How to ACTUALLY Create An Engaged Community (with Alexis from Circle)

Being in a community, in my opinion, especially online, is kind of like building a new habit. Like you're helping someone figure out how to engage, how to get content, how to join a Q&A. But if it's not something that they're already doing, you have to teach them how to engage with you. And so a couple of these, what we call a Circle signature gathering. So when we're talking about community and if you haven't engaged with Hey Creator community and you've got no idea what we're talking about, here are a couple of things that we see as engagement pillars inside of a community. So these signature gatherings are gatherings that keep people coming back again and again and keep them engaged and, you know, get them talking to each other, not just you, which is the whole point of community. You know, with email marketing and even social, a lot of those communications is just you and that individual back and forth. The point of a community is to get your members talking to each other and learning from each other. So A few signature gatherings that we see and some of my favorites. Number one is hot seats. So if you are, you know, hosting a community or even a cohort-based program or course on a specific result or on a specific niche, having a hot seat where someone comes in with a specific problem, they share it with the group live on a call, and then you and the group give advice, tactics, strategies, feedback on how to help them solve it. That is so invaluable. Like, if I can have a hot seat with you, Ragland, and Darryl every week, like, I'm done, you know, like, I'm, I'm fixed. I've got all my problems solved. But like, imagine, you know, people who all care about the same result, who are all working on the same specific goal on the same journey. Yeah, they're on the same journey and you can help each other with that hot seat. I think the hot seats are, are undervalued. Another one is accountability calls. So this is where you can experience accountability in a couple of different ways. You can have it on a call, you can have accountability groups. So you're putting people in, you know, designated groups for DMs or in a space, but helping people get accountability. So whether that's, hey, every Friday we're posting our wins, or every Friday we're posting a screenshot of the email, the sales email we were going to send, or we're posting a screenshot of our morning workout. Like, it doesn't matter, but giving people that ritual where they're like, okay, I want to post and I want to share that I'm actually taking action is something that people start to attach a lot of value to. They're like, wow, you're really helping me get things done. And I now want to celebrate by sharing that in the community. 3 is feedback as a service. So this is something that is a little bit more tedious, but depending on what you're offering is, if you want to review your members' work, or you have— maybe you have like moderators or admins in the community that are, you know, on your team that help review work. But this is where you can review— like, we see this a lot in writing communities, podcasting communities, even in marketing communities where people are submitting their work and they want someone to give them like the real nitty-gritty feedback. That's an amazing like signature gathering slash offering that people would pay money for. The fourth one is challenges. So I was actually, you know, you and I prior were talking about signature gatherings and I was going to talk to you about challenges, Matt, but we'll kind of loop back around to it.

I started one based on our last conversation. So how's it going? It's going okay. I think like for our first challenge—

we love the honesty. We want to be honest.

Okay. Because I think like, I like in retrospect, I could have done a little bit more to like pump it up beforehand. But what we wanted to do was a social posting challenge, like you can post on LinkedIn or X or Instagram or whatever, but like, hey, y'all need to practice like shipping your work more and like showing up and like sharing your wins or talking about something specific. Like, and so like just getting people in the practice of publishing. And so just doing that has been, has been a little challenging. I wanna, wanna be honest, but it is like cool to see. And then like I can pull people in and say like, hey, The people who, who do show up and post, it's cool to see like the screenshots, like link here, we go, we go click over to them and like support each other and give them the boost.

So why do you feel like it's not working to your expectations? Like what about it has been challenging? No pun intended with the challenge being challenging.

Yeah. Why is the challenge challenging? Uh, like I said, I think I could have, um, I think I could have given people a little bit more of a heads up on it. Like I had kind of generally said, hey, for these 2 weeks, I'm going, we're going to be like. Practicing our, our social writing, social posting, but given, giving more like, hey, this is what it's gonna look like. And, um, more frameworks. Mm-hmm. Also like more examples, say like, hey, like almost if it, as if it was Mad Libs, just kind of plug in your stuff. And so that, that, that part, I think I just could have given people a little bit more, like you forget about. Like I, we've talked about, we've been doing this a long time that it's like, what is it like to start posting on social consistently for the first time? And like, not the big thing is like not overthinking, not overthinking it.

