Tips & Preparations
A few preparations for launching your community:
- Define group rules & meaningful questions (if it’s private)
- Write a short intro about yourself so members will feel comfortable to approach you (You can add a Calendly link as well)
- Prepare content for 1–2 weeks (Polls, articles, questions, podcast recommendations, etc)
- Create a welcome post to pin at the top of the group with the communities values and important information for new members. Most communities have a weekly “Welcome” post as well.
- More than a few communities also have an anonymous posting option available. You can receive questions with a simple form (that you can easily create in Google Forms / Typeform) or via the new Facebook feature. Some community managers post it in a more visual way (Example)
- If you’re launching your community on Facebook I suggest opening another group as a sandbox environment. You can set it to private and unsearchable so that no one will see the drafts you post there. You can use this space to explore all the features FB has to offer, saved drafts, invite your teammates and friends to consult on content, etc.
- Promotion: Make sure to showcase your events, competitions, etc outside your community as well (social media pages) to let potential members understand what they’re missing out on. I created a page for the community on our website and used their email marketing feature to send out a visual invite to all current and former club participants.
- Collaborate with other communities! There are entrepreneurship student clubs and innovation centres in other universities in Israel. I contacted the community managers (or other relevant team members) to consult about their experience and partner for closed events.
- Retrospectives are important. There were many more bumps I haven’t mentioned as well as successes. Either way, after events or between periods (e.g. semesters, quartiles) you should think about what went well, what you could’ve done better, what could make your work more efficient and what you’d like to accomplish next. Even define KPIs. It can be a jab to the ego, but that’s the only way to grow!
- Communicate with team members. Ask for help when you need it, disagree if you think otherwise, understand when to comprise and which battles to fight. I was lucky to have an incredible team, but one of the reasons that I feel that way is because we didn’t always agree. We were being honest and didn’t just try to make each other happy.
Tools & Resources
The following were extremely helpful:
- Notion — Saved interesting articles (with the Notion Web Clipper), organised my posts for the short and long term in a calendar, created a simple internal website for the community reps, etc.
- Canva — Used it for everything: presentations, posts, videos. Visual content contributes immensely on engagement and this platform makes it so much easier.
- Newsletters are great content resources: First1000, Morning Brew, Space Cadet Ventures, …
- Screely — Useful for adding screenshots to posts, presentations, etc
- Typeform — Students can receive the pro plan for free for an entire year via Github’s student backpack. Loved the forms that I was able to create with the platform.
- Calendly for scheduling meetings without a messaging back and forth. If you have a mentors / consultants program it would be efficient to publish the link for each one. Also, as a community manager, I frequently needed to schedule meetings with potential partners, mentors, etc. It saved me and side B a lot of time.
Conclusion
This year was really intense, trying to juggle work, studies, my non-existent social life and managing the community, but I learnt so much and crossed paths with many amazing people. Managing the community taught me a lot about leadership, product management, storytelling, entrepreneurship and much more. It was a lot more work then I anticipated, but it was also that much more rewarding.
One year does not make me an expert, but I hope these insights will assist someone who’s just starting out. Would love to hear your thoughts and anecdotes from your experience! (And of course if you have any questions LMK :)
P.S. A special thanks to Snir Sharristh for making sure my posts don’t stay drafts forever
If you missed the previous parts of the series:
