Scale Your Community With Unscalable Tactics
3 ways we’ve grown the Skillshare community with a personal touch.
How do you scale community building? For smaller communities, connections can mean personal phone calls, in-person events and swag. These tactics are important because they allow you to engage with and understand your community. Investing in these relationships helps create trust, brand loyalty, and engaged users.
But as your community grows, not every member can receive a handwritten note from you in the mail. Your team probably can’t scale at the same rate as your community, and it becomes impossible to provide each individual with a high-touch, personalized relationship.
At a certain point, you need to support your community’s growth by scaling these unscalable tactics. Here are the principles we follow at Skillshare:
Educate Your Community
When a user emails your support team for the first time, they’ve already had a bad experience. Something might be broken on your site, or they have a question and just can’t find the answer. Even worse is knowing that for every email you receive, there are many more users too frustrated to even reach out. We make sure to invest in easily-available resources so our students and teachers can get answers before needing to contact us. We make it a priority to update our Teacher Handbook on a weekly basis, and recently revamped our Help Center so users can better find information on their own. Not only does this improve user experience, but it cuts down ticket volume so our team can focus on more positive interactions.
Always Build Relationships
Of course, sometimes your members need real human help. When our resources aren’t enough, we encourage all our members to get in touch with our team, even making this process as easy as possible with features like in-app messaging and 12/7 support.
Don’t stop doing the little things that make your community interactions so special just because you are growing. Even though you can’t have a 30-minute conversation with everyone, it doesn’t mean your community team should ban phone calls! When you pair personal interactions with the right members of your community, it can have a real impact on your business. You’ll figure out how to scale around it.
Spend Your Time Where It Counts
Spending time with engaged members in your community can be a really powerful way to magnify your community team’s impact. Going that extra mile for a brand advocate can have an exponential effect when they share their awesome experience and refer their friends. But while it’s tempting to only work with celebrities with thousands of Twitter followers, it’s equally important to spend time with your most active members. At Skillshare, our community team focuses on the teachers most excited to work with us, instead of chasing down unresponsive teachers based on their popularity or pedigree. In this way, we’re investing our time along with our teachers, doubling their chances of creating an amazing class.
By following these tactics here at Skillshare, we’ve learned firsthand that a well-managed, quickly scaling community is not an oxymoron. It is possible to maintain a strong sense of engagement, accessibility and high-quality experience throughout your community even as you grow.
What are some lessons you’ve learned while building your community?
P.S. Want to work with us? Our Community team is hiring.
