Gisela started with community management in 2018 when she volunteered to revamp a local mom group. She didn’t know it was actually a real job back then but she simply had the passion to build a collaborative environment for the moms to openly share, have access to reputable sources of information, and gain support from one another.

She enjoys having an accessible support group because she wants others to have their own safe space as well, especially now that we are all physically apart.

In March 2020, Gisela had the opportunity to learn from Jono Bacon in his training program, Community Access Bootcamp, and everything took off from there.

Now, she’s a community strategist helping SaaS and membership businesses build collaborative virtual spaces that support growth and are an integral part of the members' ways of life.

If you need help understanding your clients and generating ROI from your online community, schedule a free discovery session with her.

How to start a community?

Research

Single Most Important Question (SMIQ)
What are your users going through right now?
What caused them to sign up?

Plan

Plan your events and discussions based on your research.
User's needs >>> Discussions, Content, Events Onboarding

Execute

Onboarding for new members (Could be as simple as sending them a personal message welcoming them into the community and providing guidelines)
Routines (Weekly lives that demonstrate the tool)
Discussions (How to make use of the tool)
Events

Get Feedback

To tweak and realign strategy
Net Promoter Score (Quantitative On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you with our community? Qualitative: If you were to recommend us to a friend, what would you tell them about us? This will let you know how they refer to you and helps you to see if it's aligned with your vision)
Participation (You can check analytics for insights on this)
Retention (To reduce churn)

How do you keep members engaged?

Are the activities relevant to what your members need help with?

Does it help them use your product more?

If not, you may need to realign your efforts. Speak directly with your members to find out. Their priorities could have changed and the activities you have are no longer relevant.

You can look at it as seasons.

Take my client for example who is targeting boutique owners. Live selling is usually weak during the holiday season (December) because people go to physical stores.

So, instead of doing live selling, you could talk about how to make your physical store more appealing.

Because what your business provides needs to align with your customers' changing needs as well.

Also, when there are other communities, try collaborating with them instead of seeing them as competition. You might be able to complement each other as you serve different needs.

How do you stay sane as a community manager and an empath?

Create healthy boundaries for yourself, for example, set post approval hours (e.g. every 8 AM only) and a specific time frame for when you’ll be engaging.

Build a routine not only for the community but also for yourself and stick to it. This way, instead of being reactive, you're grounded and not easily swayed by things.

While being an empath is good, you need to protect your energy because your members rely on you so you need to choose where to spend it.

How to minimize the work in the community?

Doing live events like this!

They let you pull content, which helps your marketing department. And you’ll be building more authentic relationships, and help create a solid routine for your members to go to (e.g. every Friday there’s a live demo of your tool).

Live events really show who you are versus just text posts and chat and it speeds up connection.

And community is all about connection.

In a live event, you're able to see each other and talk to each other and thus foster better connections.

Live Event Flows

Pre-Event

Topic->Teaser->Reminders->Event

See Mary's posts about this live event and the FB event Sarah created for pre-event examples.

Post-Event

Event->Key Takeaways->Snippet->Implementation

This article is an example of Key Takeaways and Gisela gives a live workshop on Snippet creation which you can see in the replay. 🙂

Also, the beauty of having a community is that the answers to your members' questions don't always have to come from you. They can come from other members as well. ❤

Remember, everything doesn't have to be perfect.

Just enjoy connecting with your members.

At the end of the day, it's all about making genuine connections.

Questions and Answers

What if your client asks you to manage a community on a platform other than FB, how do you handle that?

The platform is just a means to achieve your goal but the principles remain the same.

So, if ever your client wants to build a community on Slack, Discord, or his own website, it's okay.

Just visualize the things you need to do and map it out on the tools that are available - e.g. this tool is for events, this tool is for messaging.

Some say it's not possible to build a community on Instagram but that's not true. It has a group chat you can use to exchange messages between a large group of people.

Which tools have you found to be the most helpful for managing communities?

Know what you want to achieve. Start with your market first, with what you want to solve. For example, you want to pull entry answers from the questions to your email service provider, you can use GroupLeads (groupleads.net).

And if you want help on a large scale, you can use GroupTrackCRM. It can send bulk messages, make bulk comments, and it can even segment your users.

When is the right time to build a community for SaaS?

When you already have 2 or 3 beta users already.

But only when you have established a relationship 1 on 1 because you'll be like their usher, connecting them with each other by relating their experiences to one another.