Yeah. Are you open to suggestions?

Yes. I'd love suggestions.

Okay. So I think a way to like blow this up and I think you should do it again. So I know this is your first time, but I think you should do it again in like a month or two is to bring in partners. Bring in people who are experts in content, social media growth, and have them be like your pillar speakers throughout the challenge. So let's say the challenge is 2 days or sorry, 2 weeks long. Maybe you have like a big kickoff 60-minute workshop with a social media, like up-and-comer, like someone who's in the last 12 months has really, because I feel like social media is so It's like always fresh. And so it's like bringing in a fresh voice who has just done it could be interesting. And then you maybe have a Q&A with that person the latter half of the week. And then the second week you bring in another expert who can like talk on a different strategy. But I think that would be interesting to one, you not having to create the net new content, but then you can lean on them for the frameworks and then for the content to help you like bring in more excitement around the challenge. That's a challenge I want to join. Like, that sounds fun.

That's great feedback. So thank you. Thank you for sharing it. And anyone listening also, the other thing that I feel like I could have done, like in retrospect, and someone actually like brought it up for a different challenge that they were on, is like, oh, like we just followed a prompt every day. I was like, ah, damn it. Yes, I should add prompts every day. Like post this about, post this about that, or what's like one thing from your story. And so when we do this again, and the other thing that I could have done, and this kind of goes back into the prep part or just something that I didn't expect is like we had just gotten off an email marketing sprint, and I'd been talking about like how important email marketing is. And I do think it's super important, like it's more important than social media, but social media is still important. But I, I think like for the prior 4 weeks I had basically downplayed the importance of social media. And then I was like, hey, we're all going to post on social media every day. And they're like, what? I'm still like, you know, writing my welcome series. So I was like, yeah, put parts of your welcome series into like, like use it as inspiration. So Um, I'm basically saying like, in retrospect, and this is part of like doing something live, if you're willing to put yourself out there and be like, if I had spent 2 months putting together, like what would've like been a better organized probably, but still like I would've made a lot of the same mistakes in 2 months if I had just like overthought it and tried to make it perfect. People would still, I know there still would've been things that people would've been like, oh, uh, No, you should have done this. But now that I'm like in there, I'm like, oh, I'm going to do, I'm still going to do the same thing again in 2 months. It's going to be way better if I had just like thought about it and worked on it without anyone for 2 months.

Exactly. Get the feedback, iterate and do it again.

Right, exactly.

The last signature gathering, which is similar to what we were just talking about, is like those workshops and trainings. So even like you can combine all of these, you could do a challenge on posting on social media, and then you can have a hot seat 5 days in where you start to kind of pick apart someone's post and like share where they could have done better or they could have added more detail. Like these signature gatherings are so mix and match, but the workshops with— I know you do office hours and you have the— you have the call, the Friday call with Darrell.

Yeah, Friday calls more of the hot seat style because people get in and they're like, hey, I'm having this problem. And Darrell like does his Darrell magic. We've shared a couple of them, but One, one lady got on there and she's like, oh, I'm getting ready to do a launch. And he's like, I'm going to plan your launch in 15 minutes. And he's just like, and people are like, oh my gosh, like this just paid for the whole year. That's like, yeah, actually it's way more expensive, but that's true. That's why you join Hey Creator. Exactly.

Yeah. That's your plan, your launch in 15 minutes, the live calls, the workshops, the trainings, like they do add that extra layer of value and FaceTime. And I think that it, also plays a role into like your payment. So whatever you're charging for the community, whether it's cohort or memberships, the more face time you give your members, that's more time out of your calendar. That's more obviously energy for you. And so be thinking about, you know, if you're going live 3 times a week, I wouldn't think that you'd be charging $20 a month. You know, like there needs to be that level of financial commitment. For you and the member for it to make sense for you to offer so much of yourself that they also need to be investing in that experience so that it becomes sustainable.