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6 Things I Review Before Redesigning Any Community · Build With Becky: Smart Strategies To Grow Your Community-Driven Business

• 0:00
  In this episode, I'm going to break down the six things I check before I redesign anything in a community.
• 0:06
  I like to call this our membership audit.
• 0:08
  And it's the first step if we are going to help you upgrade your community experience.
• 0:14
  So the first thing that I want to understand is what kind of member feedback are you getting?
• 0:18
  So let's say you joined a discovery call.
• 0:21
  We're going to ask, what kind of data do you have?
• 0:23
  When is the last time you ran a survey with your members?
• 0:26
  What do you know about your retention data, your engagement data?
• 0:30
  What's your cancellations look like?
• 0:32
  We want to understand what's working, what's not, what are their favorite features, what do they want more of, what do they want less of?
• 0:40
  Like what?
• 0:40
  Where are we meeting expectations?
• 0:43
  Where are we exceeding expectations?
• 0:45
  All of these questions are so important and the only way to know the answer is to actually talk to your members.
• 0:51
  So anybody that tells you all of the things you should do to your community without actually asking you, what kind of feedback are you getting from your members, like, beware, okay?
• 1:01
  We want to understand what the members are actually saying, what they're feeling, and then what the behavioral data shows.
• 1:07
  So this is both like qualitative conversations with them and then quantitative.
• 1:11
  What kind of data do we actually have in your platform?
• 1:15
  And by the way, we do plenty of discovery calls where we talk to people that are like, I really don't know, and then we give them guidance and our survey template on how they should actually, you know, run
• 1:26
  a survey with their community, what kind of data they have, and we dig into it because we don't want to create a strategy for anyone or do an audit for anyone without having some data to go off of.
• 1:36
  We should always be making data driven decisions.
• 1:39
  And that's why my team is all tech background product people.
• 1:42
  And this is how we look at things.
• 1:44
  We want to make sure we're making recommendations based on your community members, not any community member ever.
• 1:51
  Because every community is different.
• 1:53
  This is a people product.
• 1:55
  And so what your people are working toward, what they care about, how they like to engage, it's different in every single community experience.
• 2:03
  So that's the first thing we want member feedback.
• 2:05
  We want member behavior data.
• 2:07
  So we take that data and with that in mind, then we review for user experience.
• 2:13
  So this is our audit checklist, the five things that we like to review when we're looking at your community.
• 2:18
  The first thing is onboarding.
• 2:20
  So we want a really strong onboarding experience because that is absolutely essential for engagement, retention, and long term value.
• 2:28
  We want to know that your sending onboarding emails, that you have some sort of onboarding experience.
• 2:33
  It should be fun, it should be curated, it should be personalized, it should make them feel like they belong, it should build connection and it should again be fun.
• 2:44
  I'm going to say that one twice because if onboarding is boring, if they feel like they just have a giant to do list, they're going to dip out and they're never going to log in again.
• 2:52
  The second thing we audit is structure.
• 2:54
  If your membership is hard to navigate, there's a good chance they'll never log in after that first time.
• 3:01
  So we wanna make sure they can find what they're looking for easily, that they can navigate it.
• 3:07
  Because there's a really clear navigation and this is kind of a sidebar.
• 3:10
  But this is like my, this is why I struggle with Mighty and some certain platforms because there's so much navigation.
• 3:18
  In Mighty you have primary, secondary and tertiary navigation.
• 3:22
  So like you have your primary navigation bar at the top, your secondary sidebar navigation and then when you click an actual space there's also additional like tabs and that's tertiary navigation.
• 3:35
  So something can be so, so buried and hard to find.
• 3:38
  So unless it's architected in a very, very simple manner, it's very easy for there to be an overwhelm and engagement issue in that platform.
• 3:47
  I'm not hating on that platform.
• 3:48
  Like, I'm not saying if you're on that platform you need to change, but it is the reason why I don't recommend building on it from scratch usually.
• 3:57
  So you know, there, there's a lot that goes into structure.
• 3:59
  It's the platform choice, but it's also how you've actually architected the spaces.
