Now, I’ll go over set-up tips unique to the communities you own and create yourself. If multiple teams are involved in your process, success might look different for each team (which is why identifying your key stakeholders early on is important). “The more you can align your success metrics with what the business cares about, the better off you’ll be,” she adds. My recommendation for uncovering the “why” is building a persona for each community.

Podia Pricing

For example, we have a community support group that comes with access to our blogging courses. The best community website software balances ease of use with the right depth of features. At a minimum, look for tools that support discussion, content hosting, and member segmentation.

Kajabi is well-known among course creators as a place to host an asynchronous course. It has an excellent course platform and marketing toolkit to sell courses with things like landing pages, email campaigns, and triggers. Kajabi’s marketing funnels are comprehensive, with lots of templates. And the ability to add web pages makes Kajabi a great public-facing option too.

It is often used by organizations, groups, and individuals to create a central hub for discussion and interaction. It can be customized to suit the needs of a particular community. Mighty Networks, Circle, GroupApp and Kajabi offer built-in monetization tools, allowing you to sell memberships, courses, and premium content. Within your community hubs, you can choose to share content by recording a video or audio on the go right within the Swarm platform or you can upload video files from your local storage.

Technology has proven a valuable assistant that drives the business forward and allows the community to achieve its creative and financial goals. There are many ways to build community engagement, but some of the most effective methods include creating valuable content, hosting events and meetups, community gamification, etc. BuddyBoss is the best community plugin for WordPress users, as it is the only robust WordPress-based option that offers a complete suite of community-building features.

We have the marketplace where we pair freelance content marketers with companies who need freelance content help. I think many people get a quick dopamine hit from doing that and then realize relatively quickly that for the community to be actually good you have to continue to facilitate it every single day. You can literally start a Slack community in like two clicks and zero dollars. Referred customers are also more loyal than non-referred customers, increasing your customer lifetime value (CLV) rates.

Which means for a 100-member community you’ll be paying $875 per month. And honestly, it’s the last place I’d want to host my community. Bettermode starts at $4,788 a year against Circle’s $89 a month, and I worked through what the five-figure tier buys separately. That’s an expensive upfront investment, considering you’ll not probably need many of its features right away. In this guide, I’ll review all the seven platforms to show you where each excels and falls short.

Suptask enhances this tool by offering a seamless Slack ticketing system, making it easy to manage tasks and support requests within your community. As the best Halp alternative, Suptask provides powerful features for collaboration and efficiency. These observations aid in the development of a setting that engages people and satisfies their unique needs. Gaining insight into the challenges and interests of your audience helps you create engaging content. Many communities have evolved to offer an integrated, all-solution service and have expanded beyond website-only platforms, utilizing multiple marketing and content sales channels. They have become more robust and more comprehensive service providers.

However, without set policies and structure, it turns into a dumping ground. With structure, it becomes a legacy resource that members return to again and again. Over the years, I’ve found that the key to successful accountability pods is that you don’t over-engineer; ownership is what makes pods work.

In summary, Discord is an excellent choice for anyone looking to create a personalized, secure community and stay close with friends. This makes onboarding feel thoughtful, even as your community scales. Show them how to use the space, where to find value, and how to start engaging. That gives you a pricing floor, the minimum you need to break even. You know the best way to make your community guidelines more visible is to post and pin them to your community home page. Before you open the doors, you need to lay a strong foundation, just enough to help people land, engage, and move toward the transformation you promised.

Step 6: Select The Right Community Platform For Your Needs

A successful creative community delivers outstanding, contemporary and unique content but caters to the needs of today’s diverse audiences. This requires agility to align with varied and constantly changing consumer preferences. Regarding creative communities, success depends on how your community is different and better. They can supercharge your audience’s loyalty, trust, and engagement with your content. But these rewards come at a cost as healthy communities require investments of time and energy.

The knowledgeable members will volunteer to be the teachers on the mentioned topics. In the second approach, knowledgeable members list the subjects they wish to teach. The rest of the members then select the topics they wish to learn. Donut lets employees have virtual calls while engaging in other activities.

Create a “community playlist” and encourage users to add their own songs. You can even play the playlist during other activities, such as fitness sessions, game nights, or quiz nights. To play, collect baby photos beforehand and display them in a shared space, such as a slideshow or Word document. You can even create leaderboards to encourage further participation and reward community members who engage in the activity. For cohort-based programs, rituals at the beginning, middle, and end are crucial.

• This evolution has raised the bar for modern community leaders — but it also creates huge opportunities.
• At the same time, it builds self-worth and mutual respect among members.
• Members create value for each other through simple roles and prompts.
• Over time, he saw how fragile client work can be and shifted toward building his own creator business.

If you can quickly and easily make different community plans at different price points, it’s going to give you a ton of flexibility in creating a community business. As your community grows, make sure to have a team or designated moderators on hand to provide support and enforce community guidelines. Invest time in understanding your audience’s interests and pain points, then tailor your content strategy accordingly. Use a mix of formats – from text posts to videos and polls – to keep things fresh and appealing. Your goals will drive content, engagement initiatives, and how you measure success. Bettermode has a hefty price tag and is therefore best suited for very large organizations looking to create an engaged community for customers.

