What's your best advice to maintain an active community?

Question

Hey PH,

We just started a community for CTO & Engineering managers with my company (https://axolo.co), as we're helping tech leaders to manage the code review in their company, we though of launching our own community.

The goal is to create a community where everyone can benefit from each other.

My first question would be what are the best practices to keep the community active? Meetups? Invite guests for workshops? Any other ideas?

Thanks

Fabian Maume · Accepted Answer

This article is quite interesting: https://corinneriley.medium.com/community-led-growth-the-product-led-growth-expansion-pack-b474ab9a7940
"Community Led Growth" is quite new concept. But if you google the term you might find interesting resources.

I think meetups have a great potential post covid. Lot of people got used to follow remote-meetup from abroad.

Rachel Hayes · Answer

The best pillar of an organizational structure to keep a community active is the amount of events.

That said, meet-ups are both resource intensive and time consuming, and can be as stressful a people have children or full-time jobs.

In my opinion, I would say that holding monthly virtual office hours on a rotating schedule with different attendees who volunteer will stimulate discussion while also doubling as marketing for their services.

Inviting guest speakers to share their expertise on topics relevant to your interests every few months is another great way to get people interested in your group's mission.

Finally, 
(continue to find someone who shares your interest and collab.) * 10x

Arthur Coudouy · Answer

@rachelhayes thanks! We're already organizing such meetups but as you say, this is very time consuming. We're still trying to find the best ratio of meetups each month with specific topics

Arthur Coudouy · Answer

@fabian_maume thanks! I'll take a look, I did know this article: https://grayscale.vc/move-over-content-its-time-for-community-led-growth-ec1dc890be49

Gleb Braverman · Answer

Community should constantly give value to its members - one great thing is community wisdom or smth similar. Try asking open questions, then gather answers from member and share them with the community + don't forget to mention who's given the answer (adds credebility to members!)

Mohammed Nadeem Ullah · Answer

Interesting

Olu · Answer

It starts from understanding the need/mission for the community.

A community that's been created to find potential Unicorns will need to have investors looking to find great founders and founders looking to build unicorns.

Then your task as a community builder is to find enthusiasts to host events about relevant topics that'll bring both sides of the market together.

You only need 5 key topics built around key pain points to keep the engagement up. The rest is a marketing exercise with the following variables; (invite different founders, investors and/or different speakers)

Hate to say it but Clubhouse actually do a pretty good job of this, especially around Startup Investments etc..

good luck...

Julia Doronina · Answer

Try to communicate with your community, ask their opinion and implement new features that they want. The best way in our case was to maintain our comminity via our Instagram account with activities in our stories, questions ans etc. Sometimes it's good to attract them with a challange and after repost their content on your page, it will show that their opinion is important for you and they are the part of your product (team).

Fabian Maume · Answer

@arthurcoudouy SaaStock had a good presentation about the topic, but I'm not able to find back the recording: https://local.saastock.com/events/details/saastock-singapore-presents-saastock-local-sg-community-led-growth-in-dev-tools/

Answer

Continuative posting. Great community moderators. Gamification.

Sarah Jordi · Answer

Maybe that's shameless self-promotion, but some companies and projects use Angle Audio for audio conversations within their community. Audio is a bit easier for many (than video) as it allows the community to casually connect over voice from wherever they are and we also allow people to listen in to conversations without having to create an account. And we're on iPhone, Android and web.

We started out as a b2c social audio platform, but are now seeing more and more companies using our app to engage with their communities.

Arthur Coudouy · Answer

@gleb_braverman that's a great advice! Will definitely try this out

N Chandrasekhar Ramanujan · Answer

There is no easy answer. Put in the work. Show up. Consistently create value for people who are in your community. Lenny's Newsletter is a good example

Yamparala Rahul · Answer

Give them personal Rewards, like. Special Stickers for their chats, etc Designed by the core team.

What's your best advice to maintain an active community?

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