• 4:04
  Like, is it overwhelming?
• 4:06
  Is it hard to find things?
• 4:08
  Can, is it clear or is it clever?
• 4:11
  Like all of these things go into the problem around structure and user experience of that, of the way that your community is actually architected.
• 4:20
  Okay.
• 4:20
  The third thing is content.
• 4:23
  So in memberships more is not always better.
• 4:26
  And in fact overwhelm is the number one reason that people leave.
• 4:30
  And so if you have content we want to look at, how is it organized?
• 4:33
  Are we, do we have an overwhelm problem?
• 4:36
  Is it really clear how to navigate it and find what they're looking for?
• 4:40
  Is it, is it easily filtered?
• 4:43
  Is it easily, is there really clear like roadmaps or paths or personalization that goes with the content so that we can understand like which content is for them?
• 4:53
  Especially if there's a Lot of it.
• 4:54
  Or is it like this membership's been around for five years and here's a giant library of 100 million replays you can watch.
• 5:00
  That's not ideal.
• 5:01
  The fourth thing is programming.
• 5:03
  To scale successfully, you need more than great content and community, you need strong programming.
• 5:09
  And programming can come in the form of live calls, of in person experiences, of boot camps, of challenges, of drops of content that you do in the community where you give people an assignment that they then return.
• 5:23
  I mean, there's definitely asynchronous ways to do programming if you want, but programming is really crucial to drive that ongoing engagement and retention.
• 5:33
  And so we need really strong programming and live experiences, in person experiences.
• 5:37
  This kind of stuff is doing really, really well in 2026.
• 5:42
  And the last category, the fifth, the sixth category that we're auditing is your forum.
• 5:47
  So if the forum itself, where people can talk to one another and chat, if it feels quiet or inactive, maybe you're.
• 5:55
  You describe it as like it's crickets in there, then something isn't working right.
• 5:59
  And it's usually not just one thing causing the issue.
• 6:02
  It could be the way that it's structured.
• 6:04
  It could be that we're not really driving meaningful engagement.
• 6:08
  And if that's the first time you're hearing that phrase, I'm going to put another episode in the show notes where I talk about meaningful engagement.
• 6:14
  So defining what meaningful engagement looks like for your community will really help with driving forum engagement.
• 6:22
  That's actually like works and is valuable and what people need.
• 6:27
  In some cases, forum isn't that important.
• 6:31
  Like it's okay if it's really quiet.
• 6:33
  In other cases, like it is a huge value of the community because people need to be sharing notes or doing the work or submitting homework or all of these things.
• 6:41
  And so we really want to like get those numbers up.
• 6:45
  So it kind of depends on we, we look at these audit checklist items as like some things are going to be more important and way heavier than others for different communities.
• 6:54
  But I will say the two things that we pay most attention to in every single community audit we do is onboarding and structure.
• 7:01
  And I would say like content and programming is like a really quick follow there.
• 7:06
  But onboarding and structure are super crucial.
• 7:08
  And of course the member feedback that I talked about at the beginning.
• 7:11
  So if you would like us to do this for you, if you want us to go through and audit your experience, this is the first step for anybody with an existing membership that comes in to work with us.
• 7:21
  This is the first thing we do with them.
• 7:23
  It's super affordable.
• 7:24
  I even let you apply your fee forwards if you do a project with us afterwards.
• 7:30
  So if you're interested in it, book a free discovery call.
• 7:32
  The link is in the show notes and I'll also link that other episode I mentioned.
• 7:37
  And if this episode felt a little bit overwhelming to you, like, oh my gosh, there's so many things I'm not paying attention to, or I don't have a lot of member feedback.
• 7:45
  Start to think about how you can collect some member feedback.
• 7:48
  Talk to your members, maybe run a member survey.
• 7:51
  You know, look at your behavioral data.
• 7:54
  What do you know about them?
• 7:55
  What data can you take bring to the table that is going to help you improve some of these things and drive some decisions?
• 8:02
  Okay.
• 8:03
  Until next time, keep building.