An Inconvenient Truth
No, not that inconvenient truth. We at Superfeed are building a product to solve for a different truth which, while not literally earth shattering, is really inconvenient.
Here it is: your community members don’t actually care that much about your community.
Whether it’s an alumni association, a religious institution, a professional network, or a non-profit, a community will never be someone’s top 10 priority. People will naturally and rightfully devote the vast majority of their attention to family, friends, and work. Their remaining “free” time goes to fun. And then somebody will divide whatever is left of their headspace, unevenly and unpredictably, across the dozen different communities they belong to.
This truth makes communication difficult and unscalable. Newsletters go unread. WhatsApp groups see sporadic bursts of engagement but nothing consistent. Slack channels, which present today’s best option, become overwhelming and unnavigable information jungles. And while your community members will make the time to engage with a community, they don’t have the time to go searching how.
So community managers resort to following up individually, with notes like: “Hey, just following up on my post” and one week later “Hey, just following up on my follow up” and finally “I don’t understand, why are you ignoring me!?” Ultimately, we work so hard to communicate what’s possible now, we don’t have the time or energy to build what will be possible in the future.
We know this because we’ve been there. We have spent nearly a decade as community managers and organizers. Our community members loved our organizations, told us they wanted to engage more, and according to legend, even tattooed themselves with our logo! And despite this (even physical) commitment, we still struggled to get our message out.
So we decided to build a communication platform for how communities actually behave, not how we’d like them to. We are intentionally building for the community member who logs in once a week, not once a day. We are building for someone who has 30 seconds to spare, not 30 minutes. We are building for the challenges you, the community manager, face day in, day out.
Superfeed is a messaging tool that provides the hyper-relevancy of individual outreach, but allows for the efficiency of mass communication. Community managers can target a message to exactly the segment they need to reach. Community members only see what is directly relevant to them, with no spam.
We have an early prototype and are looking to do some user research. If you’re curious, give us your contact info here and we’ll schedule a quick chat :)
Also check out our second post here to understand why CRMs are the superheroes that community platforms need and our third post here to hear our strong opinions on Cherry Garcia and the importance of institutional knowledge. We promise funny gifs.
