How Morning Brew Turned Their Audience Into a Thriving Community
An event summary from our January 2022 event with Kyle Hagge
On Friday, Kyle Hagge shared how he helped Morning Brew turn their massive audience of 5M+ into an engaged community as their Community Lead.
With more than 5 million subscribers across all their media assets, Morning Brew is one of the world's fastest-growing business media brands.
Last year, for the first time ever, their brand new community and events team launched cohort-based career and skill accelerators to empower the next generation of business leaders.
Every attendee’s notepads were overflowing as Kyle dove into the details of this 0-1 transformation.
Check out our summary of some of the top tactics below!
🚀 Top tactics on how to transform your audience into a thriving community:
➡️ Have a plan and not enough time
It has been said that for things to happen you need two things: a plan and not quite enough time. Morning Brew gave themselves <4 months to build the entire new Accelerator format, onboard and then start the first cohort.
“We created a much better program by creating it and putting people through it than we would have just thinking and planning by ourselves”.
➡️ Focus on benefits, not features
Make sure you understand your ideal members well enough that you know what they want out of your community. When you start to promote your community to them, focus on articulating the way in which they will directly benefit from it (like the amazing people they will meet), and how it will solve their problems instead of just talking about its abstract features (like your new matchmaking tool).
➡️ Don’t automate humanity
Kyle understood that customers of their first cohort were taking a risk with them by joining and paying for something brand new, so he created a short personalised video on his iphone for every new joiner welcoming them into the Program. Although it took a lot of time, it engendered a huge amount of trust that really helped him get their first cohort community off the ground.
➡️ Community is many to many
You don’t have community until you have evolved into an environment where the predominant format of communication is many-to-many instead of one-to-many. Prioritise creating and articulating a reason that people should be coming together, then design a space around that where it is easy for people to interact with and support each other directly. When you see the type of member-to-member behaviour emerging that you want to see, make sure you reward it.
➡️ Act on Community feedback
The quality and quantity of feedback you get will diminish if you don’t take the time to show people you are taking it onboard. Kyle responded to every single piece of feedback that his community members had taken the time to write out. He would give clear examples of how and when each idea or improvement would be implemented and even if it couldn’t happen he would explain why. These responses delighted the members and led to further insights and even testimonials that got better and better with time.
This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.
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