company mission?"). It helps us do a better job, feel better about the work we do, and helps us succeed as individuals and a company.

KnowledgeOwl turns 5!

In June 2020, KnowledgeOwl celebrated its 5th anniversary. Established on June 1, 2015, Silly Moose LLC  has grown from a two-owl operation in Colorado to a globally-distributed parliament of 11 with team members in three continents. 

Annual Customer Survey

To celebrate turning 5-years old, we completed our first annual customer survey. The goal of the annual survey is benchmark and measure improvements in customer experience, customer outcomes, and social/environmental engagement. 

We chose to use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer experience. We ended up with an NPS of 56.7, which will serve as a benchmark for our NPS score moving forward. As part of our 2025 company vision, we will work to increase our NPS score to 90.

Pat yourselves on the back y'all; your NPS (56.7) is superb! Because NPS is a growth metric, it's important to understand how your NPS compares with others in your industry. The software industry has an average NPS between 30 and 40. KO's NPS of 56.9 means that you are set up to grow as a result of to word of mouth. The KO customer-centric approach is really apparent in this NPS!

2020 KnowledgeOwl NPS 56.7

We also asked our customers to tell us how much they agreed that KnowledgeOwl cares about them as a person, our customers, our staff, the environment, and the community. We are using this to benchmark and measure perceptions of our social and environmental impact.

KnowledgeOwl Cares Results

During the analysis of the survey results, we received 3 organizational recommendations on areas for improvement:

1. Increase communication that KnowledgeOwl cares
   We've been working on sharing more information on our company, culture, and programs on our blog (like this!). We also ran our first swag promotion to spread some joy, sending out masks and stickers to customers and friends all over the world as part of our Stay Safe campaign. And we are working on more proactive ways to engage with our customers and communities.
2. Consider how to manage customers' expectations regarding their goals
   This is an area we are actively working on in 2021. We are hoping to offer more proactive, customer-success style support where the customers' goals are discussed and solutions are recommended are part of the sales, onboarding, and entire customer lifecycle.
3. Using magic wand data to drive product enhancement decisions 
   We asked customers what they would change about KnowledgeOwl if they had a magic wand. Kate, our Product and Customer Champion (and resident cheesemonger), responded personally to all of the magic wand requests. We've added them to our product development backlog and have been working to include magic wand requests in our prioritization. We've released a few already!

We are using the annual survey results to ensure our efforts are alignment with customer needs and desires as well as to track our progress over time. We will repeat the survey in June 2021!

Customer Service Feedback

We started tp include a link to a customer service feedback survey in all of our email communications. This allows our customers a quick and easy way to provide feedback about the product or their interactions with us. Since it's part of each email we send, the customer always has the ability to provide feedback.

This also benefits our individual team members. It provides them with immediate feedback on how they did and allows them to fix any problems themselves. The sooner you know about an issue, the easier it is to fix!

Lastly, it results in a quantifiable measure of the quality of our customer service. In 2020, we received 54 responses, ended with an NPS of 85.1, and received many nice quotes like this:

The customer service is beyond excellent and team is always helpful and super nice. Very happy with product and flexibility...thank you for all that you do for your customers!

2020 KnowledgeOwl Customer Service NPS 85.1

2% for People and Planet

In June 2020 we started our 2% for People and Planet community program. We give 2% of our profits to help our local communities. As a remote company, we have team members across the globe. Each month a different team member chooses a local charity, non-profit, or organization with the goal of helping people and the planet. The goal is to use our global company to do good in our local communities

In 2020, we donated $4,357 dollars to our local communities and here's how that broke out:

• June 2020, Marybeth/Pete, $1,451 to Broomfield FISH
  https://www.broomfieldfish.org/
• July 2020, Stephen, $550 to The Social Studio
  https://www.thesocialstudio.org/
• August 2020, Kate, $856 to Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons
  https://agrariantrust.org/agrariancommons/little-jubba/
• September/October 2020, Spicer, $500 to Yamhill Community Action Partnership (YCAP)
  http://yamhillcap.org/
• November 2020, Jerrard, $500 to Black Rainbow
  https://blackrainbow.org.au/
• December 2020, Catherine, $500 to Manchester Mind
  https://www.manchestermind.org/

KnowledgeOwl for Good

We implemented our KnowledgeOwl for Good discount program as part of our Corporate Citizenship Program along with 2% for People and Plant. 

