Community Jarvis

You've the solution for the problem faced by a large number of users. The solution is community. But how do you decide if "community" is the best solution? Try this checklist - if you hit 70% or more, community is your solution!

The community space is best defined if it understands your users' motivations, leading to fulfilment of their goals. Here's a framework for you to narrow down on your community's goal.

It is important to understand that not every user facing the problem you are trying to solve, is your potential user. Here's how you can narrow down to a solution 👇

Before you go ahead and start a community, it is important to pause and define your personal inspiration for the community. This will help you bring in more clarity towards what you're building.

For you to understand how well you can solve your potential users' problems, it is important to understand their pain points first. Share this survey form with a couple of users to understand them better. 👇

It's crucial for you as the founder/admin to be aligned with the goals of the community. Here's a 3x3 matrix to help you remember and be on top on nurturing your community members.

Your community should become the inevitable solution for users with the problem you are targeting - that's when the intent of the users towards the community is super strong.

Plan for 6 months ahead - what are the tasks at hand, what tools would you need, what metrics do you need to track and how will you focus on scaling the community.

Before you decide to reachout to your potential users, it's important to reflect upon what defines an ideal community member persona. Here's a detailed workbook to set your thought process on how to go about this. 👇

Understand which platform are the users most active on today - Slack, Twitter, Github, etc - target them where they hangout the most.

Gauge your competition - how good or bad is the existing solution? How can you add more value to solve the problem in a better way?

Do a survey to understand which communication tools do they use at work. This will help you understand which community platform might work best for your target audience - Slack, Discord, etc

This will help you understand their interest fields and allow you to share content and enable connections basis that.

Identifying the pain points helps you understand the purpose or the intent to join your community. The best way to do this would be to reach out to them for a chat.

At different stages, for multiples processes you'll need different tools. Here are some of the tools you can use at various stages of your journey.

Sending a customised welcome message is the first touchpoint for the user within the community. You want to be sure you're doing a good job at being able to guide the user towards next step, while making the user feel at home with the community.

Share an overview of what's happening within the community with your users. You can do this on your community platform or chose to setup a newsletter for the same.

Retention cohorts are a marketeer's favourite tool. Here's a template for you to start measure it for your community.

Identify and create your community advocates across multiple channels. These folks will be responsible to create a buzz about your community and help bring in new users by leveraging their network.

Enabling self-flowing conversations sets your community on a user-led momentum. Create channels focused around your key goals and interests.

Set context for each community. Guide the user about how they can use each channel. This is essential for the user to not feel lost. You can pin the introductions to the respective channels.

You community needs a content home. The internal wiki will solve for that. Include all the community content, resources, guides, mentor details and also a member directory. If it's a learning community, you can use one of the LMS platforms to host your content.

Plan ahead for scheduling content within your community. This gives you an opportunity to drive interactions and engagement over the content.

Give your community an identity - name, purpose of the community, who is it for and why does one need it.

This is step 1 of the onboarding flow - deciding how you want your users to get access to the community.

A detailed onboarding form helps you capture user's goals and interests thoroughly. This helps you customise your approach to help user gain more value from the community.

Having a well thought of onboarding journey, with you being able to deliver value instantly is what is going to make the users stick around for more.

Every new member introduction is a user's first entry point in the community - make sure you acknowledge and respond soon enough on each post.

A buddy system in the community helps new users navigate easily through the community. As step one, get opt-ins from members with certain level of experience who would want to volunteer for the buddy system. Next, match interests and pair new members with their respective buddy.

Well, it is fairly easy to get overwhelmed will all the content you got running for the community - isn't it? But don't let the user get overwhelmed in the first few days - here's a thought process on how you can carefully pick the content you want your user to access for the first few days.

Users are keen to understand how to build trust and credibility in your community. The case studies will help them understand how you could steer them towards their goals.

Keep an eye out on what's happening in your space, outside the community. Take the effort of curating all the new instances and share it with your community to make it readily accessible to them.

Publishing blogs on your website not just helps your community learn from it, but will also help you improve SEO ranking for your community's landing page.

Be honest and upfront about your community stats - help them understand what led to growth/degrowth of key metrics that matter the most. Transparency helps you bag loyalty and trust from your users.

Share new feature rollouts and updates to your community first - get their feedback on how useful the new features are.

Gratitude and appreciation go long way! Make sure you don't miss showcasing top community achievements from the last week, with your members.

Schedule 1 form on community engagement every week - webinars, workshops, audio chats, text AMAs, etc

Maintain a cadence of scheduling events at regular intervals. These will help you drive periodic engagement within the community.

Smart and quirky conversation prompts are interesting and super quick engagement drivers. Here are a couple of templates/suggestions you could use.

Gamification is a great way to identify and appreciate members who are driving engagement for your community. Here's a framework on how you can setup the leaderboard and use it to drive engagement.

Networking is the most undervalued proposition of any community. Helping users form meaningful connections should be on top of your mind as a community builder.

Identify, define and measure multiple user segments basis their level of activity in the community. Create views and segments that matter the most - so that you start taking target actions for multiple segments.

Take targeted actions to progress the users on the leaderboard. Create more power users each month.

Once you have identified multiple user segments - you can activate dormant/at risk users by being on top of which members move to this view every day. Send them an activation DM right away, rather than waiting for more days.

Do surveys on why users leave? What more can you do to make them stay. Create a better onboarding experience and have a view of who is moving to the "at risk" segment.

Create milestones to track user's progress within the community. The milestones can be a cumulative performance index based on multiple actions taken in the community.

On a daily basis, keep tab of key community metrics that matter the most, to help you understand how the community performed the previous day. This will help you plan and take quicker actions if something breaks.

Here are a couple of top metrics for you to constantly keep a tab of. These together will form your community health score card. You can setup this tracking on Airtable or just a plain google sheet.

Community Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that uses customers’ likelihood to recommend your community as a score based on your customer experience. Here's how you can measure it.

Identify who are the top contributors each month consistently. Promote them to become community volunteers to help you run the community.

Referral campaigns are the best way to attract new users to the community. Create a leaderboard of the referral campaign to make it a gamified experience.

Collaborate with folks who are influential in the community space, who understand and talk about the problem you are trying to solve. Partner with other community towards a greater vision.