How to Recruit Founding Members to Help You Launch a New Community
Over the past few days, we showed you how we set up a Community Canvas™ and how we crafted our Member Personas as we’re launching a new CMX community. But guess what? The real work of building community hasn’t even started yet.
Do you ever create elaborate Excel spreadsheets — with colored labels and VLOOKUPs— before you make a decision for your community?
Do you ever agonize over what you don’t know about your members so much that it takes you days or weeks or months to ever make a decision about how to move forward?
Guilty of overthinking?
I’m guilty of it too. Raising my hand here in solidarity.
In launching this community, I recently faced this fear of just starting.
It’s okay to be structured and thoughtful. What’s not okay is never launching a community because you’re so afraid of unanswered questions that your ideas never see the light of day. You’re not able to serve your members when you do too much thinking and not enough doing.
The only true way to learn is to do.
To do this, we launched a “Founding Members” group that served as validation that there was, in fact, demand for this community. It also brought together 50 of our most loyal community members to assist us in launching this new community program.
I’m going to break down exactly how we did this, step-by-step, with lessons learned at the end so you can come back to this for reference again and again. With this strategy, you’ll never launch a dead-in-its-tracks community again. And if people don’t respond to your idea, you’ll immediately learn why.
Phase 1: Plan, But Don’t Overthink
In preparation for launching a Founding Members program to validate the need for the CMX Pro Membership program, I created a step-by-step hypothesis for how the community would be built (remember post 1?). I was pretty proud of this at the time. The whole thing was laid out in a detailed project plan in Google Doc, like so:
Almost immediately after completing this, I started going down the rabbit hole of software selection and survey creation already.
I even made a cute image that I could share with the team since we’re remote and I don’t have a giant whiteboard I can write on:
Cute. And, in hindsight, a waste of time.
Then I got on the phone with Jonathan Howard, who is a startup consultant, founder, and good friend of our CEO, David Spinks, so he offered to advise us on our new program. I showed him my plan and all the research I had yet to do, and he told me to stop dead in my tracks and just launch something. Launch anything, just to make sure what I was building was something our members wanted.
Lesson Learned: Put together a rough document with questions you need to answer in the validation phase. Then, instead of continuing to overthink, validate. That’s exactly what a Founding Members group can do.
Phase 2: Build and Validate
Jonathan said to do two things. First, pick our revenue goal and then back into our validation goals from there. Second, pick a price point that I thought was fair for community builders to pay out of pocket for professional development resources (we know from experience that most don’t have budgets at their companies for this, which we hope to change through our work). We chose an annual fee of $99 for the purpose of this test.
From there, I had to figure out what $99 was worth to our members immediately. So I started with a small hypothesis, informed by experience speaking with our target members. We would test the following incentives:
- Access to two exclusive worksheets (to validate the importance of a content library)
- Invite to a secret Founding Members-only Facebook Group (to validate the importance of the curated community element)
- Ability to have a direct say in our direction (to validate our members’ desire for influence on the industry as a whole)
- A special badge when we launch our official platform (to validate need for public recognition)
The landing page needed to be minimal and easy to create. I went straight to Typeform for this. I had seen non-profits collecting donations via Typeform, and so I set about searching how to do this ourselves. I did a quick Google search, picked a donation form template, and quickly found that Typeform integrated with our secure payment provider, Stripe.
Because I didn’t want members to simply pay and then have nothing happen, I then used a Zapier trigger to initiate a welcome email in Mailchimp that thanked our Founding Members, gave them access to the worksheets, and explained next steps.
Six hours later, I was ready to rock and roll.
Lesson Learned: Use tools you already know so you’re not building the validation engine from scratch. The point here is not to sink too much cost (through time or money) to validate. Spend no more than a day on the build. Seriously. One day.
Phase 3: Launch
Now it was time to launch. But as a major shift to our business model, we had to be careful about how we communicated this experiment to our community.
I feel awkward on video, but I know it works. We’ve tested it again and again, and people engage more with it than anything else in our group or on our email list. And it’s dead simple to produce with a smart phone or laptop.
I procrastinated on this for a few hours, and then I decided to record the video with my dog to catch people’s attention. I kept it short and sweet and made it about our members and just a little bit about us.
As soon as I launched the video, we got a response. A few people had questions on the video in the group, and I was actually able to use those questions to update the copy on the landing page immediately.
Soon, the registrations were flowing in. Well before the end of the validation period (10 days), we crossed our goal of 50 and closed off registrations.
Alas, we were validated! And we had about $5,000 to play with to develop our idea, thanks to our amazing members.
I emailed many of them personally with GIFs to share some quick appreciation.
Lesson Learned: Launch in a way that is true to your brand’s voice and resonates with your existing audience or community, and do it in the simplest possible way so you don’t get too attached to the end result. You don’t need a four-piece band here; use the resources you have.
Phase 4: Craft the Welcome Experience
If you’re a community builder, you know that good onboarding is essential to community success. Why? It establishes trust, which is foundational to every other action that your members may or may not feel comfortable taking in the community forever after. This was a vital piece of the Founding Member process.
Over the course of the next few days, I developed a funnel that would usher people from their first email to the Facebook Group to begin engaging and helping us smooth out our launch from Founding Membership beta to official launch of this program. These were our right-hand people, so I wanted to roll out the red carpet for them.
- I sent a Mailchimp email that invited them to a Facebook Group. Because the group was Secret, I had to add them all as friends. All in all, I made about 20 new friends that day, not bad! ;) Because I invited them personally, Facebook let me write a special welcome note to each of them to accept, like so:
2. I wrote up a set of Community Guiding Principles. These include: Vision, Mission, Values, and some minimal Guidelines.
3. I started a Welcome thread. Because everyone was being added in one major wave, we only needed to do one of these. In my welcome Facebook message, I asked each of them to participate here. In all my communication, I kept all the calls-to-action to a minimum to lessen friction and increase participation.
In addition to these steps, I have some other surprises up my sleeve, but we’ll let those be a secret for now.
Lesson Learned: Here, you set the space and the pace. In all communication, have only one call-to-action. Make sure your members know what to expect next. And give them a little surprise and delight to remind them how much you appreciate them.
Phase 5: Continous Engagement
Since then, things have been humming along. I went on a two-week vacation right after this launched, so David took over the day-to-day engagement in the Founding Members group, asking people fun questions as well as thought-provoking questions about their needs and pain points.
We worked together to craft a content calendar that would answer our product questions, and we quickly (and confidentially) learned people’s driving motivations for being there. With all our content calendars, we try to put in a mix of ritual (e.g. weekly posts, posts on a certain topic) and unplanned content.
As a result, the entire team has been able to take our thoughts immediately to this group and have them validated or disputed. We’ve now guaranteed that we won’t build something in a silo. We will build something useful and, above all else, game-changing for our entire membership community. And when we launch, we’ll have people who can go to bat with us.
We plan to keep this Founding Member group active as long as we exist and continue to turn to them for guidance on decisions we’re making for our community.
Lesson Learned: Continuous engagement is vital in a Founding Member group, and in any group. Dedicate one person to be on point and funnel your major questions to them, then sit back and soak up the information.
One caveat about Founding Member groups: It turns out a lot of our Founding Members are invested in our company story. CMX has been around for over three years and many of these members have been with us since Day 1. They’re also deeply invested in seeing this industry flourish and in giving back to others. We do not expect all of our future members to be as invested from the start. Our job is to get them there over time.
Your Founding Members are your most dedicated, most passionate members. Don’t expect everyone else to care as much as they do. And that’s fine. Everyone has a role to play and you need to meet them where they are at, as you’ll learn in future posts.
