A lot of the thinking around launching a community is still stuck in the past decade.
Even today we’re seeing plenty of individuals and organisations trying to launch communities following approaches and strategies which fail because:
- The approach is outdated or has been overused.
- The organisation doesn’t have the resources to execute it.
- It’s the wrong approach for the type of community they’re trying to create.
This is where you can wind up with failed launches, ghost towns and communities which struggle to reach a critical mass of activity (i.e. the 300, 100, 10 benchmarks)
So let’s look at six community launch strategies which still work in 2020s and when to use each approach.
You can find a summary here.
How To Launch A Community
There are plenty of simple ideas out there about methods to launch a community.
You can even find our step-by-step strategy for launching a community here.
Most of the approaches you can find on FeverBee and elsewhere can still work well – provided you use the right approach in the right context.
The problem begins when you transplant an approach which works in one environment onto another.
For example, trying to launch a private question-and-answer forum when you don’t have a large initial audience is going to be a huge challenge. Yet beginning with a social media channel where you can build an audience first is going to be a lot more successful.
In this post, I will explain which approaches work best to launch different kinds of communities.
The Two Major Considerations When Selecting The Right Approach
Obviously budget and having enough time to demonstrate results are major factors. But not having these changes the question of whether you should launch a community at all rather than deciding which approach to use.
The major considerations when deciding the right approach are:
1) Size of the audience.
There is a huge difference between having a large existing audience (and incoming traffic flows) vs. trying to build the audience from scratch. It’s fairly common for people who have launched a community for a large brand with a big audience to struggle when trying to help a brand which doesn’t have that kind of audience. That’s because the type of launch and work is completely different.
Even big audiences tend to become small communities. If you don’t have 10k+ people you can reach (or 10k+ people visiting your site monthly), the type of approach you use to launch a community will be completely different. The 10k+ figure is a little arbitrary but you get the idea. Do you have thousands of people on your mailing list or visiting an existing property you control or not? Because that difference is huge.
Community folks who have only ever worked with large audiences will never know the pain of trying to attract the first few people to a community and nurturing the early flickers of activity. This is why making an accurate membership projection is key.
If you have a large existing audience, you can redirect them from one channel to another (typically from existing support flows to a community property and the community can spring to life).
If you don’t have an existing audience, you need to figure out how to earn the attention and build the trust of a small group of people to get started. This significantly increases the time it will take to see great results from the community.
2) Community Type.
I’m endlessly frustrated by people using the same approach to a community regardless of the type of community they’re building. You don’t have to think about where you and most people you know go to satisfy different needs to realise that different goals require different platforms and approaches.
For example, it’s very unlikely you’re going to build a single-destination community where top experts will want to share their best advice or where the most cutting-edge discussions will take place.
That’s because experts have unique needs you need to satisfy which require a complete rethink of your approach. And most industry-related discussions have shifted to different platforms.
When organisations follow the wrong approach, it’s typically because internal needs have overruled the modern, practical, realities of building a community.
Common mistakes include:
- Trying to launch a hosted Q&A community without a large audience or a well-informed and well-connected community manager. This makes it almost impossible to get the community off the ground.
- Creating a private community without ensuring it’s exclusive. Privacy without exclusivity rarely makes sense. Privacy is a strategy, not a tactic.
- Launching a destination community for topic-related discussions. This typically fails because it’s simply not where people want to have those discussions.
This isn’t an exhaustive list – but I suspect they are the most common mistakes.
Why You Will Never Truly ‘Own Your Data’
Some will say control means ‘owning your data’. The idea here is that if you’re hosting your community with a major platform vendor then you ‘own the data’.
But owning your data is a red herring.
If a member posts an article on your community, does that article belong to the member, the organisation, or the platform provider?
Well, it depends on the terms and conditions (and often there aren’t community-specific terms and conditions).
Even if you do have community-specific terms and conditions, national and regional laws override that. GDPR allows anyone in Europe to object to the processing of their personal data anyhow.
So remind me who owns that data again?
Most community platform vendor contracts will say the licensee (the paying organisation) owns their customer data. This is true, but it largely depends on the specific terms and conditions a customer signs when they join the platform.
And who owns that data if a platform charges you $20k for a data dump when you want to take that data somewhere else?
Two Types of Data That Matter
It’s important to distinguish between the two types of data here.
- User-generated content (UGC). This is data generated by users. It typically includes posts, photos, comments, and anything else a member may actively contribute. UGC is typically owned by the users who created the content. However, when joining a platform the member will usually agree to terms and conditions which give the organisation limited rights to use and process the data.
- Member information (metadata). This is data gathered about members as they engage in the community. This includes things like levels of activity, post counts, and data they contribute to their profiles. This data typically belongs to the organisation however it is usually subject to the organisation’s privacy policy and the terms and conditions must clearly explain how this data will be processed.
The first type of data, for most organisations, is only really important when it comes to migrating from one platform to another. You want to ensure a consistent experience. Unless you want to repurpose member content in other channels, then exportability of the first kind of data is key.
