Chapter 2: Develop Your Community Strategy

So many community builders either plan to do everything themselves or hire a community manager. Instead, I recommend getting clear about your strategy first. Yes, having someone to help you moderate and handle mentorship is excellent. But if you don’t know how the community will support your business model, or if you don’t have a business yet, it may be too soon to know exactly what that support should look like or whether you need any. Sometimes, when several people are involved, distractions increase and break the focus required to strategize. 

A client I worked with had challenges in this area. While developing her strategy, she attempted to onboard her team, confusing everyone. As the host, you set the vision for your online community’s future. You’ll guide and support the members until you’re ready to bring on the proper support for your community.  

You may hire professionals who offer services to support you as the host or engage team members to manage aspects of the design, community building, content writing, copywriting, marketing materials, education, or funding. We will talk about this more in the upcoming sections. I hope you can see how much goes into creating a community with purpose, but it’s worth the work if you are dedicated to the process. 

When starting the search to fill your community roles, you may find definitions different from those I offer here. Be aware there are many different types of communities and infinite possibilities for a community’s structure and strategy. The more complex a community strategy is, the more time it will take to educate your team and audience. 

Strategy 1: Run it by yourself  

A community host sets an online community’s vision, mission, and purpose. This person makes decisions about the community structure and develops the community strategy (and launch plan) through the phases of the CALM Method ™. A single host structure comes with limitations to time and resources. It depends entirely on keeping yourself accountable throughout the community-building journey. Without a community program facilitator, you will guide members during virtual meetups and onboarding new people into the community. 

You are also the person who will market and promote your community on social media and through emails or live streaming. If you intend to build a community on your own, consider how to minimize these tasks or eliminate what is not imperative to your program’s success. An effective way to do this is to start with a timed program, say 90 days.  This gives participants a start and end date to commit to, which helps you set expectations. Another benefit of a timed program is that you can create urgency. A start date requires participants to decide—whether the program fits their schedule. They also know when it ends, so they aren’t locked into any specific “what’s next” concept. You can develop your program, test it, and evaluate the results. What worked, and what didn’t? From there, you can decide if you want to do it again.

Another critical factor is your gathering place. Don’t underestimate the importance of your chosen platform, as it affects your participants’ experience and your own. The technology available to build a community is where many of my clients get stuck. 
Knowing how you’ll use the platform is critical. For example, will your members connect between sessions? If unsure, I suggest interviewing potential members about how they want to gather.  

Here is an example of a few community roles for a paid online community, network, or program: 

• A Community Host – to guide the vision, mission, and purpose. 
• A Community Facilitator- to support the programming, events, or workshops. 
• A Community Manager – to onboard and support members and encourage participation within the community. 
• A Strategy Consultant – to create processes and tools to increase conversions from your marketing and advertising efforts to your programs. 
• Marketing Manager- to help promote, advertise, and scale your business. 

Strategy 2: Run it with help from one team member

When developing your strategy with a partner, it’s up to you whether one or both of you will function as the community host, as I’ve defined above, the person setting the community structure and strategy. When working with one or more collaborators, it is best first to identify how each person can best contribute. When launching a community as a startup with two or three people, recognizing each person’s strengths is to identify their role within the community. As I’ve outlined above, there are a few core roles that a community should have when launching a paid program. 

In the future, I’ll refer to the host as the person who aligns the community strategy with the business goals. Assuming you’re the business owner, this is likely to be you. The community facilitator is responsible for the community content, programming, and events. There are various ways for a community facilitator to engage, so think about what makes sense for your people and your personalities. Make sure to clearly define who does what and how active you will be in taking the “lead role.” 

For example, you may decide the facilitator should be the “go-between” for the host and the members instead of a community manager (if you don’t have one). Community facilitators could be course instructors, co-hosts, coaches, or advocates. For an active, forward-facing role like this, the facilitator should possess self-awareness, eagerness to learn and adapt, empathy, integrity, dedication, service, the ability to inspire others, motivation, and strong communication skills. 

A host may also bring in a community manager to help facilitate and manage the daily operations. Their role may be less visible in this case, but it is still vitally important to the community’s health. Community Strategy, Marketing, and Sales support can be outsourced by hiring professional consultants or agencies to help create content, develop a launch plan, and implement a sales strategy. One of the tasks you might ask of your community facilitator or manager includes writing a community playbook or operations manual so that new team members can be trained easily. Additionally, community facilitators or managers may be assigned to write onboarding materials like welcome videos, guidelines, or how-to manuals. 

Strategy 3: Run it with volunteers from your community  

When hiring a community manager, I recommend starting within your community. Not only do these people already know the ropes, but they also tend to bring an infectious enthusiasm. The host may or may not be able to pay for this part-time role, but it’s not unusual for online community managers to volunteer for reasons other than money. 

Depending on your community’s size, scale, and purpose, the manager may also be responsible for content planning, event facilitation, leadership development, marketing and promotion, member onboarding, or dealing with the community’s ongoing challenges. 

Designating and communicating clear responsibilities for your host, leader, and manager is key to crafting a successful strategy. Not only should you identify who will take ownership of each step, but you also establish a timeline for the community launch or relaunch with benchmarks, goals, and outcomes. 

Send an email to [email protected] for questions or comments.