We give a 25% discount on annual accounts for non-profits, no questions asked. We are also extending this discount to individuals and organizations working for social justice and racial equity.

We’re also offering discounts of up to 100% for organizations doing good for people and the planet. People and organizations working in this space can contact us for additional pricing options. If our software can help people change the world, we'd like to help as much as we can.

Black Lives Matter

In July 2020, after much reflection, discussion, and collaboration, we posting publicly about Black Lives Matter and racial equity in the United States. In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, we are finding ways that we, as individuals and as a company, can show up for racial justice. 

• Raising awareness to understand the problem . We began a #blacklivesmatter channel in Slack, open to KnowledgeOwl employees, contractors, and freelancers. In this channel, we have discussion threads for a handful of antiracist books, lectures, and videos. So far, this channel has prompted a lot of exploration of being not racist vs. being antiracist, of institutions and issues that might not seem informed by racism but are, on whiteness, and what we can do to be antiracist more often.
• Making our software available to non-profits, individuals, and companies working for racial equity. We've always offered a 25% non-profit institution discount. We extended this discount to individuals and organizations working for social justice and racial equity, offering discounts of up to 100% for organizations doing good for people and the planet.
• Pursuing B Corp Certification. The B Impact Assessment has given us a better framework to create and evaluate our policies and procedures and their impact on our communities, our customers, the environment, and the countries we live in. Antiracism has become part of what we're talking about as we do this work, and it will remain so. We're leveraging Certified B corporation's Anti-Racism Resources to facilitate these conversations.
• Formalizing an Ethical Code of Conduct. We have clearly defined what we expect of our staff and contractors/freelancers. It details a framework for thinking about social issues around diversity, inclusion, equity, and allyship and provides appropriate remediation steps for concerns around violations of this code of conduct. 
• Forming a JEDI  (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Council. As part of our 2025 company vision, we have formed a JEDI Council. The goal of the council is to champion justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion at KnowledgeOwl. The goal is for the council to not only advise our team but also facilitate internal workshops, conversations, and other learning opportunities.

Annual Team Survey

In August 2020, we completed our first team survey. We used eNPS to measure our employee experience, and we are really happy to announce we received a perfect 100 eNPS score.

2020 KnowledgeOwl eNPS 100

Just like we did for our customers, we  asked our team members to tell us how much they agreed that KnowledgeOwl cares about them as a person, our customers, our staff, the environment, and the community. We are using this to benchmark and measure perceptions of our social and environmental impact. 

KnowledgeOwl Cares Results (internal)

We also collected data regarding demographics, diversity, inclusion, and happiness at work to track our progress and identify areas for improvement.

Based on the data, we identified 3 opportunities for improvement based on our lowest scores:

1. "I know what is expected of me at work." (4.2 average)
   We are making sure everyone has a job description, which they help create, that clearly outlines each person's essential responsibilities. We have also been working on documenting and formalizing our processes and procedures to set everyone up for success.
2. "I am able to have good work/non-work balance." (4.1 average)
   The reason this score was in the bottom three is due to us including the cofounders in the results. While most of our team feels they are able to have a good work/non-work balance, our founders are still largely involved in the daily business operations, especially our CTO. We are addressing this issue through sharing responsibilities, strategic hires, and infrastructure improvements.
3. "I get constructive feedback on how I'm performing on a regular basis." (3.3 average)
   We started using a tool calling 15Five to facilitate regular feedback, 1-on-1s, and performance reviews.

