So, I have an interesting situation on my hands...
(Note: This is question w/context) [1min]
[TL,DR at the bottom]
I own and grow my own online education business with my partner who is an admin of a Facebook group full of people in our exact niche.
The original creator gave the admin role first to her - then to two other women.
Now, the original creator has gone inactive on Facebook and the group (but still active on his personal Instagram).
Which leave my partner, and the two other women to run the group.
The group was left to die, fights were breaking out between members over controversial news, the group settings weren't finely tuned, the description, cover image, name etc weren't quite optimized, etc.
So, my partner and I went and fixed all that and now want to grow the community further - to eventually maintain it as our own education business' community.
The only problem is, the other two admins are hardly active in the group too - they only pop up in the admin group chat when people message them stupid things - and the original creator is still there (and we can't remove him).
Both can betray and kick us.
Our fear is that after spending most of our time, effort and money rebranding and growing this group - the original creator comes back, sees how much we've improved it and then kicks us and take it for himself. (He seems like a decent guy but he's an entrepreneur too so - yes, I'm paranoid.)
This community would be an incredible asset to have complete control over because it now has over 26,000 members.
I have a few ideas to hedge the risk but I would absolutely love (aka desperately need) to hear your ideas for the sake of my mental health 😂
I've added a group membership question asking for their emails if they'd like to get the top weekly content sent to their email - so that if we do get booted by the original creator for whatever reason - we at least have an email list who know our brand.
We could potentially create sub-groups that we own and get current members of the main group to join them (but that would effectively kill the group right?
Would you post the same "admin engagement" posts into each group? (Btw, only 13,000 members are active out of the 26,000 total members)
We could reach out and somehow convince the original creator to relinquish his role to us since we're putting in the work? (Extremely risky, could potentially trigger him to boot us)
We've visibly rebranded without using our brand name - we could slowly publish group guides and resources that have our brand name on them (So they remember the brand and follow us to another group if we have to restart with our own)
We're going to start doing weekly Live Q&A sessions with my partner as host (So people have a face to connect to and remember, so again if we get kicked...)
These are just a few ideas I've come up with during a few sleepless nights...
TL:DR - Partner became admin of niche group that's valuable to our online education business. The original creator is still there but inactive. We've invested in growing the group. What if he comes back and removes us? How do we hedge against that risk?
Everyone has a completely fresh perspective and approach - so I would genuinely love to hear your ideas
You've renovated a house you don't own. Either do a deal with the owner or move to another property.
Building an email list before negotiating is wise.
As is raising your profile in the group.
If everyone sees you as the animators of the group then they are likely to follow you should you move.
Best of luck
My 2 cents, (I've never been in this situation, so this is all from the gut), is that yes, building the email list is smart. Have you tried posting in the group with the same offer to try to capture some of the email addresses of existing, active, members?
Do you plan to monetise this audience (ie having a paywall/paid membership at some point?)?
my suggestion: just be honest and open about your intentions.
create a new landing page, get started building a smaller community off of the larger one. it will feel like you're starting over but that's okay. smaller is better.
You could create your own group that you control, and use posts in the current group to build your own audience. Probably best to try the buying out or getting the other admins to give you rights first. It's already risky building a community and business on a platform you don't control (FB) but then to do it in an account you don't control just seems like an unwise investment.
You could buy him out. If he is inactive, ti means that right now he does not see any value. Of course your aproach could trigger him, but i dont think that will happen. I would aproach and offer a very small offer to buy him out. He is inactive and if your offer is small, he will not suspect to much.
Option 1: Ask the active admins to leave the group or give up some permissions, ask Facebook to remove the inactive creator. Try to gain full control of the group before you invest any time into it.
Option 2: Live with the platform risk and make as much use of the group as you can, as long as you can. Make sure people know your brand, collect emails or members in a secondary group you own and prepare for the risk you can get booted any time. Try to build more communities you "own", e.g. a Discord? Forum?
So in short, try #1 and make the best out of it with #2 if it doesn't work?