The Course Mentors Podcast

Your Community Might Be a Waste of Time & Energy

• The Course Mentors • Season 1 • Episode 12

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Is your course community feeling more like a ghost town than a thriving hub? Are you drowning in notifications or struggling to keep conversations flowing? In this game-changing episode, we're spilling ALL the tea on what it really takes to build a course community that doesn't burn you out!

Get ready for some truth bombs about why most course communities fail (and how to make sure yours doesn't). Plus, we're sharing our tried-and-tested 80/20 rule that turns struggling communities into self-sustaining success stories!


In This Episode:

  • Why more posts from YOU isn't the answer (and what is)
  • How to create engagement without living in your phone
  • The boundaries you need to prevent burnout
  • Simple systems that keep conversations flowing
  • Real examples of communities that actually work

Whether you're just starting your first community or trying to revive an existing one, this episode will show you exactly how to create connection without chaos. Because a great community shouldn't mean sacrificing your sanity!

#CourseCreator #CommunityBuilding #OnlineCourse #DigitalProduct

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Catch us every Wednesday for your weekly dose of course creation wisdom. Got questions or loving the show? Let us know on IG @thecoursementors. For more on our courses and mentorship, check out Online Course School's website https://thecoursementors.com/application.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Course Mentors podcast. I'm Odette and I'm Amy.

Speaker 2:

Today we're talking about something that keeps course creators up at night managing a course community without losing their mind hopefully we have a lot to well, I know that we will, but we have a lot to share today about what we've seen go right and what we've seen go horribly, horribly wrong, with course, communities really not that bad, but it's just very under thought about.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, a lot of the time they just so right, they just say, oh, we'll put a community in the end, and people will be in there engaging all day, every day, making the bestest of best friendships yeah, and it's going to go super smoothly and I will do nothing and it's very hands-off, not the case, but we'll get into that.

Speaker 2:

We certainly will. Just for everyone listening at home. Dad just pointed to her stomach. How's your baby planning going, dad, oh, baby planning, baby planning, not going anywhere.

Speaker 1:

I have not done a thing. You are crazy, I know you're insane, I think.

Speaker 2:

Nothing like dad and I have worked together now for coming up on six years and nothing has ever illustrated or spelled out to me quite clearly how different we are as being pregnant. And look, we all say we always say this all the time I'm type a, you're type b I think by this stage you would have had like a painted room, a crib, really.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, oh, my god, am I behind? I don't think so.

Speaker 2:

No, no, no, no, you're not behind, I'm just crazy.

Speaker 1:

Okay good, okay good no, that that'll be like when I'm like really close and I'll be like, oh god, I had better have somewhere for the baby to sleep I admire it so much.

Speaker 2:

I think that I was like I'm having a baby, I need to get control over every other thing, because I'm so type a. I was like I've got to set up a crib and I've got to prepare and, and I told my parents we were having a baby and I invited them over for dinner and then I walked them into the room at 14 weeks and it showed them like a fully decorated room with everything built.

Speaker 1:

Wow, no, not even almost Like the nursery is still like an office. Do you have any clothes for the baby? Only what's been given to me like an office. Do you have any clothes for the baby? Only what's been given to me? You haven't been shopping, not yet. I don't know. I just I don't know, I haven't yet. I will.

Speaker 2:

I gave that credit card of workout when I was pregnant, I don't know.

Speaker 1:

I I think I'm a bit older than you, not to be condescending, but like I'm like older than you and I feel like, oh, it'll happen when it happens. Like just really are so chill. I'm just a bit more chill. You feel like, oh, it'll happen when it happens. You just really are so chill. I'm just a bit more chill.

Speaker 2:

You are a little bit more chill, but that's why we work so well together.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%, because you let me be crazy and I let you be chill and you push me a bit to be like all right, be a bit less chill sometimes.

Speaker 2:

And you calm me back down, you're like, hey, we don't have to have the world figured out in the next six seconds yeah, 100%.

Speaker 1:

That's going to make a good team. So, in summary, it works. But the baby's happy, that's all I care about and I'll just keep on buying stuff for the baby. That would really solve some probably problems that are coming up for me. Thank you, all right, so let's get into it.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So I think the most common thing that happens with communities is two things, and today we're going to break those down and just get rid of them. Great, first one making a community as a band-aid solution and just being like, hey, I'm supposed to have a community in there, that's really fun and people will just engage naturally and it'll be alive and people will be having a great time in there making communication. And. And then the second thing is having a community that has zero boundaries to it, and so you're glued to your phone 24-7. You cannot sleep. You're waking up at 3 am with a thousand notifications going off. 100%. Both of those things really bad.

Speaker 1:

The reason they're bad is because a community can't just be like I have a community. End of sentence, end of thought, end of planning. A community needs a point Like first of all, should you have a community? Is it a good idea? It shouldn't just be a given. You should think what are people going to get out of the community? What is the purpose of this community?

