✨ How can you reinvigorate an inactive community?

Hey fabulous human,

Thanks for opening this newsletter. It’s time to learn about a new tactic to build mind blowing communities.

In the last edition we unpacked:

• What are the early signs of a disengaged community?

• What are the common reasons for member inactivity?

In this edition we are now going to focus on:

• What steps do you take to reinvigorate an inactive community?

And so much more. Now grab a chai latte, play this music I composed for you and let’s dive in.

How can this help you build a mind blowing community?

Building a mind blowing community involves actually having members show up, be engaged and gain value from being there. If no one is joining or engaging with your community - what’s the point of even having it?

This action plan provides a structured approach to revitalising inactive communities, offering clear steps to diagnose the underlying issues and implement effective solutions. By conducting interviews, surveys, and research, you'll gain valuable insights into member perspectives and preferences, enabling you to tailor your strategy for maximum impact.

My aim is to give you key steps you can take to make your life easier and enable you to spend more time on actually bettering your community and the business.

Sounds good right? It sure does. Here we go.

What would you do if you noticed high levels of inactivity?

Here are the 8 steps to take to reinvigorate an inactive community:

#1 Interviews: You need to speak to your members. They are the most crucial part of a community so we must start with them. Create a plan to interview at least 10 members 1-1 on 30 minute calls to understand the underlying reasons for the drop in engagement. By speaking directly with your members, you can gain qualitative insights into their experiences, concerns, and suggestions for improvement.

As we have done in the past with our members, conducting interviews can involve meeting members for coffee, phone calls, or creating an interview guide to ensure consistency in questioning and thoroughness in analysis. We recommend interviewing a range of different members e.g. ones that just joined, ones that have been there for the longest and ones that have just left (they are the most honest usually!).

#2 Surveys: After gathering qualitative data through interviews, complementing it with quantitative data from surveys is essential. Surveys allow you to reach a larger subset of your community and quantify trends or issues identified during interviews. Crafting surveys with a concise set of questions, typically five to seven, ensures that you capture the voice of the majority of the community and gather actionable data.

Hot tip: If you want to increase the likelihood of your members actually filling out the survey, offer an incentive or gift upon completion. E.g. gain free access to our Resource Library or access a $50 Amazon Gift Voucher.

Here’s an example of a Member Pulse Check survey we sent to our free meetup community in 2023:

#3 Research: Informed decision-making relies on understanding both internal trends within the community and external best practices. Research involves analysing historical engagement patterns within the community to identify recurring themes or issues. Additionally, exploring what strategies other communities have employed successfully can provide valuable insights and inspiration for addressing engagement challenges.

Plus it’s great to now uncover the perspectives of your team and why they think the community has become inactive. Put your research hat on and get digging!

#4 Announcement: Transparency and inclusivity are key when announcing plans to reinvigorate the community. Sharing the intention to address engagement issues openly with members and your team demonstrates a commitment to collaboration and improvement. It also brings them along the journey as to why you’re getting all these insights and research in the first place!

For example, when we conducted an audit of our free meetup community at The Community Collective, we sent an announcement to all members about what we were doing and why. Involving members in the process from the outset fosters a sense of ownership and investment in the community's future.

Here’s the email we sent in 2023:

#5 Data & Insights: Now it’s time to analyse the data. Pull up your sleeves and review all the insights gained from your member interviews, surveys and research. This helps you to now uncover exactly what’s going on in the community and gives you a sneak peek into member sentiments, preferences, and behaviours.

A thematic analysis helps identify patterns and key takeaways, guiding you to understand the problem deeply and the best way to move forward.

Here’s a snapshot of 1 of the 17 pages from our thematic analysis from auditing our free meetup community in 2023:

#6 Strategy Review: Great now that we’ve got the data from our members, team perspectives and everyone know’s what we’re trying to achieve, it’s time to review our strategy and create an action plan for the best way forward.

If you have an existing community strategy, amazing let’s review that. If not, let’s create one from scratch (or you should totally check out our Community Cohort to do just that).

Reviewing the existing (or creating a new) community strategy is essential to ensure alignment with member needs and the business goals. It helps us to create a plan on how we’re actually going to move the needle on what matters. Plus it will help us make the big decision of:

• Will we reinvigorate this community?

• Or is it time to sunset this offering?

Evaluating whether the current direction of the community matches the desired outcomes requires collaboration with your team and a focus on shared objectives. Beginning with the end in mind, as advocated by Stephen Covey, emphasises the importance of aligning your vision for what the future will look like.

Hot tip: Have your entire team read the Thematic Analysis before booking in a 2 hour workshop to unpack what everyone learned. What are members enjoying? What are they not enjoying? Why is that the case?

