In this episode of the Community Strategy Podcast, you’ll hear experts of the Creator to Community Builder book. Deb reads a chapter about community design and the architecture of an online community.
A well-thought-out community aligns with the group’s host’s vision, mission, and purpose. Leading an online community requires deciding how you want to communicate with your members and understanding how they enjoy connecting with each other.
When working with a client to restructure their community, I start by identifying a purpose for each area of the community. A common problem for many community builders is knowing how many destinations to have available for people to meet, connect, and engage.
The structure you establish will influence other design elements like your community’s culture. It will provide the framework for your host, leader, and/or manager to help your people build habits and cultivate rituals.
Think about how you want to communicate; your personal communication style is an important factor to consider. In addition, your community must be easy to access.
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Explore Community Design and Architecture
Standing near the top of Peña de Bernal in Central Mexico, a friend offered to take my photograph. Several of us from the Location Indie community had hiked up. I couldn’t wait to get back down and enjoy drinking from a real coconut, something one of our hosts, Jason, had described in great detail, and his story had my mouth watering just thinking about it!
I’m sharing this story to emphasize the importance of creating memorable experiences for your members. That’s what matters to them. Most of my clients skip that step. Then they launch quickly without validating their community concept and wonder why their community isn’t gaining new members or retaining existing ones.
Often, it’s at this point that new community builders find me.
Let’s talk about the five elements of community design:
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Architecture – A strategy for the layout of a community.
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Member Content – The written, visual, audio, and video content in a community.
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Experience – Onboarding, communication, notifications, and interactions.
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Culture – The tone, guidelines, and expectations of your community
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Participation – Methods for members to share, connect, and communicate within the community.
A well-thought-out community aligns with the group’s host’s vision, mission, and purpose. Leading an online community requires deciding how you want to communicate with your members and understanding how they enjoy connecting with each other. When working with a client to restructure their community, I start by identifying a purpose for each area of the community. A common problem for many community builders is knowing how many destinations to have available for people to meet, connect, and engage.
The structure you establish will influence other design elements like your community’s culture. It will provide the framework for your host, leader, and/or manager to help your people build habits and cultivate rituals. Think about how you want to communicate; your personal communication style is an important factor to consider. In addition, your community must be easy to access. When envisioning your structure, research communities you’re attracted to as a member.
Here’s an activity I recommend for this stage: Visit an online community you haven’t been a member of for a while. Log in like it’s the first time. Pay attention to everything you experience.
- What’s the navigation like?
- What features do you see?
- How easy is it to find resources? Is there a chat space?
- Who posts what?
- What are the guidelines?
- Can you ask questions?
- Is there a member directory?
- Where do you go for help?
In addition to scoping out the group with fresh eyes, check out fellow community members. Introduce yourself to one member and see if they respond. Ask a question of the host and see how they reply.
Do they get back to you with comments or questions? Take notes on what about the design you love and what you don’t. Notice if there is too much text or too many complex explanations. Ideally, everything should be clear and easy to understand. Think about the value of investing your energy and money there.
These things will help you design the architecture of your own community. Being thoughtful now will create confidence in your decisions once you’re up and running. Another common challenge for new community builders is excessive content. It’s easy to get caught up thinking you must spend hours building content, but this is rarely why your people are there.
Online community members seek a dedicated place to share challenges, thoughts, or ideas. They want to ask questions, respond in support of other members, and feel their opinions are valued. But some individuals don’t want to hide behind fake profiles and want to build genuine relationships or improve their existing ones. It takes courage to be vulnerable on social media when life isn’t going well, so struggling and needing support isn’t something most people would post online.
If you are like me, you tend to retreat into your house and stay there, feeling very disconnected from society. Everyone is busy, and everyone has problems. How do we manage the stresses of life if we have no one to talk to about them? As a community host, leader, or manager, you must facilitate your members’ experience. Don’t expect them to jump in on their own; you need to show them what to do and how to do it. Onboarding is the first experience your members will have with the community, so you want to ensure that they aren’t left with more questions than answers.
Please start with the purpose of your community, and let members know why you’ve invited them to take this journey with you. Guide them on how to experience the community and get the most out of their time here. List the most critical action steps to meet your goals as you prepare. Prioritize those from most important to least important. Once your priorities are clear, you’ll see the best structure for your community based on your needs, lifestyle, goals, and vision. Community culture can be explained as how you invite members to participate, share, connect, and learn together.
It is the path for members to feel seen, valued, and heard. Culture is written into your community guidelines, demonstrated in your member testimonials, and expressed by members when they talk about your community to others. Creating a community culture doesn’t just happen; you must actively nurture it. I’ve already shared the common pitfall, which is overly complex tech, but please allow me to repeat it once more: Don’t let platform selection hold up your entire launch!
Start by gaining clarity. Make a list of questions and reach out to your ideal members for feedback. Ask about the features, functionality, and experience they’d benefit most. Remember to consider the experience you want to have as a host. Once you have envisioned the community architecture, content, experience, and culture, you can jump into what the members will be doing. If you haven’t considered where your ideal members are on their journey, now is a good time to do so. Are they at the beginning of a journey or in transition? What decisions do they need to make? The biggest draw to an online community is that members can receive feedback about their problems, projects, or ideas.
Getting immediate suggestions from peers in a safe space is extremely valuable; it’s worth paying for. If you have a book idea, you probably won’t post that on your Facebook page or in an Instagram story. But if you were part of a support group with new and experienced authors, you may be more inclined to share.
Within that safe space, you would feel encouraged to share your genuine thoughts, knowing you’d gain feedback to inspire and clarify the concept, not tear it down. Contrast this experience with posting on social media, where someone might say, “Nice idea.” An intentional community will foster real conversation about where to take the idea.
