✨ How can your community run without you?

Welcome back to edition #4 of Pazazz, a monthly newsletter to help you build mind blowing communities, written by yours truly, Paz Pisarski.

Now this newsletter was meant to go out on the 17th of every month, but there was a delay this week as I was launching our new Community Cohort #3 into the world. So you got me! Or maybe you didn’t notice at all? 😅 Regardless, life happens and we’re here now which is all that matters.

Plus if you need help building a mind blowing community, definitely check out our Community Cohort #3.

If you’re new here, welcome. You can catch the 3 recent editions of this newsletter here:

1. Should every business build a community?

2. How can community builders leverage ChatGPT to become more efficient?

3. How can you attract new people to join your program?

So what’s the focus today?

For this edition, we’ll be unpacking the question: How can your community run without you?

Now. You might be thinking, “But wait Paz. Why would we want to remove ourselves from the community?”. And that’s totally fair.

But hear me out. We’re not trying to remove you from building the community. We’re trying to make your processes more efficient by automating, delegating and championing more people to be involved in running this community alongside you.

Plus, wouldn’t it be a dream to be in a position where things can run smoothly without having to be responsible for every single thing that goes on? It can be hard to imagine that this is actually possible.

Well you’re in luck. I’ve built a tried and tested process to help you achieve just that.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Especially now that I’m on to managing my 5th community and 2nd business (here’s my 1st business 👀 ). Tasks get repetitive and deep down I know that there’s surely a more efficient way to be doing things.

So recently when my friend asked me to play guitar at her wedding in Spain I had to say yes. And of course since I’m flying so far from Australia (a 26 hour journey to be exact), of course I had to stay for a long time. I found myself at my laptop booking a return flight to Europe and committing to taking a 4 week break in June 2023.

But as I booked those flights, it also dawned on me that I had a business and community to run. How would it operate without me? Who would be here to look after everything? How was I actually going to step away?

Well I set up a process to answer those exact questions and am now going to share it with you. We’ll also unpack:

• How can you apply this to your own role?

• What goes on behind the scenes of Paz’s life?

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

How can your community run without you?

Here’s the process I went through to set up my business and community at The Community Collective to run without me for 4 weeks whilst I travelled to Paris, Morocco and Spain for a friend’s wedding.

Whilst this is a process I went through before I took time off, you can still go through this process at any point to make your processes more efficient.

Step 1: Vision - how do I want things to look in the future?

Just as Stephen Covey said, start with the end in mind. Map out exactly what you’d like the community to look like in the future. Pick an exact timeline that this future state would be achieved by too.

It’s important to understand exactly how much input you’d like to be having in the community. Do you want to be spending 20 hours managing the community each week or perhaps just 5? Write it all down.

Here are the questions to ask yourself:

• How do you want the community to look?

• What date do you want the community to look like this by?

• How many hours per week do you want to be spending on the community?

• What’s the ideal balance between manual and automated tasks?

• Who else is helping to run the community?

For me, I wanted the community to be running whilst I was away without me completely. I wanted it to all be set up ready to go before 7 June 2023 and I wanted to take the 4 weeks off and not work any hours in the community. I was happy to check emails for ~2 hours per week for anything urgent, but that was about it. I wanted many of the tasks to be automated (e.g. Slack messages, monthly newsletter, member EDM) and any manual tasks to be taken on by other people. I knew I needed to ask for help from my team, Ambassadors and members of the community to get to this state.

At the end of this step you should have a clear idea of how you want the community to look like in the future and by when.

Step 2: Present - where are you now?

You’ve mapped out the future. So now it’s time to map out where you are now. This step is all about understanding the current processes and support you have now in order to clearly see the work that needs to be done to get you to the future state.

Here are the questions to ask yourself:

• What does the community currently look like?

• How many hours per week are you spending on the community?

• What’s the current balance between manual and automated tasks?

• Who is helping to run the community? Is it just you? Do members have roles?

• What platforms and tech tools are you currently using? What plan are they on?

• What is the current events/workshop/content cadence within the community? E.g. every Friday there is a meetup and every 1st of the month the newsletter goes out.

For me, I wrote down everything that was currently happening in the community and by whom. I mapped out the various onboarding journeys for members and documented the offerings and content that happens regularly in the community using our Community & Content Calendar (you can make a copy of them template I use here).

At the end of this step you should have a list of everything that happens in the community state right now.

Step 3: Community audit - how do processes need to be changed?

Now that you understand how things currently run, it’s time to conduct an audit of all the processes and tasks involved in running the community to see where things can be more efficient.

To do this, look at the answers you wrote to the questions above and apply the ‘automate, delegate, eliminate and keep’ filter to them in order to make them more efficient. This is a process I learnt from the amazing Fiona Killackey @ My Daily Business.

• Automate: what manual processes and tasks in the community can be automated?

  • Can any of the platforms and tech tools you use automate these tasks? (It’s great to see if you can first get more functionality from the tools you already use than to automatically search elsewhere for new ones). 

• Delegate: what processes and tasks in the community can be delegated to someone else?

  • Can anything be delegated to your current team?

  • Can anything be delegated to the community by creating member roles? e.g. Ambassadors, Alumni Hosts

  • Do you need other people to delegate the tasks to?

• Eliminate: what processes and tasks in the community can be eliminated altogether?

  • What tasks are you doing that DO NOT move towards your community goals? Think about things that aren’t moving the needle or having very low engagement or impact.

