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Serving Beginners & Advanced Members In The Same Community · Build With Becky: Smart Strategies To Grow Your Community-Driven Business

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  I was recently doing a strategy for a client for a hobby design community.
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  So think about this.
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  Like, it's not education.
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  They're not trying to grow their business.
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  They're literally just in there for vibes in there to have fun, in there to learn, and in there to, like, learn a new artistic skill and do the thing and practice and, like, be a part of it.
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  Right?
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  Okay, so hobby design community.
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  So the problem we were trying to solve was that members were either not participating, so they were struggling with engagement, or.
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  Or they're canceling and they're saying, I feel embarrassed to share my artwork because I am not good enough to be here.
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  Now, you can imagine the community builders that have built this incredible membership with, like, hundreds and hundreds of members are not excited to hear that.
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  Right?
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  They're like, wait a minute, what do you mean?
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  Like, this is for beginners, too.
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  Like, we're here to help you learn this skill from scratch.
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  But I will tell you that this is really, really common.
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  This is a cancellation reason I have seen across many communities, also in communities as well, where they're saying, like, I feel like a newbie or I'm too green to be here, or I'm afraid to speak up because everybody
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  else is so much further along than me.
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  They're more impressive than me.
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  There is a general feeling of.
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  There's.
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  There's not.
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  First of all, there's like a psychological safety problem because they don't feel safe to share their work.
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  They feel like they don't belong.
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  They feel like a newbie or a beginner when other people around them are more advanced.
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  And so they're either lurking and not participating, or they're canceling and saying, I feel too embarrassed.
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  I'm not ready to be here.
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  So this comes down to the fact that we need to serve different knowledge levels, different experience levels, differently in the community, in the membership.
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  And of course, you probably see this one coming.
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  But it all comes down to personalization.
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  When we understand who is joining and what their level is, what their experience is, where they are their.
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  Then we can give them a custom roadmap or a custom experience, or safe spaces for connection with others on their level based on where they're at.
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  And so there's a couple ways to think about this.
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  Number one, like, let's say you have people coming in that genuinely are too green for what you're teaching.
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  Maybe they are way more beginner, and you don't really have a beginner experience.
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  Then you might need an application, actually, and you might need to tell Some people, like, hey, this membership isn't for you.
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  So first of all, let's like put these, these, this group in one bucket.
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  So I'll give you an example, my friend Tamara's PMM camp that I've talked about before.
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  She helps senior product marketing leaders in her community.
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  And so anybody that's not a senior leader that they don't have that title yet, there may be an earlier stage junior product marketer.
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  They're not necessarily the target for her community.
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  So she has an application and she tells lots of people, no, sorry, you're not ready to join.
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  Here's some things you can do.
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  And then when you're ready, when you've reached this level in your career, we would love to welcome you in.
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  So you have the power to say, like, hey, this actually, this space actually isn't for you.
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  So number one, like, make sure if that's you, if this is your type of experience and it's actually for people that are a little bit further along, then you should have an application where you're filtering some people out.
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  So that's a number one.
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  But let's say for the purposes of the rest of this conversation that you do have beginner content and you have your space is meant to be for people that are beginner, people that are advanced.
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  Maybe you're serving a lot of different levels.
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  In this case, you need to have personalization.
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  So because you have these different tracks, these different routes where it's like, you're going to serve beginners, you're going to serve advanced, then you need to understand who your members are the second they join and get them into
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  the right content, or they're immediately going to feel like, I don't belong here.
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  And if you've listened to any of my content on onboarding, one of the most important things is that we want to create the feeling of, I belong here.
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  This is made for me.
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  And if we're not creating that, then they're not going to engage, they're not going to log back in, they're probably going to cancel.
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  So back to this strategy I was working on.
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  So they are definitely serving all kinds of levels and they're also serving different types of art in their community.
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  So what we wanted to do is really understand which art are they interested in making and what is their level for from when they first join.
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  So we have an onboarding experience that includes a quiz where we understand their interests, we show them different styles, they get to choose things.
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  It's super fun, fun is important.
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  And then at the end of that, it's like here's your custom content, your custom plan, your roadmap that you're gonna follow in order to create art that you care about, that you're gonna be excited about.
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  We're also putting them in a space for connection with others that are pursuing that same category of art.
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  The other thing we did was only give them access to certain courses that are at certain levels so that they're not overwhelmed by content that is way beyond their abilities just now.
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  They can always re go through a process and we can unlock new things, but we have processes for all of these different milestones they can hit.
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  But when they first join, we want to make sure we get them into the stuff that's right for them at that moment and not going to overwhelm them.
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  The next thing is one of my favorite strategies for programming that I tell lots of people.
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  So, okay, imagine you are going to a gym and you go to the gym classes, you like the live in person workout classes and you look at the schedule and there's certain classes that say that they're advanced and
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  there's certain classes that are like all access.
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  And then maybe you see some beginner ones.
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  Like you're not going to be able to take Reformer Pilates Advanced Reformer Pilates, which without taking a foundations Reformer Pilates class.
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  So in this experience for this client, we actually have labeled their events calendar with beginner classes, advanced classes and all access level classes.
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  Which really helps people understand like, okay, this beginner class is gonna be for me, I'm gonna sit in and watch the advanced class because I'm curious and I wanna see what I'm working toward.
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  But I also am not gonna feel like overwhelmed or like I don't belong because I know that it's like beyond my means or, or they just don't attend it.
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  Right.
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  So we have tracks kind of like beginner, intermediate, advanced.
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  And then we can make other programming of classes and events for the type of art as well.
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  So it's like category through personalization.
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  There's tracks for the different levels.
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  And this starts to feel like, oh, I belong here.
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  I'm just like in this group.
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  And so we're starting to sub community the community into different levels, into different interests.
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  And that's how you really serve a community that's scaling and that has a lot of people at different knowledge levels in your membership.
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  If you're interested in a strategy that's going to help you with your member journey, design with your programming strategy with how you can serve different members that are really on different playing fields and different levels, then this is
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  a very common problem that we do tackle a lot in our strategy workshops, which is the first step of any client working with us.
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  So if you're interested in doing this, you can book a free discovery call with my team.
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  There's a link in the show notes and we would love to chat with with you.
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  And until next time.
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  Until then, keep building.