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Two headlines caught my eye today as they appeared side by side in my newsfeed.

On first glance, they seemed contradictory.

The first was that the UK lost nearly 2,500 shops and stores last year and the second is that discount fashion retailer Primark has just invested £70m in a new store in Birmingham.

This new store covers 161,000 sq ft over five floors and features a Disney-themed cafe, a beauty studio, a gents hairdresser and a Harry Potter themed section.

If the UK is closed thousands of stores, and a recent department store has just fallen into administration why would a brand invest £70m in a new store?

We all seek success with our Invision Communities. For too many of our communities, however, we yearn for success but we don’t plot the correct navigation to get there. We haphazardly pursue our strategies, trying new ideas and hoping one will stick. It’s time to take a step back and assess your goals in context to your growth. It’s important to understand the stages of the community lifecycle, and to strategically match your goals with your growth sequence.

"Increasingly, social media is making it harder and harder for us to talk to each other directly. We are tired of fighting with algorithms, and we do not want to pay to appear in your newsfeed. So we’ve decided it’s time to bid farewell to some of our social channels and open up the conversation between you and us instead."

We catch up with Helen for a progress report on how her new community "The Dogly Mail" is faring.

"We recently broke the 100 member milestone and that all came from word of mouth. We’re not talking huge numbers but I’m very encouraged for the future. My focus is now on building interactions with four main areas of the site."

Every day, LGBTQ young people from all walks of life log into TrevorSpace, the world’s largest moderated safe space for LGBTQ youth online.

TrevorSpace is a service from The Trevor Project, the foremost suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth in the world.

TrevorSpace is growing by over a thousand new members every week.

Here's how they use their Invision Community.

We do love a parlour game at Invision Community HQ and we were playing "6 degrees of separation" recently.

You've probably heard of the "6 degrees of Kevin Bacon". This is where you try and connect any actor with Kevin Bacon in 6 steps or less.

So let's try "6 degrees of Invision Community". This is where we try and connect a person with an Invision Community.