How to create an engaged community on Slack?

Finding people who share similar values or are working on similar things brings a sense of purpose to a group.

Choose people to join slowly and carefully.

It’s easy to create a group of people who are just interested in selling themselves. It’s hard to bring together a community of people that genuinely want to help each other.

The right people will listen, comment and contribute.

Here are my tips for building a successful community:

• You have to love it. Supporting a community is way different than running an app, interacting with people on Twitter, or writing a blog post. It's going to require daily attention and care.
• Everything rises and falls on your leadership. IH is awesome because @csallen has been a great leader. PH's community is cool because of @rrhoover's leadership. You have to lead.
• Start small. Invite your favorite people to begin with. Initiate good conversations.
• Create recurring traditions. Inside of MegaMaker Club, we have QOTD (Question of the Day)., we watch Apple Keynotes together, and whenever I visit your town, I'll try to meet up.
• In terms of tools, my favorites are Discourse, Slack, Podia, and Spectrum.chat.
• A community will need you to show up, be present, and proactively generate discussion. You can't just leave it and expect that it will grow on its own. It needs daily watering!

I have managed & run communities for years (mostly smaller communities, from ~500 people to ~50k people) and have learned a few things.

• Communities that exist to sell things are difficult, and that’s why you see so many indie makers struggling with engagement in their communities. Communities need to be about something people love, not just trying to upsell a course or some guru shtick.
• Smaller is better. Some of my most successful communities have been the hyper niche communities with perhaps 300 active users.
• Be active and be honest. Don’t push things. Your users are there for interaction, not to be monetized.
• Following on that, monetization is difficult. I have never directly monetized a community because I feel it isn’t a central part of my business model (although I have sold several). However, I’ve used them extensively to push traffic and awareness for other projects. More than anything I use them for branding.
• The easiest communities to get engagement in are about passions. Like traveling, cult films, music, or cooking. Notice none of those are super money focused. Business focused communities often devolve into self promotional places with little organic engagement.

I have much to learn still, and it’s always changing, so I’m sure everything I know so far will soon be defunct!

Hi Merott,

Now, that I've started my own open community I'm also interested in this subject and returned to your post which I initially just skimmed over.

I'm reading Building Online Learning Communities and although it's quite an old book I found it quite insightful.

Also, what I'm trying to do now in my toddler of a community is:

• invite people I personally know who are good fit. I also have a benefit of having a few advocates who took my courses before and participated in other groups I had. Having them onboard should help to create momentum.
• reaching out to people (including channels others than Slack). For some people in my community Slack itself is a new thing and they might not be using it that willingly so at first I'm willing to connect with them via other means of communication until they got accommodate to Slack.
• reiterate the messages and question in 1-on-1 communication. That is, not only address group in a common channel and repeat some of the messages so that people feel the attention. When I conduct online courses I find it very useful to 'talk' to people 1-on-1 and after that they start participating in group conversations. It seems so empowering for some.
• having a questionnaire to check people's expectations before they join. I'm sure people won't really share real expectations at first (sometimes they don't know them themselves) but at least it gives me an impression of whether they are a good fit and what can be useful for them.

Here's a great tweet on the topic → https://twitter.com/DavidSpinks/status/1029442787412869121

Posting here for brevity 👇

🔑keys for building community:

1. Consistency - keep creating even if no one responds
2. Experimentation - try new things, dont stagnate
3. Humility - its not about you its about the whole
4. Transparency - be honest and admit mistakes
5. Energy - keep it high keep it positive
6. Be authentic. People gravitate toward those with true passion. It’s infectious.

I suppose knowing exactly what people who are in the community want to get out of it would be a key aspect of creating an engaging environment. 🤔

I think it is very similar to creating a web community.

Lots of community sites to get ideas from, PH, IH, reddit

I find most comments on this post good but relatively unhelpful - it’d be great to hear specifics, tactical steps taken to create (what’s the exact setup, what channels do you create and why at what times) and engage (what specific questions, at what cadence, why) the community

As someone running a Slack community for my S4F course, I'm interested to hear others' experiences here too!

Some things I've tried...

• Group calls to get to know each other
• Daily/weekly update reminders
• Asking people who message me privately to share in the group as well

Look forward to some more suggestions!