chapter 2

Who is your community for?

The secret to a thriving community is relevance.

Think about how many people are fighting for your attention right now. Instead of participating in your community, your members could be enjoying clips of the Daily Show on YouTube, catching up with friends on WhatsApp, or binge-watching a new series on Netflix. The war for attention is ferocious.

Even if your audience feels a compelling need to ask questions, learn from others, or share their expertise, there’s no guarantee they will do it in your community. They can also do this on social media, in other communities, or by talking to their friends and colleagues.

So, why would they decide to visit and participate in your community?

If you can’t answer this question, your community is doomed.

Your audience will only visit and participate in your community if it is the most relevant method for them to satisfy their needs and desires at a given moment. These needs and desires will vary throughout the day. When you’re waiting for a bus, you might simply want to kill time and visiting Facebook might be the most relevant way to do that. When you’re at work, you might need an answer to a software question and the software company’s community might be the most relevant way to do that. Yet while these needs and desires vary by the hour, day, and month, the principle remains the same. Your community needs to be the most relevant method for your members to satisfy their needs and desires at some point in their lives.

Relevance is the magnet which draws your members in and keeps them coming back.

Relevance shapes what features you add and remove on the community platform. It determines what activities and discussions you initiate. And, most importantly, it guides who you invite to join your community. Every decision you make about your community should be designed to make it the single most relevant place for your audience to satisfy their needs and desires.

Relevance often falls into one of two categories. A community is either relevant to a large number of people for a short amount of their time (i.e. support communities) or is relevant to a small number of people for a large amount of time (interest and belonging-related communities).

Facebook thrives because you get to express yourself and keep in touch with what friends are doing better than anywhere else. The Apple community thrives because it’s the best place to get help for people who don’t want to call customer support when their iPhone tracker breaks. The Fenty Beauty community thrives because it’s the very best place to show off your look and get featured on the homepage of a top brand.1

Who is your community relevant to?

If you’re trying to be relevant to everybody, you’ll end up being relevant to nobody.

Your audience is simply too diverse. Your audience isn’t a homogenous mass of people with identical needs and aspirations. They have different backgrounds, different experiences, and might even work in completely different fields. Some might be enthusiastic newcomers to the topic and others might be grizzled veterans. What is relevant to one group may be completely different for another.

For example, newcomers may want advice on how to get started in the topic, recommendations on what products and services to buy, and tips to avoid making common mistakes. Veterans might want exclusive news and insights, advanced tips, and to feel recognised for their experiences.

Deciding who the community is for (especially at the beginning) is the critical decision you will make about your community.

This isn’t an easy option. You might have dozens of options. Imagine you’re building a community for product managers. You can build a community for product managers by their level of experience (newcomer, veteran etc.), by their location (product managers in New York, London, New Delhi etc.), by their sector (technology, retail, sports etc.), or even by the type of company they work for (small, medium, large enterprise etc.).

These decisions will determine how relevant the community is to your audience. If you’re a product manager working at a Fortune 500 company, you will probably find a community exclusively for product managers at Fortune 500 companies far more relevant than a community for any product manager from any field. This can be the difference between one in ten discussions being relevant to you and nine in ten discussions being relevant to you. In turn, that’s the difference between a community you visit every day and one you might remember every few months.

The secret is to narrow your target audience to get started. For example, if you’re building a community about a passion, say baking bread, the kinds of discussions and information which will be relevant to professional bakers is very different from weekend amateurs. While the professionals may want to discuss the pricing and comparative abilities of commercial ovens, amateurs may just want to know which yeast to use or how to stop baking lopsided loaves.

It becomes a lot easier to attract people in the beginning when you’ve zeroed in precisely on who you’re targeting and what you want.

If you want your community to be a priority it has to have unparalleled relevance to the lives of your members. This is what ensures your audience visits your community out of habit at the start of their day instead of hoping they get around to it at the end of the day. If you can’t make your community relevant, your audience will never make it a priority.

Daily relevance vs long-term relevance

We can split relevance into two categories: things that are relevant to you today and things that are relevant to your long-term goals.

In the long term, you probably want to be happy, healthy, and wealthy with good relationships with your spouse, family, friends, and peers. But today you might be looking for tips to increase engagement in your community, trying to find a good restaurant to meet your buddies tonight, or looking for the right time to ask for a pay rise.

