Nearly every week, I curate three of the best links about community building for my newsletter, Community Manager Breakfast. I scour the web, reading sometimes dozens of articles a week to find the cream of the crop. For the end of the year, I thought I’d take that curation even further and take a look at which of the roughly 140 links I’ve shared this year got the most clicks. Here are your favorites for the year!
10: What are the Indicators of a Successful Online Community?
In this piece, my amazing friend Carrie Melissa Jones walks us through the five key elements for a community to succeed.
9: Offensive and Defensive Community Onboarding
Ian Vanagas, one of my favorite new community writers of the last few years, provides a great framing for two approaches to consider for onboarding your community members.
8: Community Discovery Framework
This framework from the folks at Burb falls into the “I wish I had written it” category for me. They provide a clear way of thinking about how to explore and discover the right community for your organization. It maps extremely well to how I think about the topic!
7: Community Strategy Planning for 2023
Jenny Weigle, one of Community Manager Breakfast’s biggest cheerleaders, blessed us all with a five-part series on yearly strategy planning. (Scroll down to the bottom to find the other entries.) In-depth, thoughtful, and immediately actionable.
6: A Big List of Community Advocacy Program Incentives
Sometimes you just need a list. Jenny Weigle lands two spots in a row here, this time with her inspiration-provoking list of methods to reward advocates.
5: What it takes to scale
Many of the links above focus on how to launch a community and achieve success…but how do you achieve scale, and what challenges do you face once you hit it? Gareth Wilson has some answers.
4: The Community-Led Growth Report
Common Room took advantage of their massive dataset to give us all an early holiday present, covering a plethora of topics including: does the initial surge of chat community activity drop off? Do communities contribute to lead generation and conversion? How responsive are community members? Great stuff.
3: Building Campfires and Community
Carrie Melissa Jones returns to the list, this time using a campfire analogy to help us think about how we create crucial intimacy in community experiences, even at scale.
2: How To Improve The Community Member Experience
Georgi Todorov, who also frequently showed up in the runner-up links, takes member experience back to fundamentals by reminding us to think through who we’re serving and why they’re present, then building from there.
1: How to Deal with Low Engagement in a Community
And coming in at #1 is Martha Essien not with a cheat sheet of engagement tactics, but with sage advice to take a breath, assess the situation, and get to work. Good advice for all of us.
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