How to use Community Design to Build a Successful Online Community

When I first started building my online business, I fell into the trap of thinking that I had to know the answer to every single question before it was even asked. I wanted to be the expert who could help everyone that came my way. As it turns out, there's a better model for helping people make the transformations that they seek to a model based in community. When you gather together a group of people who are working toward a common goal, you create the conditions for sustainable progress as each individual learns from and is inspired by the unique experiences and perspectives of other members of that community. That's what Mighty Networks is built for, that type of meaningful gathering. And over the years, they've developed an approach to community design that has worked wonders for countless hosts who've chosen to bring their online communities to this platform where they can master something interesting together. I'm one of those people. I'm a creator and educator who launched my own Mighty Network because of the unique blend of courses and community they provide. And it was through their Community Design Accelerator program that I was able to create a sustainable schedule that is manageable for me as a host and leads to real results for my members. I say sustainable because it's not about doing more work. It's about identifying the deep roots of a common why and a light structure of community activities. That's the combo that will accelerate your community in whatever direction you point it. Since the skill that I teach happens to be visual note taking, the Mighty Networks team asked me to sketch out some of the biggest takeaways that I and thousands and thousands of others have learned from their Community Design Accelerator program. The principles that we're now applying to our online communities to help them thrive. While you no doubt are good at what you do and can provide plenty of individual support for the folks you work with, I think you'll be surprised at how quickly transformation can take place when you open up space for your community members to learn from each other. It's the quickest way I've seen to identify the most meaningful questions around whatever it is that you're mastering and and then answer them together. Here's how it starts with your big purpose. This is the motivation for your community, the reason that it exists, and it has three components. The first is the who who is it that you'd like to gather together? How would you describe your ideal member? The person who needs your community the most right now? The second component is mastery. What skill or field will you master together? This focus on mastery is what really pulled me into this approach. It stands in stark contrast to most of our traditional education, which focuses on breadth over dep. Here's your chance to go deep. The third component is results. What are the tangible outcomes that your members can expect to achieve by being a part of your community? Results that they can't get anywhere else, at least not without paying an arm and a leg. Keep in mind how rare it is to have a supportive community around a common interest. And don't underestimate the results that can flow from that environment. All three of those components come together into one powerful sentence. Your Big Purpose we bring together who to master what skill or field so that we can achieve these three results. Here's an example from my mighty network called Verbal to Visual. We bring together lifelong learners and makers to master the skill of sketchnoting, another word for visual note taking, so that we can learn new concepts deeply, solve complex problems efficiently and effectively, and tell stories in a memorable and impactful way. Who will you bring together? What skill or field will you master? And what results will your members be excited to achieve? Answering those questions sets the foundation for your community. They're the deep roots that make everything else possible. It wouldn't surprise me if you set a pretty lofty vision for yourself and your members within your big purpose. When that lofty vision runs up against our modern programming of instant gratification, you might feel like you have to deliver on it overnight. But that's not how mastery works. Which is why it's so much more helpful to think about a year in the life of your community, which is the second part of community design. This is where you get to imagine the transformation that can occur over the course of a year. It's not about planning the entire year, but instead looking forward to a year from now and imagining the results you've created for your members. What's different in their lives a year from now? What's different in your life a year from now? Within your big purpose, you set a direction and identified some benefits. Here you get to describe how your life and the life of your members will be different after spending a year within the world you've created. In my case, I identified one very practical result for my members and another a bit more philosophical. The first to sketchnote with confidence in a way that supports their personal or professional goals. That is, they learn the thing they came here to learn. The second to feel more engaged with work and life and more satisfied with the contribution they're making. I want sketchnoting to be a gateway to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose and personally, the transformation I wanted to experience was a greater sense of stability within my business as well as a deeper connection to the folks I hope to serve with my work. What are the practical and perhaps philosophical transformations that your members will achieve over the course of a year? And what sort of transformations would you as a host like to see for yourself? No matter what those year long transformations look like, it's a well designed community that can deliver them. That's where part three comes in. It's within your community design plan that you identify the regular activities that your community members will engage in that will slowly but steadily move them toward that year long vision. That plan includes monthly themes and a weekly calendar. The theme you choose each month provide some focus to the conversations that take place within your community, and the weekly calendar creates the particular space and the specific prompts that will spark those conversations in the form of a simple post or a live event. In the realm of posts, the Mighty Network platform makes it easy to elicit stories and spark debate with questions, multiple choice polls, percentage polls, and hot cold polls. As the host, you get to identify the questions and polls that strike a chord with your community members and get folks thinking deeply about the skill or field you're mastering. You're always welcome to add your $0.02 within the comments of those posts, but I think