We are using the team survey results to ensure our efforts are align with team members needs and desires as well as to track our progress over time. The challenge will be to keep that perfect 100 NPS score, so we will continue to find ways to ensure that everyone is happy working with us. We will repeat the survey in August 2021!

Product Improvements

Expanding our parliament has given us more developer owls to keep providing valuable knowledge base software. In 2020, we released a steady stream of bug fixes (over 100), feature enhancements (over 30), and new features (over 20).

We focused a lot of our not-roadmap development around these key areas:

Content management & Reporting

• We released a lot of improvements to the Manage Articles interface, adding new Bulk Edit options, more fields in the export, select all in view/filter for bulk edit, and a new bulk edit custom role permission.
• In the Reporting Dashboard, we added self-serve options to reset article ratings and article view data.
• We revamped the Tags Library and created a full-fledged File Label Library, offering you more ways to create, edit, delete, and merge your metadata.

Versions and internal notes

• We have released a number of enhancements to versions, including versions + version notes for draft and deleted articles, reverse chronological order, and displaying the 5 most recent by default.
• We also added internal notes separately from version notes, giving you more places to have editorial conversations.

More visibility

• We now show inherited reader group restrictions, making it easier to see when content might not be viewable by some readers.
• We released our first references logging, tracking which snippets an article references on-save and displaying those articles in the snippet's references section.

Keeping you informed

• We added some KO news and announcements to the app dashboard, so you can see our release notes, blog posts, and announcements about down-time and upgrades.

Documentation

This year, thankfully, we didn't do any major reorganizations of our support knowledge base. We have successfully managed documentation updates for every software release (no small feat!), and we did a massive round of updates on screenshots. We still have some older pages that need some more love, but we're feeling a lot more upbeat on our documentation as a whole.

We've also built out a lot more internal documentation to streamline our QA/testing, support, and product development processes.

In 2021, we plan to revamp our Getting Started Guide, restructure our Articles and Categories documentation, and give our API documentation a facelift.

The Not-Boring Tech Writer

After being a fan and sponsor of The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast for many years, we purchased the podcast in August 2020 from our longtime friend, Jacob Moses. Jacob has been teaching us the ropes of hosting and publishing the podcast, and our very own Jerrard Doran is taking over as the host in 2021. You can listen to the episode A Fond Farewell (Yet Warm Welcome!) to hear more about TNBTW journey so far.

By sponsoring and now hosting the podcast, we are happy to continue support the tech writing community. We believe the podcast makes life better for our customers and communities, so it was a no-brainer for us to take over for Jacob when we were asked. It is another way we live our mission and give back to the community we serve.

Sponsoring Write the Docs Conferences

We continue to support tech writing community by sponsoring Write the Docs. In 2020, we sponsored both Write the Docs Prague and Write the Docs Australia & India.

The Write the Docs community is near and dear to our hearts. WTD considers "everyone who cares about communication, documentation, and their users" to be a part of their community (that's us and our customers!). The conferences create a time and place for the community to share information, discuss ideas, and work together to improve the art and science of documentation. 

We are proud to have been a sponsor of Write the Docs conferences since 2017, having sponsored our local Write the Docs Boulder/Denver Meetup since 2016.

By the numbers

What annual report wouldn't be complete without some numbers, so we will end with a look at how our numbers changes over the year.

• Number of team members increased from 8 to 11 
• Number of guest bloggers increased from 0 to 9
• Number of podcasts increased from 0 to 1
• Annual NPS increased from n/a to 56.7
• Annual Customer Service NPS increase from n/a to 85.1
• Annual eNPS increase from n/a to 100 (HOOT!)
• 2% for People and Planet donations increased from $0 to $4,357 
• B Impact score increased from 23.5 to 90.1 (pending verification)

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading our State of the Parliament! If you are a customer, fan, or friend of KnowledgeOwl and you'd like some stickers, email us at support@knowledgeowl.com. We'd love to hear from you!