The second type of data, the metadata, is more important on measuring community value and knowing what is and isn’t working. Knowing who is engaging in a community, when they are engaging, how they are engaging etc…is more useful to most organisations than what they are contributing.
This is especially useful when you can aggregate the data for overall stats and segment the data in really granular ways.
What matters then isn’t ownership of the data. We know already members will own most of the data they create. What matters are three specific things:
- Can we create custom terms and conditions regarding the use and processing of this data?
- Can we see clean aggregated data?
- Can we export data from one platform to another? (Via APIs)
Asking these questions is more important than having a vague idea of ‘owning your data’.
The Six Methods Which Work In 2024
Method One: The ‘Redirect’ Approach
The ‘redirect’ approach is essentially when you have a large existing audience or inbound traffic flows and you redirect this audience to the community. In short, instead of directing the audience to one location, you redirect them to another (the community).
The most common example of this is customer support. People who would otherwise contact customer support are instead guided to the community – typically via search, the customer support page, or within the product itself.
Seeding and Launch
Typically here you license an enterprise platform, configure the site to your needs and spend 2 to 4 weeks seeding a private community with initial questions and answers (ideally answered by a few hand-picked superusers).
When you’re ready to launch the community, you make it public, send an announcement to customers and (critically) ensure it’s featured in the flow of where people would visit already.
We did this when we helped Geotab launch their community a few years ago. We seeded the initial questions and answers from common support questions. Then, when we were ready, we launched and ensured the community was promoted in the existing customer support flow. Within a couple of months, search became the community’s primary source of growth. The community has thrived ever since.
The key to success in a ‘redirect’ approach is having a large volume of support requests which you can redirect to the community. It’s a lot easier for companies like Zoom and Calendly to launch their community because they have a vast number of customers.
However, if you try this same approach if you have less than 5k customers, there’s a high risk you will wind up with a community like Benchling with minimal levels of activity.
The other key decision here is ensuring the community is public and indexed in search engines. Building a community becomes infinitely harder if you decide it has to be a private community. You don’t benefit from search traffic.
This raises the question, what should you do if you have a smaller audience but want to build a successful support-centric community?
Method Two: Founder-Driven Growth
If you have a much smaller audience, but the goal of your community is primarily to get answers to questions, then you usually have two choices.
- If you’re expecting the company to grow its audience rapidly, then begin with a simple Facebook group and drive people there until you’re ready to hop across. Many major communities began with this approach. However, be warned that once you’ve reached the 10k mark you should jump across. I like Elementor (and I’m writing this post using it) – but having a 150k+ Facebook group instead of a dedicated enterprise platform is nuts. That’s a huge amount of wasted knowledge and data.
- If you’re not expecting rapid growth, then you need to take a founder-driven model. This means you need to find a community manager who has existing connections (or can quickly build them) and then invite those connections to join the community. You can use an inexpensive community platform to do this.
This is precisely what we did when we helped USP launch the Nitrosamines community a while back.
We had a relatively small group of scientists in a highly specialist field to build a community for.
We began small, seeded some early activity between staff members, invited some early members, and then worked with Naiffer Romero, the community manager, to constantly promote the community through posts like this and directly inviting connections.
Naiffer also spoke about the community a lot at events he attended. And it worked – but it takes more time to reach that critical mass of activity.
The key here is persistence and having a community manager who can continually initiate and sustain activity in a community. The community manager is the critical decision you will make at this stage. They need the domain knowledge, relationships, and personality to drive the community forward.
If you don’t have an incredible community manager, it’s going to be difficult to build a successful community. You need someone who is reaching out and inviting more people to join and participate every day.
Gradually the community grows. It takes a lot longer, but if you’re persistent enough you will succeed.
But what should you do if the goal isn’t support?
Method Three: Nurture The Experts
If you want people to share their best topic-related expertise, that’s unlikely to happen in a firm-hosted community platform. Experts today want to share expertise on platforms where they can build a following, have the opportunity to attract viral traffic, and build their brand. If you want to encourage smart people to share their expertise, you have to create a structure which helps them achieve their goals.
This means taking an expert-led community strategy. You need to think less about having a central platform and more about connecting an ecosystem of experts together and encouraging them to share expertise on platforms they are keen to use.
When people click the ‘community’ link on your site, they will find a list of experts you recommend they subscribe to and follow. That’s what the community will be for them.
This has several components.
- Identifying and building relationships with people already sharing knowledge.
- Creating a place for customers interested in sharing knowledge to get help to build their audience.
- Helping experts build their followings and their communities.
- Aggregating the best contributions into a central place to share expertise (typically via a newsletter).
The benefit of this approach is you encourage people to build and grow their audiences on the platforms where they prefer to engage.
The incentives stay aligned to what experts need and you won’t need to spend your time pestering people to share expertise.
The challenge is identifying enough experts to make the approach worthwhile and ensuring they’re sharing the kinds of messages which matter most to you. Many of these programs today are often run as part of broader MVP or brand ambassador programs.
