Find Calm creating your
community strategy with Jenny Weigle
In this episode of the Find Calm Here Podcast, Jenny Weigle shares how she’s creating, executing, and reviewing strategies for online communities for more than 10 years. She’s worked with more than 100 brands on various aspects of their community strategy and implementations, including launch, migration, programming, and planning. Jenny has consulted for Airbnb, Google, HP, Quickbooks, Pinterest, REI, Samsung, Sephora, Splunk, Visa, and many more.
When she’s not geeking out on community strategy, Jenny spends time in Los Angeles with her partner, John, and stepdaughter. In her personal life, she is a proud member of a number of communities: Southern California Gator Club, Spiritual Sisters of Los Angeles (which she founded), Oak Park LA (CrossFit), Sofar Sounds, D23: The Official Disney Fan Club, and others.
Show Notes
2:40: Jenny starts by explaining what interested her in building a community. The beginning of her career focused on the social media community, which was the one-to-many type of interactions, but then switched focus to enterprise brand communities with more one-to-one interactions.
9:19: Jenny explains first impressions are key in retaining and growing your community, recommending an immediate personal welcome message. Set clear expectations for what the experience is going to be like for founding members.
17:15: When opening her workshops, Jenny shares she likes to lead by having everyone think about communities they are a part of and what value they get from it, helping individuals envision the community they want to create.
22:49: Jenny touches on features she would enjoy seeing in the industry; for example, the marriage of audio form platforms with enterprise communities and to start seeing more senior positions with appropriate titles. She mentions platforms she prefers, with the recommendations being dependent on each individual clients’ needs.
Community Strategy Done Right
Set yourself up for success
Community Concept
What’s the why behind your community idea?
Community Curious
Who is this community for and what’s in it for them?
Community Clarity
How will this community transform or support them?
Community Structure
What content, events, and programs
will support them?
Community Strategy
Who, when, why, where, and how
will this community be shared
with my audience?
Community Launch
A phased-launch approach with checkins to monitor and report on progress.
Community Strategist
Since 2020, as a community strategist, Deb’s guided more than 50 entrepreneurs in building, launching, and growing an online community. She’s worked with companies and organizations in non-profit , wellness, healthcare, leadership, coaching, and business development.
Deb’s work spans the globe with business leaders in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Brazil, and Norway.
Deb works with an organization’s leadership in 3 areas: discovery, strategy, and implementation of an online community. She also provides best practices to keep it simple for both the user experience and the back-end operations.
In 2021, Deb founded the Community Consultants Collective, a group of consultants who gathered to share resources and expertise and offered encouragement and support. A Global Advisory Board was established in 2022, and a formalized program begins in 2023.
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