Your online community can be where like-minded people get critical feedback and meaningful support. With this format, you’ll have the power to gather the right experts and peers, then cultivate an environment that allows them to thrive.
Creator community monthly memberships, collaborations
A new term has emerged: the creator community. As a visual artist and creator, my content includes photographs, podcast episodes, blog posts, and audio recordings. I can repurpose any of these into a course or collaborate with fellow business owners looking to rebrand to create additional revenue streams. Those revenue streams could include a membership model to support my work.
I’m not alone in wanting to monetize my work somehow. There are 200 million creators, according to the 2022 Creator Report.
I’ve struggled to make it as a creator because of the sheer determination and energy it takes to publish high-quality work without cash consistently. It has taken me years to pivot my business strategy and rework my pricing, offers, and services in hopes my audience will wake up and support my work.
That’s when I learned about the creator community economy and discovered the world of community building, with people who, just like me, wanted to bring together people to create transformative experiences.
The modern-day type of free “exposure” for creatives is social media– the challenge is to gain followers and thereby status, but no one has ever really understood what that means for us. Frankly, it now seems that creators are just the “user generators” that companies prey on for their content. The truth is that social media algorithms use your content to push advertisements to your audience or work against you.
The world undervalues many creators trying to make a living at what they do best. Yes, some creators have reached the top, hit six figures, and found success. In the Creator Report, 48 percent of creators who make $100,000 a year spend more than 10 hours a week on content creation.
So, a new idea emerged: YouTubers, podcasters, and creatives in many other fields across the globe decided to go directly to their audience and stop paying to be seen. Some even started connecting with their subscribers and building relationships with them.
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A YouTube Influencer needs to have an audience of 10K followers to launch a membership for a low monthly pricing structure.
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A niche content creator can be described as an industry expert with a specific skill or talent that is unique and needed within that industry.
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A community creator is looking for an opportunity to bring clients, maybe friends, or followers, into an online community membership for the purpose of earning recurring revenue.
These are just a few examples of the ways creators are making money online, and the reason that it is so hard to figure out what is right for you is because there are so many options, and with them, a lot of distractions.
Any business owner knows, the key to entrepreneurship is diversifying their income and getting their audience to support them directly with member-supported community apps like Patreon, Podfan, and Buy me a cup of coffee, among others.
As you can see, there is so much to consider when launching an online community, and knowing how to raise money or get investors is key to a successful community and business. Next, a client example of a mother-daughter podcasting team that grew an online business and community using mindful membership strategies.
Mindful memberships and monetization strategies
As a podcaster, I can relate to the desire to be compensated for the time and effort that goes into creating a podcast. While it is much easier than a decade ago, the economy still doesn’t recognize creative content like interviews or educational audio stories, courses, or case studies in the mainstream consumer market.
Most podcasters want to monetize their podcast when they realize it isn’t just sitting down and talking into a mic.
Podcasting involves editing the raw content— audio, video, or both— and uploading that content as files. In addition to editing, a podcast producer creates captions, titles, tags, and social media graphics to promote episodes.
If you have an interview-style podcast, you also need a podcast producer to manage your booking schedule and maintain a flow of guests for your podcast. If you have the capital to do so, you can hire companies that offer these support services. If not, this is the work you’ll be doing as a podcaster.
Once podcasters find out how much work is involved, many aren’t so excited to continue recording without some financial resources like a sponsor, investors, or supporters.
Emma and Mary, hosts of the Good Dirt Podcast, had supporters, but they wanted more.
The mother-daughter duo opened the ALMANAC, a private paid community for those who want to practice slow living and share their skills.
When I worked with Emma and Mary, they asked me to help them restructure the community to improve the member experience. We received actionable feedback from conversations with their members that we implemented into their community strategy.
The new membership model we developed looked like this:
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A core community staple will be the slow living challenge in January.
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Podcast supporters will receive extra content.
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Members can volunteer to lead a skill share session to benefit the community.
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Emma will host a 3-month Artist Way study group (additional cost to members).
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Mary will host a 3-month Regenerative Gardening program (at additional cost to members).
Being mindful of your membership means you must consider how you will fund each phase of your community launch strategy.
I learned the hard way, after spending too much time and energy trying to sell low-priced memberships before I had an audience, that building an online membership can take anywhere from one to three years. This average is based on an entrepreneur or business owner hosting a community as an additional revenue stream rather than their main offer or income.
This varies from one community to another, so it depends on several factors. But overall, the more specific you are, the more niche and exclusive you will see financial success faster.
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The first phase is about building the foundation of who you are (your brand) and what you do (your services or products), and how people will get to know you (how you will market these). People need to know you and what it is you do so that you can be known as the go-to.
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The second phase is focused on building meaningful relationships with your ideal members and getting to know them while they, in turn, get to know you. That is when you discover what problems they have, how they’ve tried to solve them in the past, and if they’ve ever before joined an online community to help navigate this challenge. This is critical to customize your community concept for your ideal members. If you discover that the problem your ideal member faces is something they don’t want to workshop with others, that is a sign that a community is not a good fit for this problem.
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The third phase begins when you’ve started building a super fan base, and people are asking to work or collaborate with you somehow. They want to know what you know or reach some goal you’ve achieved, but you have to tell them that. So, you now need to convert these followers into true community members who want to be a part of something bigger than themselves, join a movement, find a tribe, feel a sense of belonging, and so much more.
If you have any questions or want to share a comment with Deb, email at Deb@FindCalmHere.com
Email: Deb@FindCalmHere.com
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