Then it’s super important to align on the best way forward. What should be our top 5 focuses over the next 3 months to reinvigorate our community? Who is responsible for what? What actions will drive the biggest impact for our members and the business?

#7 Feedback: Now that you’ve aligned on your plan. It’s time to get feedback on it to ensure you’ve landed on the right direction forward!

Feedback serves as a continuous loop throughout the reinvigoration process, distinct from initial interviews and surveys. Encouraging ongoing feedback from members enables iterative improvements and ensures your strategy is actually responding to the needs of your members and the business.

How do you do this? Share your plan and strategy with a few members to clarify if it truly is the best way forward.

Additionally, seeking feedback on proposed offerings or initiatives directly involves members in shaping the community's future direction.

For example, after conducing the audit on our free meetup community we actually decided to close the entire offering. WOW. I know. It was a huge decision. However before setting this plan into action, we wanted to gain feedback from our members and we also wanted to know which new offerings we would launch to better meet the needs of our members.

You can read about the full process we took here.

#8 Who, not How: Alrighty my friend. You’ve made it to the last step. Now that you’ve spoken to your members and aligned on the key path forward, it’s time to cultive the most supportive mindset possible.

“Who, not How”

Adopting a "who, not how" mindset ensures that you are making this a collective process, not a solo one. Let me explain.

Instead of asking yourself:

• How am I going to make all these changes to the community?

• How am I going to learn how do to this myself?

• How do I ensure we succeed?

You ask yourself:

• Who can help us make all these changes to the community?

• Who has mastered this path before that I could learn from?

• Who can ensure we all succeed together?

This mindset ensures you don’t take the huge burden of solving all the community problems alone. Remember, you can always ask for help and so you should. In order to execute this strategy, it’s key to now involve as many people as possible to help you bring it to life.

Instead of focusing solely on individual capacity, identifying key stakeholders and collaborators within the community enables the delegation of tasks and harnesses collective strengths. Asking for help and collaborating with others streamlines the process and enhances the likelihood of success.

For example, when we closed our free meetup community, we spoke to multiple people who had walked this path before to understand how we could best do it with grace. We asked our Advisors to help us organise a ‘Ceremonial Community Closing’ event to bid farewell to our space together with our members (basically a community funeral lol?). We asked our Ambassadors to help us jump on calls with members to check in on how they were feeling about this new way forward. It was a collective effort. If I had taken all of the responsibility to execute our strategy by myself, it would’ve been 1000 times more difficult and taken us three times as long. Not to mention all the added stress!

You can listen to the full recording of our Ceremonial Community Sunset here if you’re curious:

Ok you made it woohooooo!!!

Here’s a recap of the 8 steps we mentioned:

Now remember. This is a blueprint that has worked in the past for me. So please ensure you adapt an action plan that suits your needs. You have the ability to create your own version of this.

How can you apply this to your own role?

Grab a good old piece of paper and a pen and write down the 8 steps you would take to address the inactivity you’re seeing in your community.

• How would you go about this process?

• Who could help you on this project?

• What timeline are you aiming for?

• What insights would you like to uncover from your members?

• What is the first step you can take to bring this to life?

And keep rolling from there my friend.

Prefer to listen to this advice?

Great. Here’s a keynote I did at CMX Summit in San Francisco in 2023 about how to prevent and respond to communities becoming inactive. Listen to the full recording. Enjoyyyyyyy.

You made it

Alrighty my friend, you made it to the end. I’ll be back in your inbox on 17th to answer your most pressing questions.

Which reminds me, have a question you’d like to ask about community building? Hit reply to let me know. I’d love to help you.

Until then,

Paz Pisarski
Co-Founder of The Community Collective

You can expect this newsletter on the 17th of every month.
Enjoyed this edition? Forward it to a friend and make both of us smile.

Bonus Section

Still reading huh? Well you made it to the bonus section where I share an insight into my life.

Proud moment: We just hired our new Cohort Lead at The Community Collective and I am SO happy. This has been a long time coming and I am so proud of the value they have already driven to our team. See who it is here 👀

Challenging moment: I keep over booking myself and committing to too many things in my calendar 😅 Ugh. I feel drained at the end of a week and ideally would love to have at least 2-3 meeting free days to actually get some work done. I’m going to try re-scheduling a few things to make this better.

Personal moment: I’ve spent the last week at my family’s house in Gippsland Victoria, Australia and it’s been so beautiful to have a week solo exploring the great outdoors, hosting events with my fancy microphone and doing plenty of journalling.

See you next time.