Speaker 2:

Exactly One thing that we see in the course creation space is communities being tacked onto the end of an inclusion list as a standard inclusion, like, yeah, you get the course, you get the videos, you get the modules and then you get a community. And oftentimes we see community valued at two thousand dollars and you get it included. How, how? And it drives us crazy, because communities are not just a random add to your course to add value.

Speaker 1:

they are a very strategic learning tool and not everyone, like I just said, should have a community 100%, because the reason you need to think about this is if you just throw in a community and you don't tell people what it's for or what to do there, you can have some really serious problems If you're in anything to do with health. Health are people using that community to get advice, where people should not be replying to them. Somebody puts a question to a community. The community can answer. Should they be giving medical advice?

Speaker 2:

or what about if it's super emotionally charged and people are saying, hey, I just gave birth. Last week, I will anecdotally joined a breastfeeding course and that course came with a community, and that community is crazy well, that's it, like people vent in a community yeah, they come in and they say I just gave birth six hours ago, I can't stop crying, my baby won't latch.

Speaker 2:

What do I do? Help, I'm in an emergency like that is not your job as a course creator. You're there to educate about something. You're not there to be a 24-7 on-demand therapist.

Speaker 1:

You are there to protect the other students and they need their experience like monitored and you need to control that experience for them as well, because one person jumping into a community inventing about something, that's really not appropriate. You don't want that affecting your other students either. So you've really got like a duty of care there to everybody in your course, not just that you know one individual absolutely so.

Speaker 2:

The very, very, very first thing that we talk about with communities is do you actually need one? Are people going to get a very real and actualized benefit from the community? Do they need other people's support? Do they need to see what other people are going through to get the transformation?

Speaker 1:

like. Troubleshoot what the issues with the community could be, so that you can make sure it doesn't happen from the start yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

If you have decided that, yes, a community would be over, I'm not here to scare you away from one no, no, it just needs to be a question, it's a, it's a decision that needs to be thought out it cannot just be tacked on as an inclusion because everyone else is doing one yeah.

Speaker 2:

So once you've decided, yes, this is going to be really beneficial for me and people are going to go and get a lot out of the community. They're going to speak to other people, they're going to learn from other people's journeys, they're going to get support from other students and it's going to be beneficial. An example is my japanese course. It's really good to have a community in there, because the amount of questions that come up that I cannot foresee about how someone's interpreted a tiny, tiny piece of does this word mean this in english is really important that I can navigate that and manage that in a community. But also because I want people to talk to each other and practice the japanese that they're learning and I think that's really, really beneficial. So I have a community, dad has a community yeah.

Speaker 1:

For you it's more about like getting that support that takes a lot off your hands. For me, it's more about like accountability and like showing off the projects you've made. It really increases engagement for me because people look forward to showing process steps and showing their finished sewing project. So Amy and I have two very different purposes for our communities that have been communicated. Like Amy said, it's a learning tool. They have a set purpose. They fulfill that purpose.

Speaker 2:

Here are the three biggest community challenges that we see people struggle with once they have decided that they're going to have a community. Okay, the first one is cricket chirps. So this is when you create a community, and oftentimes this links back to not having that clear communication, not having clear objectives, not knowing exactly what it is that you've created the community for. You get a silent community on the side of that, because people don't know why they're supposed to be engaging with each other, and maybe it's not clear and maybe they're just confused.

Speaker 1:

People second guess themselves too, and if you haven't said this is what the community is for, post this type of thing.

Speaker 2:

People don't know what to post, they don't post the second one is the overwhelm override, and this is when there are too many notifications and people again don't really know how to use the community. So they're just posting it all day, every day, with a billion notifications going off, and for some people this is counterproductive. For a lot of people that's overwhelming, it's frustrating. They close the communities out and they stop engaging with that, which over time creates a lot of non-completion rates.

Speaker 1:

That's right. It comes back to knowing what the community is for. Number three is drama management. If you've got a whole bunch of people together, especially if your content is maybe heavy or there's something that they could, you know, complain about or vent about.

Speaker 2:

If you today, you got a group of 200 people, let's say, and you put them in a room together and you put them in that room together every day for three months, eventually by like week nine. Someone's not going to like another person.

Speaker 1:

It's kind of just human behavior, yeah, or they say something that is construed as passive, aggressive. So having really clear guidelines in your community again what it's about, but also what's like tolerated. Like any good community, there should be rules like no swearing, no, nothing offensive, don't post nudes. Hopefully that's not by experience.