you'll find that the real value comes from your members sharing their own stories as they have conversations with each other. This is where you get to put your expert badge to the side and simply allow for your members to share their wisdom. That's what I do with what I call Monday Momentum posts. I alternate between the question format where I pose a short sketchnoting prompt like how would you sketchnote the concept transition and the poll format to see where folks land with questions like what's the ideal percentage of imagery compared to words within your sketchnotes? In addition to helping your community members clarify their thoughts on important topics, those polls and questions are a form of customer research that can help you shape future community activities and resources. While those types of prompts allow for all of your members to hop in and contribute whenever it's convenient for them, you might also build some live gatherings into the mix. You can go live right from your Mighty network using their own built in feature or by integrating with something like Zoom. I go live for the Wednesday workshops that I host. Each week I identify a topic or question related to sketchnoting, like building your visual vocabulary, and we spend 90 minutes working on that thing together with a bit of light prep from me, but a lot of community driven exploration. Having regular weekly events like that give your members a reason to come back and contribute. In the process, they're supporting both their own development as well as the development of other community members who will see and be inspired by their work and their thoughts. With this approach of a monthly theme and a weekly calendar, you move away from the mentality of posting 10 times a day like you're encouraged to do on social media, and toward a model of posting two to three times a week. In that way, your job is to get the ball rolling and then let your community members take it from there. But what's the structure of the space where that theoretical ball will roll, and how much will it cost to be a part of it? Those questions constitute part four of community structure and pricing. Though you can create a mighty network that is free to join, the Data from over 11,000 communities has shown that people pay attention to they pay for. That's why you shouldn't shy away from charging for access to the community that you've built. You're more likely to get engagement because your community members have literally invested in this space and will want to see it succeed so that they can succeed. Mighty Networks makes charging easy with the ability to offer monthly or annual subscription plans as well as plans that give lifetime access for a single purchase, which work well for standalone courses but probably isn't the best fit for an ongoing community. If you're weaving together courses and community like I am, you can either charge separate fees for each, a subscription for the community and a one time fee for each course, for example, or you can bundle them together into a single offer, which is the route that I've taken to keep things simple. A single subscription that gives access to everything. No matter how you choose to charge for what you offer the takeaway here, people pay attention to what they pay for, and the fact that 77% of mighty networks that offer subscriptions sell subscriptions should alleviate any worries you have about charging. So long as the components of your community design plan those monthly themes in your weekly calendar help your members take regular steps toward the big purpose of your community, they're likely to stick around month after month. Now that you know you can and arguably should charge for your community, let's talk about how to get it off the ground. The fifth and final part of community design is launching and growing your community. With the launch of your community, it's not about getting it perfect, it's about getting it going. You don't need a massive archive of content at the ready just the light structure of your community design plan and the deep roots of your big purpose. When that combo brings in your first few ideal members, you can begin having meaningful and transformative conversations. The small initial numbers and intimate feel can even be a strength rather than a weakness by facilitating real connection as opposed to the clout seeking that you're likely all too familiar with on other social platforms. Those first conversations captured and accessible in the form of a review, viewable post, or a video replay, those will be what new members see when they join and will kickstart their engagement. That's how your content archive will grow week after week at a sustainable pace, with the added benefit of documenting the history of your community, the things you learn together, and the milestones that individual members will pass through and celebrate. So your job in the beginning is simply to observe what's resonating with those early members and what isn't, and tweak as you go based on the feedback you get. Don't worry about the numbers. Many successful Mighty Networks thrive with this future as 25 members and grow from there to the thousands or even hundreds of thousands. Just show up for those early members and they'll show up for you. Mighty Networks has been teaching community design since 2019, and they refine it every year. I took part in the program in March of 2020, and even though it already felt quite polished, I saw the instructors continue to tweak the material and add resources based on the feedback of participants as well as the new insights gained from the growing number of hosts and communities that are thriving on the platform. In the year and a half that I've hosted my community here, I've also done plenty of tweaking, adjusting my weekly calendar and even the pricing model as I home in on the best fit for me and my community. What hasn't changed over that span of time is the deeper connection that I feel with my community members and course participants compared to my old DIY setup on WordPress, which was more hassle than it was worth. And the thing that I never get tired of is pulling up the activity feed on the homepage of my Mighty Network and seeing not just the latest sketchnoting work that's been shared, but the supportive conversations that take place in the comments. How many people can say that about Facebook, or any other platform for that matter? Those platforms aren't built with community design in mind. Mighty Networks is, and their Community Design Accelerator program will teach you how to use it. Go check out community.mightynetworks.com to see this framework in action and learn what's happening with the latest version of the Community Design Accelerator program. You've now heard about the key principles, and you might even have some ideas for how you'd apply them. But for those ideas to go any, anywhere, you must share them. And for that, you need community.