  • Are there any tasks that are a waste of time?

  • Perhaps there are tasks that aren’t revenue generating that you need to deprioritise?

• Keep: what processes and tasks in the community do you have to keep?

  • What are the manual tasks that only you can do? Of course there are going to be things that only you can do for now.

  • How many hours do these tasks take you each week?

  • Are you sure that these tasks cannot be automated, delegated or eliminated?

  • Is there a way and place you can document these processes and tasks in case you can train someone else to do them?

At the end of this step you should have a new and improved version of how everything can be more efficient to achieve that future state.

Step 4: Plan - when are you going to action everything?

Now you have your action list to understand exactly what needs to be changed to make all these improvements (the future state is in sight!). It’s time to now break this big scary list into bite size actionable tasks.

Review your list from Step 3 and now prioritise everything. Put the big and urgent tasks at the top of the list and work back from there. The list should feel more doable now.

Here are the questions to ask yourself:

• What needs to be actioned first?

• Who can help me action this plan?

• Where am I going to write down this plan?

• When does each task need to be actioned by?

Here’s a sneak peak of the list I had created in Todoist:

At the end of this step you should have a prioritised list of what needs to be done by when, in order of priority.

Step 5: Comms - what does the team and community need to know and by when? 

Being the founder of a business and face of a community means that people will notice when you’re gone. You can’t just chuck an out of office on and say see you later! It’s key to communicate clearly and well in advance to your team and members about what’s happening so they’re not left in the dark.

For example, if you’re taking time off for a month, share 1 month before you’re leaving. If you’re simply making improvements and things more efficient in the community, share the relevant parts of the vision you have for the community 1 month before you start actioning things.

I let my team know 6 weeks before and the community know 4 weeks before I left. I also messaged clients we had active projects with 4 weeks before I left to ensure they knew what to expect too.

A key part in communicating to the community is explaining WHO the interim contact will be whilst you’re away. I organised for our team member to be the go to contact and our advisor to reply to any posts on the team and community Slack.

Here’s the message I posted to the community:

Anddddd my out of office (for some reason I found this one the hardest to write 😅):

I received great advice from Kelly Irving @ Expert Author Community (if you’re writing a book, you need to join her community!) to ensure someone else was looking after the general community inbox whilst I was away. It can be tough as a solo founder because you don’t have an entire team or direct manager to send people to. So this was really key for me and such a big help.

At the end of this step you should have a clear idea about what you need to communicate to who and by when.

Step 6: Execute the plan - when does it all have to be done by?

Okay enough planning! It’s time to start actioning! You have your list, a deadline and some great concentration music (like this one) to smash out as many tasks as possible.

For me, I did a couple each week and the main bulk of it 2 weeks before.

In practise this looked like: automating Slack messages to be sent to the community whilst I was away (birthday messages to be precise), scheduling 4 weeks worth of social media content, automating welcome emails, rescheduling a meetup to be in July instead of June, asking my team to own certain tasks and so on.

There were some things that I just did not get to, so I let people know and made a note to do them when I got back from July. Remember, we’re human!

The key here is to actually carve out the time in your calendar to make these improvements and to always think about who you can ask to help you.

This is the biggest step. At the end of this step, you should have achieved (or be super damn close to achieving) your ideal future state of the community! Woo!

Step 7: Enjoy- how will you let go and enjoy yourself?

It sounds counter intuitive to let everything go after all this planning and hard work. But hear me out.

There will always be another task, another email. Just one more thing that you could do. The processes might not be perfect but they will have to do. It’s now time to let go and enjoy yourself on your break (or in the new version of your community)! Trust that you have set up the right processes, delegated tasks to the right people and trust them to look after things.

It’s time to focus on YOU and enjoy the added space in your weeks.

So there you have it. My tried and tested process for setting your community up to run without you.

I would even recommend doing this process even if you aren’t going away… doing a community audit to reduce your workload and improve efficiencies is always a good idea.

How can you apply this to your own role?

Use this Community Audit Template I created for you (have fun!).

You made it

Alrighty my friend, I hope you enjoy going through this process as much as I did. It’s a truly liberating feeling to spend time on making things more efficient to allow more space into your life.

Plus if you need help with this process, you can join our Community Cohort #3 where we take a group of people building community to build a strategy, become more efficient and connect with people who have mastered it.

Or just hit reply and let me know how I can help. You can also share your feedback on the process (and a sneak peak of my time away in Europe) here.

Ok I’ll be back in your inbox on 17th August 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: Honestly it was saying yes to myself and setting the business and community up to run without me for 4 weeks. Plus playing guitar whilst my friend married the love of her life was a pretty special moment too.

Challenging moment: The first week away whilst travelling was a bit hard to let go and be present on the trip. I was battling with whether to check my emails and reply or not 😅 Was I really on holiday if I replied to people? But I also didn’t want to come home to an overflowing inbox. I ended up letting go and just replying to a few emails each day and loved coming home to Inbox 0.

Plus right before I started playing guitar at the wedding a guitar string snapped and I had to frantically find a new one and restring it... Thank god the bridal party was 10 minutes late! I had just enough time to sort it.

Personal moment: I’ve always dreamed of seeing the Sahara desert and words can’t even explain how magical it is. Sitting on the dunes and watching the sun rise with my partner was beyond mesmerising.

See you next time.