Speaker 2:

So we've talked a little bit about people who maybe don't need a community after all, and it's not just a standard thing, tack on to the end of your course that it needs to be and that maybe you should be thinking strategically about if it's actually going to benefit people. We've also talked about what can go wrong in a community and all the ways that we can see communities go dead or overwhelming. Now we're going to talk about how to get higher community engagement, get people talking, moving and action taking in your community, and then we're going to talk about how to do this in a really easy, systematic calendar. And then, finally, we're going to come back and loop around two boundaries that you really should be setting in your community to make sure that these things aren't happening.

Speaker 1:

First up, we have the 80-20 community rule. It should be community run. It shouldn't just be a place where you drop in for prompts and notifications. You know that makes it not really community, you know, you know that makes it not really community, you know. So to create that community atmosphere, you want 20 to be your input and 80 is their activity, their input. For you, your 20 could look like weekly themes, celebration prompts. You can call out specific people maybe they've emailed you saying, hey, I just did this really cool thing and you say, hey, I'll pop that in the community. That's amazing. Discussion starters say, hey, what's everyone up to this week? That's a very basic example, but it starts a discussion and then core announcements. So if there's anything going on, hey, maybe I'm running an extra training session. That sort of stuff's just a given. Post it to your community. So that's what your 20% should look like. The 80% of their activity should be member discussions. Hopefully that they've facilitated them themselves, but if not, you've put a prompt there. You've started that discussion. Now it's all up to the members Peer support.

Speaker 1:

So if somebody asks a question, they can offer advice, as long as it's appropriate and the right advice. You need to sort of monitor that just to make sure everyone's on the right track. But peer support should look like advice cheerleading. If somebody posts a win, they hopefully will be like a pylon of well done. Oh my God, that's so amazing. On that note, win sharing you should encourage people to share their own wins in the community, not just you always calling people out. In fact, if you get an email and they've shared something really cool with you, hit them back and say amazing, go post that in the community. I want everyone to share your win. And then a lot of it will be question asking. So they should be able to ask questions in the community. Get some answers from not just you, but everybody else.

Speaker 2:

As a bit of a case study, we had an incredible student called Michelle. She's amazing. She runs a marketing course and had a community associated with it. Now, when she first started her course, she was doing 95 of the posts, because when you first start a community spoiler alert, it's gonna be kind of quiet yeah, which is okay. That's a really good expectation okay, totally normal, totally fine, and.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, good expectation is that it builds with time.

Speaker 2:

But she raised her posting to 95%, which is fine and, again, that's good. But the culture that you foster is what will follow. So she kept posting at 95% and over time her course got more and more and more students until she had 400 students, but she had kept posting 95% of the content. So anytime that a student posted a question in the community and they were asking other students for the answer, she would immediately be the first comment to jump in and then end the discussion. Yeah, and that kept the community stuck because they turned into the culture of. This is where I go if I want to ask questions and Michelle will answer me straight away, instead of letting other students jump in and answer the questions for her Absolutely, which meant she was up 24-7 when she really didn't need to be.

Speaker 1:

She had a really great community. All she needed to do was monitor to make sure that people were on the right track, and we told her turn your comments, turn your answers into a thumbs up.

Speaker 2:

Yes, we said to her go and star the most correct answer instead. And when she did this she turned her posting down to 20% and immediately the community met her at the 80%.

Speaker 1:

Way better experience.

Speaker 2:

Way better experience for the students and for her. So sometimes it's about the culture that you're setting. Sometimes, if you're posting too much in the community and you're kind of like throttling the answer section, you're turning it into a bottleneck for you because you're making sure that you're the only person that can communicate back. Instead.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes you just need to put a thumbs up in there yeah, the community should take work off your hands, not create more for you.

Speaker 2:

A great community hosts conversations, doesn't lecture next up, we want to talk about how this can be systematic what does a good monday to friday look like within an online course community? Because we're asking you to do prompts and start conversations when you do that. So here's an example of a week that we would set out for somebody.

Speaker 1:

Your community should sound repetitive, because repetitive equals consistency and good expectations. So if you think, oh no, that'll get really repetitive, good you want it to be repetitive.

Speaker 2:

People want to know what to expect. Starting with Monday you could post Monday morning 8.30 in the morning, monday motivation. You could post one quick hit of motivation every single Monday morning. That is going to keep people looking forward to that every Monday because it's the first thing they're going to see when they start their week.

Speaker 1:

How exciting, how exciting. Another really nice one is a weekly goal setting. Say hey, what are you up to? Give me one goal for this week. What are you working on?

Speaker 2:

That is a 15 minute task, if I've ever seen one. You post in something that's really motivational, a sentence or two, and then, hey guys, now you tell me what you're doing this week. 15 minute task every Monday.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. If that you can pre-write them in advanced copy and paste Then on Tuesday come back around for teaching Tuesday, or quick tips or resource sharing.

Speaker 2:

That can look like sharing something quick in the community. It can look like a quick tip. It can look like a five minute video that you've recorded, just something that is going to reignite community engagement, because people are going to get something for free in the community and go hey, that was so great. Thanks, dad, I loved it. Have a great week, dad.

