Welcome to the Community Coach newsletter, a value packed read
for community builders who are wishing they were Reddit superusers who got allocated stock pre-IPO.

In this jam packed newsletter…

• 📚 Community 101: How to measure success for your community
  

• 🤖 A tool that analyzes your Discord community better than Discord and helps you engage smarter with members
  

• 🔥 This restaurant app is building their own paid community differently and SOLD OUT with waitlist only now
  

• 📩 Build our own internal knowledge assistant using AI (for free)
  

• 👋 Answering your questions: ”How do we retain members post launch?”

Community 101: How to measure success

Measuring the success of a community is a challenging task.

Don’t waste time on metrics that don’t matter. My first role as a community manager in a large company had me wasting time reporting on some of these default metrics (but to be fair at the time community management was still “early”), but now I know better.

Here’s some “usually default” and “very average” ways to measure the success of a community:

• % increase in the number of people who have joined the community

• % increase in number of posts/comments/likes per month

• % increase in event attendees over time

All of the above are what I consider “superficial metrics”.

Now let’s look at some better ways to measure success:

I focus on these two questions:

1. What is the Return on Investment (ROI) from building this community?
   

2. What are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that we could use to indicate this community is on track to helping us achieve ROI?

ROI usually refers to the “long term” and how a community can help businesses achieve their goals - usually around acquiring new customers and/or retaining existing customers.

KPI’s help you know you’re on the right track and can be measured in the shorter term.

An example: KPI’s for a community built to offer customer support for a product/service could include:
- Customer support ticket deflections (how the community is supporting or reducing the need for customer support)
- Customer effort scores
- Time to resolution

If you need further insights on the above, I’ve written a lot more about it.

Discord insights tool

If you’re looking to take your Discord community beyond the default, you should definitely check out the tool by Together Crew (powered by RnDAO, currently in beta).

Here’s how it helps:

Reduce unnecessary noise in your community

Together Crew helps you send targeted announcements to the relevant segments in the community (i.e. only those who need to see them will be targeted). You can choose how they see the announcement - either in public channels or privately via DMs.

You can also target them by scheduling announcements out at specific times when members are most active.

More personalised announcements = more read receipts = more engagement.

The insights from this app are more useful than the standard insights from Discord

Discord server settings will give you the number of active members.

Together Crew helps you identify the breakdown of your active members:

• Who’s the most active

• Who is newly active

• Who is “vital” - which means they are active and very connected

• Who has recently become disengaged (and therefore requires more outreach to re-engage)

It further provides an additional breakdown of active members who are new to the community (this is a great way to measure if your onboarding strategy is working).

You can also identify when the community is most active to the hour plus schedule your posts out when it’s the best time to reach your members live.

It’s relatively straightforward to get started with it too. The tool currently only seems to work with Discord (although I did see some messaging around potentially Discourse in future, and you can reach out to the team directly if you have custom requirements).

Inspiring community builder: Blackbird.xyz

I always get excited when I see communities that go against the grain. Blackbird.xyz is building their restaurant community differently than many other restaurant clubs - linking their community members by passion rather than by location.

Blackbird is a restaurant rewards app (using web3 tech - NFTs) and is currently available in New York, as well as select restaurants in LA, Chicago, and Charleston, SC.

They launched a community members club called The Breakfast Club and their community growth has been impressive with a high level of interest. They have already sold out of their paid memberships for the Breakfast Club and now it’s waitlist only.

Let’s dive deeper on how they did it.

Understanding your community member is important before developing community benefits. 

Blackbird clearly understands them because they launched an offer for future members that was too good to refuse:

• Free coffee/tea for a year (daily, until 11 a.m.). Go forth and caffeinate, talk shop, close deals, brainstorm big ideas, change the world

• Use your pass at some of our favorite restaurants in NYC: Partnered up with 6 restaurants around NYC - Gertie (Williamsburg), The Bakery at Greywind (Hudson Yards), Unregular Bakery (Union Square), Canal Street Market (SoHo), Spring Cafe Aspen (Greenwich Village), Fairfax - beginning 4/2 (West Village), with more restaurants added over time

• 5,000 $FLY reward on your next check-in

• A bag of Tom’s Perfect 10 Granola

• Exclusive Blackbird Breakfast Club merch

• Access to private Blackbird Breakfast Club events

• Please note: Offering includes coffee, tea and espresso based drinks but it’s up to the restaurant's discretion what items are part of this program. No refills.

They collaborated with their partner cafes to provide their community members with amazing additional benefits and connect their user base with EACH OTHER.

How they launched: They launched the club by announcing it on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, their blog plus they have a newsletter called The Supersonic about dining, tech and the future of restaurants (note how it’s not about their app specifically but the broader interest of their users).

