Matt

Every time I checked in with a newly launched running community, it seemed like there were more and more new people posting. As a result, I found it harder to find my friends' latest run write-ups and even harder to reply directly to them. Speaking with other early adopters, they felt the same way, and we all eventually drifted out of the community's orbit. It's natural to want your community to grow; indeed, a lot of community management strategies are based on increasing registrations and scaling upwards. However, your early adopters may feel very different about growth as they watch their close friendship circles dissolve as more members join and begin posting. A small and tightly connected community is very different from a large sprawling community, and often our business goals as community managers can be at odds with our member's goals. Let's take a look at the problem and then the solution. A new community is small and personal. Your early adopters will make friends fast by sharing their experiences and stories. They start to learn about each other and actively look forward to new posts and content. It's easy to keep track of the conversations and people in those early days when memberships are still in their infancy. Before themes and topics drive your community, the primary reason your members return is to strengthen burgeoning bonds. As your thriving community grows, more names appear, generating more posts and content. It can become harder to keep track of those personal conversations and friends. For those early adopters, it becomes overwhelming, and the feel of the community changes. The key to growth is to do it with consideration and understanding by allowing your members to retain smaller friendship circles within the larger community. Think of these small circles as a secure basecamp your members will use to explore more of the community together. How you structure your community can heavily influence member behaviour, so let's ensure you are set up for success. Forum structure Deciding how many forums to have largely depends on the size of your community. Generally, fewer is better; however, adding more when activity increases is recommended. Using the example of a running community, when you have few members, a single topic can be used to keep track of workouts; however, as membership increases, a dedicated forum where members can post and maintain their own workout log topic makes it easier for others to find specific member's logs rather than trawling through a long busy topic. If you're in doubt, asking your community is always a great way to draw out real honest feedback and guidance on how to improve. Nerd Fitness forums allow each member to maintain their own training log in their busy forum Clubs Creating a sub-community is a big decision. On the one hand, you syphon off discussion to areas outside the main community, but this can be an advantage if you want members to retain their smaller friendship circles. On the other hand, you may find an appetite for more niched discussion within your topic. For example, while your site may be based around road running, you may have a small group specifically interested in mountain running. Using a club allows them to follow that passion without altering the core purpose of your community. Even though our own community is here to serve our clients, we have a health club where members can discuss health and fitness away from the community's primary aim Follow Using the robust follow and notification tools is an efficient way to let members know when a favoured member posts something new or a loved topic gets a reply. Make sure your members know how to set up notifications and the different ways to receive them, such as via mobile, email, or the community's bell. Your members need not miss a friends update again. We have a very comprehensive follow system Discover Activity streams allow members to personalise their first point of discovery. In addition, the flexibility of the streams will enable members to choose which member's content to see and which forum's content to include in a single news feed style stream. Giving your members the ability to customise which content they see when they first visit the community allows them to check in with their favourite areas before exploring the rest of the community. NerdFitness use streams to show content for each 'guild' Growing a community from a handful of people to tens of thousands takes a lot of planning. Unfortunately, it's easy to focus on just numbers and forget about the people behind them. However, aligning your business goals with your members' goals is critical when growing beyond your early adopters. Setting up your community for success using our built-in tools will help your members feel comfortable as you grow.

🟢 Scaling your community requires overcoming many barriers and learning new ways of working with your community. Rosie explores this in her blog: How we are at the small scale is who we are at the large scale. "In community, we often say to do things that don't scale. To start small. To get the foundations right. To trust that how we are and what we do is what the community becomes, on a larger scale. Our behaviour, our intentions, our alignment, and our goals all influence what the community can become." 🧠 What we think: There is no right or wrong way to scale your community from its humble beginnings and it can be a lot of hard work but that doesn't mean we should change our core values and how we approach helping others. 🟢 Should you respond to questions before your members? Is a question explored by Richard at Feverbee. "If you (the community manager) respond to a question in a community, other members are less likely to respond. This makes it harder for top members to earn points and feel a sense of influence. But if you don’t respond to a question in a community, it can linger and look bad. It also means the person asking a question is waiting for a response and becoming increasingly frustrated." 🧠 What we think: There are certain areas where you need your team to lead. Right here on this forum we want to provide the best service for our customers so our support team are active and quick to reply to all questions. There are other community-led sections that definitely benefit from allowing time for other members to reply to share their knowledge. It's a good feeling helping others. 🟢 CMX explores how to move your community online. Much of this is great advice for anyone considering moving platform (to Invision Community, right?). "Christiana recommends viewing community migration as a process that requires patiences, “this is not a race meant to be run fast. We are changing the mindset of the people in our ecosystem”. " 🧠 What we think: Patience is definitely key when moving platforms. The sooner you start engaging with your own community and explaining the reasons for the move and the benefits it'll bring, the easier it will be. 🟢 Michelle can't find the bathroom when at a party which inspires a blog on 5 secrets to community onboarding. "Walking into a party without your host can feel confusing, alienating, and frustrating. And for your customers, joining a new community without onboarding is just as bad." 🧠 What we think: Onboarding is critical to your community's success. New members can often feel lost and unsure where to start. It can be intimidating in real life to enter a room full of people that know each other, and this is true in the online space too. 🎧 Podcast: What makes a community a home? Patrick explores this by interviewing members of his own community, which opened 20 years ago and is still going strong. 🧠 What we think: We love hearing about long established communities that are still thriving and hearing how those early online relationships shaped people's lives.