This is the second post in a series of posts on community. Check out the first post here.
Community building takes time and careful planning. Launch is your time to shine or fail, so you have to do it carefully and methodically. You’ve done the strategic work to define the purpose, where the community will live, key archetypes, rules, and started to engage plants. Before you breathe life into the community, there is a bit more preparation you have to do.
First, you must build critical mass.
You identified and signed on your plants to join your community. You may remember from part one that these are people who are highly engaged and represent the key archetypes. You now need to get a critical mass of people like them. The first way to do this is simple, ask your plants. Who do they know in their lives who would gain benefit from being a part of your community? The second way to find a critical mass is to go to them. Where do they live on the internet today? Are they having conversations on social media? Are they hiding out in their jobs, wistfully wishing for someone like them to talk to? Are they at industry conferences or specific events? Find these archetypes in the wild and pitch your community to them. Gather a list and update them along the way as you start to build critical mass.
But how much is a critical mass?
This is a consulting answer — it depends. I’ve launched communities with 15 member companies and I’ve launched communities with hundreds of people. You need to think about the value you provide to members and how you are going to deliver it. For example, if you wanted to build a community for entrepreneurs (key archetype) to share (value) best practices through a (delivery) question and answer forum, you would need hundreds of participants. The delivery method is such that people won’t be checking it all the time, so you need more people to be able to participate in the discussion. If you had a community dedicated to data analytics for the oil and gas industry that held monthly live discussions to share learnings from specific initiatives, you could launch with a group of ten experts. The content focus is narrow, the delivery is more infrequent, and you will still find a range of experiences amongst experts from different organizations. If you can confidently say that enough of your waitlist will participate when you launch, you have a critical mass.
Second, prepare topics for initial discussions.
But wait, Elisa, that means that it’s not an organic conversation. Yes, I know preparing topics for initial discussions means that it isn’t *truly* community driven, but you have to start somewhere. A church may only have a few members, but they have a guide of what they cover and what they don’t. You’ve created the rules, boundaries, and limitations for your community. Use those along with community discovery interviews, think of these as customer discovery interviews for your community, to create a list of key topics that people in the community want to discuss. This could be something that a plant is an expert in that they can share with the community. It could be a topic that a lot of folks in the community struggle with that another archetype in the community can share best practices. Make a list of those topics, stack rank, and start assigning dates and people to be involved in these discussions. Schedule these discussions with your plants and others who may be interested in your community so that you can ensure participation. By preparing topics and ensuring a lively discussion, you will show quick value to members.
Finally, you have to build the hype.
FOMO is real and you want people who are inside and outside of your community to feel that if they don’t participate at launch, that they are missing out. As you are building the waitlist, you are conducting community discovery interviews with members. Use the information they provide on where they see community value to build your messaging and communications plan. Get quotes from members and sprinkle them throughout your communications as social proof of what you are building. Your plants are central to building hype. Work with them to promote some of the key discussions you may be having and what value they are excited to get from other members. Finally, over communicate before launch to both people on your initial launch list and the broader community you want to reach.
With all this in mind, you’ll be as prepared as you can be for the launch of your community. In my next installment of this community building series, I’ll talk about the launch and how to obtain and maintain engagement from your community along with key metrics.
If there is anything that I missed, feel free to find me on twitter at @MissElisaS.