Understanding the difference between what’s relevant in the short term and long term can be critical to making your community succeed. It’s always tempting to build a community around big, noble, long-term goals. But, in my experience, it’s far better to position the community to serve these immediate, daily needs.

A few years ago, I was hired to save a dying community of teachers. The community had been running for almost five years, but activity had been declining for the past two. I was the third consultant brought into the project. The previous two had undertaken research, discovered that teachers were too busy, and recommended the community should require less time to use. None of these recommendations had worked.

They had listened to what teachers were saying but hadn’t properly understood what they needed. Making the community easier to use didn’t make the community more relevant to teachers right now. People make time for things which are important enough anyhow. The problem was the community wasn’t relevant to their daily needs.

If this community of teachers are saying they’re too overwhelmed with work and don’t have any time, the solution is so obvious it’s easy to miss it. I helped my client reinvent the very nature of the community. Lack of time was the most pressing problem for teachers so we reinvented the community to solve that very problem. We turned the entire community into a place for teachers to swap their time-saving tips.

We brought in productivity experts, let teachers track how much time they had saved with each idea, and we highlighted our time-saving ideas of the week. We created a ‘quick time-saving tips’ area as well as photos and videos showing some of the tips they had used.

Activity in the teachers’ community rose slowly in the first month after our changes and then rapidly over the coming few months. Within six months, the community had surpassed its peak activity. The key was identifying what was relevant to our members today. Once we had nailed that concept, it became easier to build our engagement plan.

The word ‘today’ is critical here. Sure, teachers still cared about the long-term future of the profession, discussing salary issues, and deeply wanted to help their students. But today they were simply too busy to ever make it a priority. Once the community was about their biggest challenge right now, it became a priority.

Another great example comes from a struggling community for sales and revenue professionals I worked with in 2018. The community had been created with the broad goal of helping members share advice and expertise. However, our research showed sales professionals most needed case study templates, proposal templates, and the right language to use in their sales calls.

Instead of continuing to drive people to participate in discussions, we sourced 150 templates from a tiny group of members (and linked to others across the web) to get started. Then we told members if they wanted access to this treasure trove, they needed to share their own templates and resources (notice how we’re solving the collective action problem here). Each new template was added to the pot which in turn attracted more people to share their own. This virtuous cycle also drove discussions around the best types of templates to use for each situation and steadily increased participation in the community.

If you want your community to thrive, don’t be vague about the benefits or broad in its purpose, but ensure the community is aligned to the needs of your members right now. No one needs to join ‘just another community’; they want to join a community which serves their daily needs.

This is critical in every type of community. Even if you’re running a small WhatsApp group with close friends, you still want to solve the immediate needs of your members. That might be having fun, feeling like they belong, or planning an upcoming trip.

When you’re trying to get a community off the ground, it’s usually best to find the smallest possible segment you can delight by solving their daily needs.

This raises the obvious question however, how do you find out what the daily needs of your audience are?

Step 1: Set up and run a survey

The most obvious way to find out what your audience wants is to ask them.

If you’re building a community as a hobby for a small group (fewer than 100 people), you can reach out to the vast majority of them over a few weeks and ask them. The answers will be invaluable.

If you’re working on behalf of an organisation, however, you have two common approaches. The first is easy – select one of the personas or archetypes your organisation has already created. Many, if not most, organisations already have segments or customer personas you can use. Check with your marketing or sales team. If you’re lucky, they might even have divided their customer base into separate email groups based upon these segments. This will save you plenty of time.

If your organisation doesn’t have this (or you’re not able to use them), you need to do the research yourself. The easiest way to identify your segments is to use a survey. There are plenty of useful tools available. The cheapest and easiest to use include SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, and Typeform. You can also use more advanced tools like Qualtrics and SurveyGizmo. For simplicity, I tend to prefer SurveyMonkey.

Your survey should try to probe into the demographics, behaviours, and psychographics of your audience (you can find our template surveys for both existing and new communities at www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity).

I’ve included a breakdown of each of these below:

Not every question is relevant for every community. Feel free to adapt the survey to suit your situation. Ideally you should be aiming to ask no more than seven questions. The fewer questions you have, the more people will complete the survey. Push back against colleagues who try to add more questions to a survey. If you don’t know precisely what you will do with the answers, don’t ask the question.

