3 things I learned from soft-launching my social impact community
Hi friends! I recently launched a community for Soapbox Project (www.soapboxproject.org). We make social impact easy for busy people. We started with 3-min bite-sized climate action plans in a newsletter format, started some monthly events, and most recently launched a paid membership community.
We soft-launched in March 2021. Here's 3 things I learned so far:
- A 1:1 welcome does wonders.
I noticed many of our 60 founding members would lurk and in many cases not even log into the community. This surprised me because they were paying for it! Not much, $5/mo, but still. I started reaching out to do 1:1s with each of them and offer a personalized community tour and that would convert almost immediately after our call into logging in and posting an intro! I'm still figuring out how to scale this experience, maybe through a video or getting other community members to reach out, but it's SO important to make people feel like individuals, not just numbers.
- One of the biggest barriers to engagement is knowing how to engage.
After the first week, I removed most of the channels I'd so carefully set up because I realized people didn't know where to post stuff and what to post. During those 1:1s, I discovered that people just wanted to know WHERE and how to share their thoughts!
- Be clear on community goals and what members will get.
I redesigned my founding member launch page like 10 times. I realized that early on, I wasn't centering my user, I was focusing too much on sharing my own story, and it wasn't clear what would happen once people joined the community. This is the initial launch page, but I've since created location-based signup pages that you can see in the nav under Community. https://www.soapboxproject.org/beta
Let me know if you have any questions or tips! The current stack is Webflow.com, Outseta.com, and Circle.so.
