How to scale your community: A content collection

To continue reaching the right folks, finding and welcoming new, and more, voices and experiences in conversations, and demonstrating the impact of the community on their business, community managers need to scale their communities.

While a community team might grow by one, two, even ten, the community itself will grow to much larger numbers. Community leaders need ways to acknowledge, activate, and reward their biggest advocates and most enthusiastic members to help scale the knowledge, reach, and effectiveness of the community.

Once you’ve seeded your community (check out our whole content collection about seeding your community) by determining the metrics that matter to you and your company, choosing your community tech stack, and gathering founding members in your first channel, you’ve got to begin the work of growing and scaling your community.

It won’t happen all at once, but you can start small by activating your community’s biggest advocates, giving them opportunities to participate and empower other members, and acknowledging and amplifying their contributions.

How to scale your community

We’ve put together a collection of pieces to help you think through the projects, programs, and platform features that can help you scale your community.

1. Building a nurture program
2. Building a Champions program in DevRel
3. How to host Twitter Spaces events
4. How to use Common Room’s Segments feature to develop and track your programs
5. How to build your community - a live author Q&A with Richard Millington

With Common Room, you can quickly identify your most enthusiastic, engaged, and influential community contributors and begin building the relationships that form the foundation of your community’s future. However you start, the most important thing is that you start. If you have questions or would like to hear from other community builders, join the Uncommon community Slack where you can connect with 1000+ community leaders.

The content collection

• Building a nurture program: Nurture programs provide guided product education, access to leaders and experts for mentorship, and opportunities for members to uplevel their knowledge and refine their ability to publicly showcase their expertise. This post walks you through defining your program’s purpose, determining your acceptance criteria and application process, outlining the program’s expectations, and defining the program’s benefits.
• Building a champions program for developer-focused communities: Written by our resident community scientist and former developer programs leader at AWS, this post dives into the three key steps DevRel community leaders need to take when building out their first champions program—define the program’s purpose, identify candidates, and establish the program benefits. To see how Common Room customers have built champions programs using our Segments feature, check out our popular use case, Build a champions program.
• How to host Twitter Spaces events: Consistency is super important when it comes to events—whether weekly, monthly, or yearly, it’s easier to show up when you know when you should be there. As a community leader, you want to bring members closer together to highlight and share learnings and expertise that helps folks grow in their careers, in their product understanding, and in themselves—however they find that in your community. Twitter Spaces has been a lightweight way to bring people together to do just that, and we wrote this blog post so you can start hosting your own without the hassle of learning how it all works.
• How to use Common Room’s Segments feature to develop and track your programs: Common Room’s Segments feature is designed to help you easily and efficiently create member cohorts to manage programs and track updates across your community. As you create segments, you automatically build your team’s collective knowledge used to further nurture members and build meaningful relationships. For more about Segments, visit our Segments section in our User Guides.
• How to build your community - a live author Q&A with Richard Millington: Founder of the community consultancy FeverBee and author of three books based on community building strategies, Richard spoke with the Uncommon community about everything from empowering your founding members to become community leaders to crafting excellent replies to community posts that facilitate more engagement and scale expertise and knowledge sharing across your community.

Every community is different, so if there’s only one thing you’re able to do today to step in the direction of scaling your community, reach out and ask a founding member (or two!) what would make them feel most valued and how they’d most like to help the community grow. Starting small is better than not starting at all.

To better engage, support, and grow your community, get started with Common Room for free. Want to connect with 1000+ community and DevRel leaders all sharing expertise around scaling and empowering their communities? Join Common Room’s Uncommon community Slack.