Your community keeps dying, let's fix that

Everywhere you look there’s a new community popping up. 

They’re all over Slack, Skool, Discord, and even Twitter.

The benefits of a community are simple:

People can come together to collaborate and experiment to generate new ideas.

Transfer knowledge to each other.

If done well it boosts your brand. 

The sad reality is that most fail. Many know how to bring people together but don’t know how to keep them engaged. A lot of these experiences leave people with a bad taste in their mouths about communities.

I’ve built and scaled communities, studied what works and what doesn’t, and have been in both amazing and terrible communities. 

Here’s what I’ve found that works through my own trial and error and my time working with community building experts.

I think about communities like co-working spaces.

There are co-working spaces where, as a first-time visitor, you’re greeted warmly, given a tour, introduced to other members, and are provided with resources to get your work done efficiently. People are happy to go and work and meet with others to collaborate.

Then there are co-working spaces where no one acknowledges you when you walk in, the amenities are lacking, the layout is confusing, and the environment feels lifeless because people rarely return after their initial visit.

Let’s create a vibrant space. 

Here’s what we’ll go over.

1. Defining why someone would join.

2. Deciding if it’s worth your time.

3. Picking and building on a platform.

4. Onboarding

5. Launching

Defining why someone would join.

If you don’t have clarity on why someone would join, how would others? If you don’t define a purpose people will define their own and you’ll have a group with no common goal.

Harvard Business School came out with a great framework that helped me define this.

Jobs to be done

A simple way to answer what job your community will be hired for is this:

[This community] is for [type of person] who wants to [accomplish thing].

Let’s say your community will be a place where people will get answers about fundraising. If a person puts in a ton of time in creating a post and no one responds or responds weeks later. Your service will be fired.

Online it’s so easy to click x on a tab and never return.

Deciding if it’s worth your time

This is when you need to be real with yourself. Memberships take time and effort and you want to make sure that it fits into the life you want to live.

Here are some questions to ask yourself.

Do I want this to be a free community, if not how much do I want to earn?

• Deciding if it should be a free community or not is easy. Deciding how much you want to earn is extremely important. This will determine pricing and the number of members you want in the group. 

What is the maximum number of members you want?

• Let’s say you decide that at most you want 200 members (because after that you typically will need some help). 

• You also want to earn let’s say $100,000 a year. You now know you need to charge at least $500 per person for the full year. 

• If that isn’t something your community is willing to pay then you need to increase the number of members you’ll allow.

How much time do you want to spend on this each day? Each week?

• If your community is operationally efficient, you shouldn’t need to spend more than 10 hours a week on it with 200 people. If you don’t have that much time, consider hiring help. 

What will you offer?

• Is this a space where people can receive answers to questions, share experiments, or get feedback on ideas? Make a list, but don’t start out with everything. It's better to start with less than more. People like to see growth in offerings, not a reduction.

If things start ballooning in a way that doesn't fit into what you envision it’s time to rethink. You’re now at a crossroads. Are you going to continue forward or not? Be real.

Picking and building on a platform.

There are tons of platforms out there, my favorite is Circle.so.

There is a ton of flexibility with spaces to chat, go through coursework, and host events. 

They aren’t sponsoring me to say that, I think it’s a great space.

Let’s dive into the most important thing when starting, onboarding. 

Remember the co-working space example? If you have the most impressive space and all the resources to solve the world's problems but people don’t feel welcomed or know how to navigate the space they’ll leave.

So that’s where we’ll start. The first thing to work on is a welcome video. Recording on your phone is fine.

Welcome people in, tell them you’re so ecstatic they decided to join, and then point them to a section that says “Start Here”.

In this section, you’ll have videos about everything they need to know.

• What are the expectations

• How to introduce themselves

• How to navigate the space

• How they should be engaging in posts.

This is the place where they should leave having no questions. 

If they still have a question the only possible reason should be that they didn't go through all the videos.

This section almost needs to be overdone. Why? No one wants to come in and think “What do I do next?” The simple answer is to close the tab and go on YouTube.

Now that people are onboarded. You tell them how to introduce themselves (hopefully by video) and you lead by example and start enthusiastically engaging with each new person.

Everyone will follow your lead, how you set the expectation of engagement is essential to the existence of the group.

This kind of onboarding is important wherever you host your community.

Launch

It’s time to get people in and get them talking. It’s all about engaging with people in a timely manner, sharing and setting an example, and being a great facilitator. 

Now that you’ve launched It’s a perfect time to run experiments, use Vidlo to get testimonials, and build out a landing page that people can reference to understand what to expect from the group.

TL:DR

1. A community takes effort and you need to know when it isn’t worth your time.

2. Know what job your community members are hiring you for so that you can blow their expectations out of the water.

3. You only get one first impression. Be warm, inviting, and responsive to members. 

4. Have fun and document the process.

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