Their newsletter has over 8000 subscribers.

The founders asked one of their friends who is a regular columnist at a hospitality publication to write a REALLY interesting article about “How to breakfast properly”. It includes how people in New York have built their own breakfast clubs organically in the past and is a fascinating read.

“In my early days in New York, my friend Noah Brier and I made a regular habit of inviting people we found interesting and/or inspiring to breakfast at Balthazar.”

“First, there needs to be a warm welcome for repeat visitors, and guests should be promptly seated, no “wait at the bar for a complete party” nonsense.”

“Seating is important. Again, here Balthazar shines: there are nooks and crannies to the right where you can toil in anonymity and read the paper like Nick Denton used to do. Or there are areas that connote a certain pecking order or social network like the banquettes on the left side of the room. But the balance is vitally important.”

Key learnings you can apply to your own community (you don’t need to spend $$$ to achieve these):

• Know as much about your future community members as possible: what interests them, what are they looking for (in the case of Blackbird: their user base are people who love dining out)

• Find a niche within your community and go all in on it (Blackbird focused on the “breakfast” niche to start but they can scale out later to include “pizza club” or “supper clubs” in future

• Collaborate with key partners to help you create benefits that are too good for your community members to refuse (Blackbird partnered with 6 amazing NYC cafes - who could also help promote them as it’s a win/win

• Consider your content strategy: Blackbird had a friend who was a regular columnist in the hospitality industry write a blog article for them - go beyond just founder stories to bring interesting content to your community

• Consider launching a newsletter that discusses broader topic beyond your business that delivers interesting insights (just like Blackbird did with their Supersonic newsletter) - they now have over 8000 people that have awareness their app exists

• Consider limiting the availability of your community so that you can ensure you can maximise the benefits delivered to members at the start. Over time you will create FOMO and can scale out more niche clubs in future (that also “sell out!”.

Build our own internal knowledge assistant for your community using this AI tool

There’s an AI tool called Cassidy that helps you customise your own AI assistants for many different tasks - and it includes some that community builders could find save them a lot of time.

Here’s a couple of use cases that you may found helpful:

Setup an AI assistant in a Slack community: Answer questions instantly using information from the knowledge base you have uploaded, directly in Slack. If you’re always answering the same questions over and over again in your Slack community - this could really help save you time.

Reply to community members questions directly in your email with the help of your AI assistant: Cassidy has a Google chrome extension which you can use in combination with an AI customer service assistant to come up with a responses right away, without ever having to leave your tab. The below image shows an example focused on customer support - but you can definitely use this for community members too.

The best part is you can play around and get started for free, so if you’re curious on how AI could potentially help you then this may be a great tool to try out.

More details can be found via their website:

Answering your questions

“How do we retain members post launch?”

Great question and a really important one to figure out. Here’s some advice I can share:

• Get to know your members better: Depending on how large your community is and if you haven’t already done so, set up a quick one-to-one call or send them a quick survey to complete, asking them key questions that will help you understand why they have joined the community, what could help them from day one and what they can offer to the community

• Play matchmaker: Connect them with others in the community that are in similar situations to them or that they would be grateful to be introduced to

• Over deliver value to them: whatever their expectations are from joining this community, your aim should be to deliver WAY BEYOND that. Surprise them when they least expect it, keep an eye on what members “wish for” and do your best to deliver that even if it is a great challenge. Even if you fail - communicate how you tried to deliver, couldn’t quite get there - the more entertaining the story the better - (but make sure you have a good backup plan of delivering something that still delights members so they’re not overly disappointed with getting nothing).

• Create community “lore”: you want to deliver an experience to your members that feels unique and distinct to them - something that can’t be replicated in any other communities they belong to. Pay close attention to any inside jokes, anything unique to your community (it could even be failures/negative things that can be turned into a positive) and go all in on the lore.

• Pay attention to feedback, acknowledge it publicly and create change based on the feedback: community members that are heard are more likely to remain engaged, so pay attention when they offer feedback, appreciate them offering it and make sure it’s worth their time in doing so. Even if if you can’t actually translate their feedback into action, it’s important you tell them why that is the case (and treat it VERY seriously - what can you offer instead?).

The more creative you are with the above and the more you over deliver to your members, the higher your member retention will be. I hope that’s helped get you started.

Got a question for me? Reply to this email and ask away.

Until next time,

Carmen
Community Coach

P.S - Once I reach 100 subscribers (not there yet but we are on the way!)… I’ll be selecting 5 community builders at random to offer a free mentoring session with me. We will go through your community together and discuss any current challenges, what improvements can be made and advice I can offer.

Connect with me on Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn.