Online Community Launch 101: A Breakdown of Key Phases

Selling a community idea involves convincing people to invest their time, money, and energy and asking them to do so for a set amount of time. Ask five to ten of your ideal members to join a structured program that lasts thirty to ninety days. This will be a good time to test your content and structure and gain insights into member experience.

When I revamped my community, I invited five community builders to a ninety-day mastermind program. We met on Zoom every other Friday. I spoke with each participant individually and shared the structure I’d created for the group. In return for free participation in this custom experience, which I dedicated my time to cultivating, they would provide me feedback. This would allow me to decide how to relaunch the community after my failed attempt the previous year.

The structure of the mastermind included weekly and monthly webinars on themes they would vote on. After the program, each member would share their launch or relaunch plan during a growth seat to receive honest feedback and ideas. Because my outcome was the same as theirs, I also participated as the mastermind, and yes, their feedback helped me refine my launch plan.

The first steps I took:

• I reached out to everyone who had ever booked a discovery call to let them know I was offering a community specifically for new community builders and wanted to share it with them.
• I told potential clients about the community and offered them a way to stay informed with an email newsletter.
• I developed a content plan for the website that included information on how someone would benefit from joining the community. I also created a sales page to increase views of my landing page.

A month after completing this mastermind, I opened the doors for real. Thanks to my outreach, I had a few members ready to go. I didn’t have any content inside except for some blog articles, but I did offer a call with each member when they joined to learn more about their needs.

Create a Vision for Your Launch

Depending on the nature of your community, give yourself about two to three months from vision to launch to avoid feeling overwhelmed. You'll need to proceed cautiously and put your health, family, and personal needs before your launch. Don’t sacrifice your self-care or self-esteem for anything or anyone.

Next, could you identify any personal commitments that take up more time than your usual schedule? Do not plan a launch the same week you fly to Hawaii! Also, could you check with family and friends to see if anything still needs to be added to your calendar but will be?

Consider the number of hours you can dedicate to this project each week and block off the nonnegotiable hours in your calendar for community building. Set yourself up for success by creating a unique process for managing each phase of your launch. You can learn a little new technology. Please keep it simple and make it easy to keep track of your progress.

Phase 1: Pre-launch

The pre-launch phase involves planning your events, preparing promotional materials, scheduling tasks, creating content, cultivating partnerships, building relationships, writing content for emails, engaging on social media, and securing conversations on podcasts, radio, television, and news outlets.

You can set yourself up for success by creating a launch plan that fits your needs and letting go of the expectation for everything to be perfect.

A few ways to build relationships with potential members include:

• You are attending networking events.
• I just wanted to let you know that you are communicating updates with your email subscribers.
• You are sharing your community-building journey with your followers.

Phase 2: Launch

You now have a waitlist, audience, beta members, or email list of people you’ve been talking to about the community for a while. Now begins the launch period when you promote your content, share your offer, and connect with your partners, members, and customers.

Please ensure you have an onboarding plan and members understand your offer. If it is a twelve-week course, could you clarify the expected outcomes?

When you provide a subscription-based membership, either month-to-month or annual, please ensure you give your members the details of the benefits and features.

Monthly memberships require you to provide constant content or give members a transformational journey they can easily envision. I often help clients understand and communicate the differences between features and benefits.

Benefits are the outcomes the member experiences:

• A community that offers a coaching program to help female founders lose weight can provide the benefits that members will feel more energetic, more comfortable in their bodies, and more confident in their ability to lead without fear of shame.
• A community that offers a twelve-week course for new homeowners about the do’s and don’ts of home remodeling can provide the benefits that members will know how to select the right professionals, determine if the rates they charge are fair, and decide if a project is something they want to do themselves.
• A community that offers monthly networking calls for busy executives in technology provides the benefit of improved communication with their peers in one place and a growth mindset.

Features are what the product or service provides to the members:

• The community that offers a coaching program to help female founders lose weight might feature live calls, an interactive chat channel, or coaching group calls.
• The community that offers a twelve-week course for new homeowners might feature weekly videos, live workshops, course webinars, worksheets, templates, or demonstrations.
• The community that offers a monthly networking call for busy executives in technology might feature the ability to connect to peers who share the same challenges and struggles and provide solutions and resources.

Phase 3: Post Launch

The post-launch experience is all about making sure your members adopt the platform you’ve selected. Technology tools help community builders organize, schedule, plan, and create content. There are also tools to manage your community’s daily, weekly, and monthly tasks.

Community-Building Tech Tools

Beginner: If you’re a new community host clarifying your community structure, your goal is to keep costs minimal until your community generates revenue.

You’ll need:

• An email address to invite people to your community with the ability to organize contacts and set reminders.
• Digital storage to organize and house online files.
• Software to schedule virtual meetings, create forms and surveys, organize data, and manage your marketing campaigns.
• A marketing and promotional tool or person to create branding and graphics for your community and share with social media.

Intermediate: If you’re a community host who’s opened the doors to a small group of people inside your network, you’ll want to grow your community by customizing a strategy to help you manage your network. You’ll need:

• A project and task management software to systematize your workflow.
• A contact management system that tracks leads, paid members, billing, invoicing, and automating forms.
• A scheduling application that allows you to share your calendar with others for collaborations, onboarding sessions, and networking meetings.
• Video software to share recordings of live events and promote your live network, offerings, services, or products.

Advanced: If you have a highly engaged community of members contributing content, creating conversations, and inviting others to join, you’re in a great place! It would help if you had automation, email campaigns, content creation, and product development support. You’ll need:

• A way to organize into a roadmap the many ideas you have for new features and benefits for your product and service releases.
• Automation of tasks and communication between you and your members.
• Email marketing, onboarding sequences, and a list-building strategy.

A few examples of tech tools include:

• Google email lets you send invitations to your members, organize contacts, and create templates.
• Trello, a project-management tool, allows you to manage your community launch plan by visually organizing, scheduling, and assigning tasks to yourself and, if applicable, your team.
• Google Drive for data management allows you to store your content and share it with collaborators, partners, and support staff, so all your resources are in one place.
• Google Docs for content creation permits your content to be shared with others and updated over time. It’s a “living document” that can be accessed anywhere and is backed up to Google Drive.

The above technology tools are for beginners, as I don’t see new community builders needing to be very technology savvy. Research and find the best fit for your community before instructing members on how you’ll communicate with them. If you need more clarification about what the members of your community want, ask them! It is always best to validate your tools and methods before diving too deep.

Ask this in the form of a poll:

How can my community best stay in conversation with you?

• Please email me to remind me of community updates and new features.
• Send me text or mobile notifications from an app.
• Send me direct messages through the community platform.
• Please send me a calendar invitation for any events or updates.
• Post your updates on social media because that’s where I spend my time.

For questions or comments, email [email protected].

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About the Author

Deb Schell is a global entrepreneur, guiding 60+ businesses in online community building. She excels in discovery, strategy, and implementation, simplifying user and backend experiences. An accomplished photographer and journalist, her work has graced Central Pennsylvania. As a certified YouMap? coach, Deb leverages two decades of writing experience to empower others.

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