Consider features such as discussion threads, file sharing, event management, and any other functionality crucial to your community’s interactions. Patreon is a platform designed for creators to monetize their content and build a loyal community of patrons. Creators, whether artists, musicians, writers, or other creatives, can offer exclusive content, rewards, and tiers of membership to their members in exchange for ongoing support. Additionally, features like gamification contribute to a more interactive and rewarding community environment. On the platform, there is the option to create multiple sub-communities, while users can leave comments, ask questions, mention each other, send private messages, and more.

Delivering an indispensable, engaging branded community that people want to come to again and again begins with determining the “jobs” that will motivate your users to come to the online community. Why do you want to create an online community, and how can it help your organization and your members? You’ll need to understand goals that various stakeholder groups are striving for. That’s not only among users – it’s also among your internal team and leadership. Community platforms combine a suite of services enabling the creation, management, and utilization of spaces for sharing between connected users. A common example would be a brand’s presentation of a forum composed of administrators and end-users discussing a product or topic.

It’s particularly well-suited to cohort-based programs and membership communities that prioritize interaction over content complexity. It has a Help Center, a blog, and a Kajabi glossary where you can find FAQs, how-to guides, walk-through videos, and getting-started resources. Podia has a built-in community that is available in all plans (including the free version) and comes with one admin, unlimited members, and topics.

In Peter’s case, he needed to tap into our community of engaged course creators to test out a new feature. Tiffany Aliche’s online community is an excellent example of a learning community in action. She’s built a wildly successful online membership community teaching women about personal finance. Members of her community are often participants in her online program and log on to discuss learnings and progress toward financial independence.

If you make adjustments in the future, such as adding more spaces, you won’t need to go back to individual members’ profiles to add them or send invitation links. You can manage access to individual Spaces by setting them as open, private, or secret depending on what you want members to see or join. You then organize related spaces into folders known as Space Groups.

Here, I would suggest you step back as well and let them self-manage. Pods are small groups (3–5 people) who check in with each other weekly. Keep it alive by resurfacing intros in a monthly roundup so older members reconnect with new faces.

Bettermode is a professional relationship platform that enables users to network, collaborate, and create new opportunities. Additionally, the platform allows for easy moderation and monitoring of conversations, allowing moderators to quickly respond to issues or inappropriate content. Additionally, people on Facebook can be easily distracted by this paid content or simply the fact that Facebook is also a large, social network. The built-in communication tools for Zoom and other platforms help to facilitate this communication. When selecting the best community platform for you, consider the following criteria.

Higher Logic Vanilla is known for providing robust customer support, offering assistance through various channels such as email, forums, and documentation via a knowledge base. They prioritize customer success, providing resources and assistance to ensure smooth implementation and ongoing community management. However, for businesses and organizations looking to improve their presence, Facebook offers paid advertising options to promote the group to a wider audience. Bettermode is suitable for businesses, brands, and creators looking to establish a unique and vibrant online community. With features like roles, permissions, and integrations with other tools, Discord offers a dynamic and flexible environment for building and nurturing communities. It’s responsive 24/7, providing online support and onboarding for new customers.

Unlike platforms like Circle, Mighty, or Skool that focus more on community-first experiences, Heartbeat has more compelling online learning features. It offers built-in tools to run both evergreen (self-paced) and cohort-based courses, with progression tracking. Spaces are a great online community-building tool for businesses too, since they’re a way of adding sub-products within your community. Whether you charge for access to the main community or not, adding a charge for Spaces can be an upsell for the people who choose it. This is a huge value add for coaches, for example, who can run a community but upsell into individual group coaching. Or, in a community of entrepreneurs, a subgroup could be a way of creating a paid mastermind group as a high-ticket product.

At the very least, you’ll want to be able to embed videos in your courses. Thinkific is built for creators who want to sell courses, memberships, and communities. Its course builder is one of the strongest in the industry, while community tools support engagement around learning. These community platforms have a mix of strong features and integrations (payment gateways etc) to support the needs of creators and online entrepreneurs.

Elearning platforms increasingly include built-in community features—not just to replace social media groups, but to improve learning outcomes and engagement. Communities help learners feel connected, supported, and motivated to stay active in a course. For instructors, they provide a direct way to gather feedback, host discussions, and add value between lessons.

A well-moderated space keeps conversations meaningful, making members feel safe and valued. For example, a travel community could earn by sharing hotel booking links or selling “Wanderlust Warrior” hoodies. For example, a writing community could host a “Pitch Your Novel” workshop with an editor for $30 a spot. For example, a coding community could create and sell a “Python for Beginners” course, catering directly to what their members are there to learn. Strategic partnerships allow you to tap into an existing audience that shares your interests. Collaboration helps you reach a wider audience without starting from scratch.

Launching your online community is one of the most essential steps to building it. Encourage your community members to network and build relationships with 1 or more people in the community and you’ll see higher completion rates, happier members, and more success. ChatGPT is a hot topic and it really gets people excited to…should we say, chat about it. In this scenario, Aaron used the question to get people to https://goodmenproject.com/dating-2/cupidfeel-faqs-answered share about these hot new tools and how they might be used to help online course creators. The major advantage of branded communities is that you’re in full control of the content, the branding, and the experience.