Starting a new community can be overwhelming. You may have lots of fantastic ideas but where do you start? 

Planning for a new community is a must, but we have to be careful to not fall into the planning trap and overcomplicating things. 
 

The minimum viable community is a great mindset to have to overcome this. Think of it as baby steps to a community. 

Benefits of using the MVC approach

1. Resources don’t need to be stretched​​​​​​​ - starting small is less risky

2. Create a better understanding of community member needs - helps you listen to what your members are actually saying and doing rather than making decisions from assumptions

3. Get feedback faster - you can receive feedback from your members, build, measure, and learn at a much faster rate

4. Scale where appropriate - when you find something that works, you can build on it and turn it into a flywheel (see below)

To follow on the idea of using small-scale experimentation.  We can use community flywheels as a visual framework of actions to focus our attention. 

For many communities, the biggest pain point is with growth and engagement. There is constant pressure to grow but it's hard to build a community sustainably and organically.

The idea is to shift from a funnel perspective to an effective flywheel, creating energy or traction, which then naturally leads to growth.

Empath: Listen carefully and sense issues

Concierge: Ensure newcomers are welcomed and to find resolutions for members

Plan: Create and review the community strategy

Content creator: Create accessible and useful information and events

Gardener: Watch over the platform, ensure the technology is working and problems are escalated

Cheerleader: Celebrate success, new features and news

Monitor: Stay vigilant to inappropriate behaviour and spam

Growth tactics

•Related articles / blogs - to signpost community

•Newsletter promotion

•Social media campaign

•Member referrals

•Partnerships

•Direct invitations, Relationship managers

•Product/service integration

Engagement tactics

•Welcome newcomers (onboarding process)

•Tag groups / people in replies

•Design low friction interactions (polls, careful humor - emoji / GIFs)

•Share & celebrate milestones (group or personal)

•Source the topic ideas and let members vote to see what’s hot

•Post questions in the community asking for experiences and expertise

•Invite members to share any useful templates, resources, tools they use

•Member interviews

•Co-write the resources

Event tactics

•Formats (Workshop, lightening talk, show and tell, thinking room, power hour (group activity to solve a problem)

•Pre-event: raise awareness and register

•Post-event: summary post or blog

•Post-event feedback

Content tactics

•Write a newsletter (summarise popular or unanswered member posts and industry updates)

•events

•Blogs (what is the community interested in learning?)

•Case studies (more in-depth look)

•Host a podcast

•Create a post schedule to share the above ideas

Influence tactics

•Solve a problem together - easiest to get people to join, hardest to get people participating

•Seize an opportunity - members get together to share their latest ideas, research

•Explore a passion – find out what your community really cares about?

•Exclusivity - find whom most people in the sector admire and invite those people to form a group

1. Established from a genuine need – creates value that everyone understands

2. Unique proposition – can offer something different to what might already exist

3. Strong purpose and clearly defined objectives/tactics

4. Engaged manager and leaders to drive activity

5. Awareness – people know it exists

6. .Builds trust and connections between members

7. Meets member expectations

8. Can adapt to change

9. Right technology

10. Variety of touchpoints