This approach works if you already have a large audience. A large audience increases the likelihood of existing experts you can engage with. Better yet, experts will work with you because you can drive more traffic to them.
But what should you do if you don’t have a large audience but still want to share the best expertise?
Method Four: The Audience-First Approach
The audience-first approach is exactly what it says. You build an audience first on a single platform.
You select a content channel and publish or create great content to build your reputation.
This typically means selecting a platform which is designed to help people grow their audience(s).
At the moment, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Substack are pretty good options. You need to be able to stand out to build a following.
And you will almost certainly need to do this as an individual rather than through a brand account (although multi-author blogs still remain an option).
As you grow, you might expand to multiple platforms. And, possibly, at some point launch a more typical hosted community (often a private community) for people in your audience. This is the road well trodden by creators building their communities.
Seth Godin’s recent launch of purple.space community is a recent example. Seth has spent decades nurturing and building his audience so he can launch a community which proves popular with his audience – and generates $500k+ per year. (Disclosure – I interned with Seth way back in 2009).
There are two ways to implement this approach.
- You build the audience yourself. This is where you are the individual creating the content and building a following. You need to have a high level of expertise in the topic to make this work.
- You work with employee advocates. You find the right brand advocates who have the motivation, expertise, and character traits to build such a following for the long term.
Both routes can work well – but neither is easy to do. While this approach works well for creators who have the freedom to say and do anything in response to their evolving understanding of the audience, it doesn’t work so well when internal advocates have to jump through multiple hoops to post things.
However, if your goal isn’t support or growth, but instead improving loyalty (via improving sentiment), then there are two final approaches worth considering.
Method Five: Event-Driven Approach
Event-driven community strategies can serve many goals, but improving customer loyalty is perhaps the most common. That’s because when you host events, you create a feeling which is very difficult to replicate through any online channel. Naturally, people who attend events are already loyal, but events can be shown to increase this sense of loyalty if you know what to measure.
The side-benefit of events is people get a lot of information quickly which can improve their outcomes (and thus loyalty to the product).
The great thing about an event-driven approach is the results are typically a lot quicker.
You begin by hosting events for customers (either conferences or through regional programs) and people turn up. You can often begin seeing results in a couple of months.
Conferences combine extremely well with platforms like Slack and Discord. That’s because these platforms facilitate open discussions before, during, and after the event where people can bond and connect vs. the traditional question-and-answer approach in forums. These platforms are especially powerful now that X/Twitter have stopped being the water cooler for these discussions.
Events will typically grow through word-of-mouth (people talk about the events they’re attending) and via speakers promoting the event to their audiences. In terms of sheer ability to attract an audience – events are perhaps the most powerful approach. As the event takes off and the audience grows, you can decide whether the community needs to be situated on a new experience.
CMX might be the most familiar example of this approach to many of us – but it’s far from the only example. It’s common for organisations to launch an event (or series of events) invite people to join some sort of group and then that group to form into a community.
The real challenge is to make the event prominent enough to be worth attending. There is a significant upfront cost to hosting events.
But what should you do if you don’t have a large audience to invite to an event?
Method Six: Industry Roundtables
If you don’t have a large audience, want quick results, and your goal is to create a sense of loyalty – then small, private, roundtables are a great option.
These can be hosted online or offline (but offline is a far better option). You invite prominent people into the industry to an exclusive roundtable to discuss a topical issue where everyone can share their approach to a challenge and learn from the efforts of others.
The key to making this work is exclusivity. You have to focus on networking your way to the right people and ensuring you are hosting a roundtable specifically for people at their unique level.
Typically you want people at very senior levels to spend an hour (online) or a day (offline) engaging and learning from one another.
One of our earliest projects was getting a relatively small group of key decision-makers at pharmaceutical companies together on behalf of a client.
We attracted 14 people at the director or VP level to attend the event. These folks had a huge influence over spending on products in our client’s sector. Our client later tracked $14m(!) in spending from new connections sourced through this approach. That’s a phenomenal win.
The benefits of this approach are speed and influence. You get to quickly connect with the top people in a particular space which naturally lends itself to opportunities which might arise.
Hosting a roundtable of top experts also puts you in a position of power – i.e. other people will want to attend the event.
Sometimes the roundtables themselves can grow to a point where you can charge people to attend. SocialMedia.org is a great example of this model in action.
You can also grow by expanding to regional groups or topic-related groups as you expand.
The Key Decisions In Each Approach
Make sure you select the right strategy for your type of community.
The difference between having a large audience and a small audience is huge.
You can’t replicate an approach which works from the former to the latter.
This table below might help guide you to the specifics of each approach
Likewise, your approach should vary based on what you want people to do.
We have preferences in which platform(s) we want to use to satisfy each need. If you select the wrong platform for the wrong behaviour, you’re going to make life infinitely harder than it needs to be.
So first work out the type of strategy you need and then you can work on the specifics of how to execute it.
