This playbook is a summary of best practices from the most successful communities on Openland. These tactics can be applied to all communities, both on Openland and elsewhere.
<aside> 👉🏼 To get personal advice for your community, message Openland CEO Yury Lifshits at https://openland.com/yury
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Most successful communities we know start with **Who** (the type of people you want to bring together) and Why (an inspirational goal all members of the community are interested in achieving together). The actual activities and logistics of community can be determined later and evolve based on community feedback. From our experience, bringing together like-minded people doing a wide range of things makes a stronger community than enabling a single activity for a highly-diverse group of people.
<aside> ▫️ Example WHO: high-ambition high school students WHY: find new friends online, with similar interests and talents
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Beyond WHO and WHY, the upcoming community needs a name and a membership model, i.e. a decision on whether it will be open or selective. For selective communities, an application form needs to be created (Google Forms and Typeform are good tools for that). A community can start being selective and become open later. Alternatively, it can be selective for direct applicants but open for anyone with an invite from a current member.
Building a successful community requires a serious time investment. But it shouldn't all come from from the main organizer. To get things started, you'll need 10-20 hours pre-launch and 1-2 hours per week on ongoing basis. When your community is build around an inspiration goal, you can recruit a volunteer team of moderators contributing an additional total of 10-20 hours per week.
To get started, an organizer needs early promoters, early core, and the initial invitation list.
Early promoters can be recruited as an advisory council of people influencial among the target members of the upcoming community. Ideally, the total social media following of early promoters should be at least 100k-1M followers.
Early core are the founding members of the community who will be instrumental in setting the tone, inventing first rules, and welcoming the first onboarding wave. We recommend to create a "Team" chat and invite all early core members manually to it. A good size for early core is 20-50 people.
The initial invitation list can come from previous activities of the organizer, e.g. their newsletter, alums of their educational programs, customer list, Linkedin connections, etc. A good size for initial invitation list is 1000+ people, although smaller lists sometimes work too.
On launch day, the organizer publishes a series of social media announcements (Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.), sends direct invitations to the initial list, and asks early promoters for retweets and reposts. A good result is 100-200 members joining on the first day and 500-1000 total over the course of the first two weeks.
To create the best newcomer experience, we recommend to onboard new members in waves, sending invites to 100-1000 people at a time. Later, you can onboard each member in real time.
When invited, a new member should receive an invitation link and a link to member guide, i.e. an online doc with community benefits, rules, and the first day checklist.
We recommend to automatically subscribe all new members to a small number (typically 3-7) of default groups. The common default groups are: intros, random_chat, announcements, feedback, and ask_community.
The most important actions for new members should be to write a self-intro message in the designated group and to complete their **profile** (e.g. using the text from their intro post).
A direct welcome message from one of community admins can be sent automatically. Alternatively, a bot message can be configured. Early core members can be instructed to like and comment intro posts of newcomers to create immediate feeling of belonging.