Try to avoid offering incentives for completing the survey. The number of people who take the time to complete a survey is a good indicator of the number of people likely to join the community when you get started. This will be useful information if you need to make membership projections later.

Step 2: Identifying your segments

Now comes the finicky part. In the survey, you’re looking for clusters of members with distinct shared needs, behaviours, or interests. Go through the questions one by one and compare future responses by answers to each question.

Some tools, such as SurveyMonkey, make this simple by offering a comparison tool which lets you filter and compare answers between clusters of people formed from other questions (i.e. you can compare challenges listed from people who joined the community within the past year against veterans). You might use answers to a sector question (retail, technology, non-profit etc.) as a means of comparing later answers looking for significant differences.

This isn’t as scientific as you might hope, but you should be able to find some clusters as you play around with different filters. You will probably have some hunches about what the different clusters might be. So test your hunches. Often it’s factors like age, location, or what kind of work they do which help decide the unique segments amongst your audience.

SurveyMonkey even offers a statistical significance option to reveal whether the filter you’re using does produce meaningful differences in responses (or whether those differences could be caused by random chance). I’ve created a video showing how to do this on www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity.

List the different segments you find

Each time you find a potentially unique segment, list the segment and outline what makes the segment unique. You’re not looking to neatly split every possible member of the community into distinctive groups, you’re simply trying to create an outline of possible segments you might target. Ideally, you want to find distinct segments with unique daily needs you can satisfy better than any other channel.

You can turn these into full personas if you like, but simply listing the unique interests of the segment usually suffices. A typical example might include:

You can also dive deeper into specific segments using two qualifiers (i.e. veterans who live in the USA) or newcomers who use specific products etc. Don’t be afraid to look at any number of answers to compare your members and identify the unique needs of each.

Step 3: Selecting your first segment(s)

Now you need to decide which of these segments you will serve to get started.

You can make this decision in one of two ways.

The first is to serve the segment you feel would be most valuable to the organisation. You can list each segment by their value and begin with the one at the top. For example, if you’re building a customer support community, you might launch your community helping customers with a single type of problem or focus solely on newcomers and gradually expand. Likewise, you might build a community just for your most loyal customers, most passionate fans, or those with the most experience in the topic.

The second approach is to look for the segment most likely to participate in a community. This is typically the easiest way to get a community going. This is usually either the segment you have the best relationships with already, the segment which has a clear passion for something your community could provide, or the segment with the least competition for their attention (hint: it’s generally best to avoid areas of high competition to get started).

Step 4: Conduct interviews to identify use cases

Now it’s time to go deep in understanding what your audience desires.

It’s critical to spend time with your audience at events and in person. I’ve spent several days sitting with prospective members at their offices or in coffee shops trying to get the full picture of what they need. When this isn’t possible, you can try and schedule phone interviews to talk to prospective (or current) members of your community.

I recommend interviewing around three to five members of each segment (ideally in person or on voice chat) to get a deeper sense of who they are and what they need.

For example, the community of sales professionals from earlier were clear that they wanted templates of proposals and case studies, but it was only in the interviews where I could find out precisely what type of templates they needed and in what format (e.g. sales proposals in presentation format). Once I knew that, we could make sure this community was filled with these very templates when we launched.

You can find these interviewees either through your existing mailing list or by inviting people to put themselves forward in an email to your audience. Remember an interview isn’t a survey. You might begin with a few broad questions, but you should push deeper to get the precise context and background information. It’s one thing for a member to say they like useful information, it’s another to describe what precisely they’re working on now and the exact materials they need (and in what format). I also like to ask questions about their needs (or challenges), ambitions, and who they consider their peers or feel similar to.

Using your interview data, you should be able to identify precisely what members need. We can then turn these needs into specific ‘use cases’ for the community. You can see an example below (targeting a newcomer segment).

Hopefully now you can see the contours of your community beginning to take shape. You should now be able to get a clear sense of what your community is going to be about and what will happen within the community. In the next chapter, you will learn how to take these use cases above and begin designing the perfect community experience for your audience.

In later chapters you will also learn how to use this framework to create content and discussions your members will love. Remember the purpose of this process is to help your community explode into life (or reinvigorate an existing community). You do this by making sure it’s the most relevant place for your members to satisfy their daily needs.