Speaker 1:

On Wednesday get creative. Maybe it's a Wednesday win. You could single one student out, or a few students out and say, hey, tell us a win lately. It could be in your personal life or in the course. What's been going on for you. Give me a win to really get that positivity going. It could be a celebration thread, it could be a progress update. You prompt people to say, hey, what are you up to? It's Wednesday, what have you done this week? What are the rest of your goals? You know, just get creative with it.

Speaker 2:

On Thursday or Friday you can post an implementation check or a problem solving situation or a feedback. Friday or weekly wins, Any of those things towards the end of the week where you can come in and ignite a little bit of passion, a little bit of engagement quick, prompt, five-minute task and then round out the weekend.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely Use Monday's work to feed Thursday's work. So, hey, what was your goal on Monday? Did you achieve your goal? Yeah, how's it going? Do you need a prompt, or have you already smashed your goal? You know, make it super personal.

Speaker 2:

Perfect. So, as you can see, during the week you don't need to do a lot of work to bring your 20%, because if you're posting these prompts and you're having 100 people respond back to you, that's going to be your 20, their 80. And that is going to keep the community moving. That consistency is also what's going to help create that community feeling overall, a really kind of shitty feeling. Community is one where you check in every like three weeks and say, hey guys, what's up?

Speaker 1:

Crickets, crickets, crickets. All right, yeah, and and it's too general like hey, what's up?

Speaker 2:

like get specific and you'll get specific answers absolutely okay, now let's talk about boundaries, because if you've got those two things sorted, you've got the fact that you're bringing 20, they're bringing 80 and you have a nice structured routine going where you've got some prompts that you're posting on Monday, some on Wednesday and maybe some on Friday. Right, what's?

Speaker 1:

next, let's talk about boundaries. People respect boundaries. For starters, set boundaries, people will respect them. You might need to reinforce them from time to time, but it's not a negative thing. Enforcing a boundary equals respect.

Speaker 2:

We say this all the time, but people love communication and where things go wrong is actually when you don't uphold your personal boundaries, and then people don't know how to behave and then they get it wrong. And then they get punished for getting it wrong when they were confused at the start and that creates a really shitty negative feedback loop.

Speaker 1:

And it unravels really fast.

Speaker 2:

So you've got to really stick to your boundaries so there are three main type of boundaries that you can keep in your community, and the first one is like the most critical of all, which is time boundaries, specifically setting community hours. I cannot express to you how seriously important this is that you set community hours and you let people know when you are reachable and then you stick to that. It is so critically important because, with online courses, you're selling to the world, and when you sell to someone on the other side of the world to you, they're awake and they're saying, hey, I sent that email or that community post or I did whatever nine hours ago.

Speaker 1:

What gives, I'm about to go to bed and I haven't got an answer. 100%. You were asleep for those nine hours. You really need to communicate time and time again that hey guys, I'm on the other side of the world. Whilst I'd love to answer you all night, it's not really going to happen, is it? So that's a really important boundary to set. So set those community hours of when you're actually going to be active in the community, when you're awake, essentially, and response windows. I will get back to you within 24 hours. It's not like a chat.

Speaker 2:

You're not texting each other. The next thing that you need to do in the time boundaries column is you need to batch your engagement so that you are not on a hamster wheel of community posting. Okay, when we talked about a content calendar, before posting Monday, wednesday and Friday, or Tuesday, thursday and Friday, whatever it is that you're going to be posting, right, you'll know what's right for your community. Doing that, like Det said, by batching that work together and then posting it when you need to post it, is incredibly important Because you cannot be available every single Monday morning at 8am for the rest of your life. Be available every single Monday morning at 8am for the rest of your life. Sometimes things are going to happen and you need to be available and ready to have something that you can quickly pull from a copy paste file.

Speaker 1:

Yep, best practice. If you've decided every Monday I'm going to do a prompt, write a whole bunch in advance, copy and paste. All right, energy boundaries you can delegate roles within your community. If you've got like natural leaders that you've discovered in your course they're posting all the time you can delegate some of these roles. They'll love it because they're obviously extroverts. You can reward them for it. You could give them like extra time in the course or an extra module, an extra module discount on the next round.

Speaker 1:

Yep, something that works for you. Delegate those roles, Turn those community like.

Speaker 2:

Empower those people to really make your community a really cool place to be in the next thing to help preserve your energy is to automate and template an FAQ template up as many of your resources and responses as you can. So naturally, the same kind of questions are going to arise sometimes, whether you like it or not. And if you can't build it into your course content, those same questions are going to get asked and that's okay. That's really really normal. It's actually really natural and to be expected, but when it does happen, it is so much better of an experience for you and your own energy boundaries, but also for your students, when they can be sent a document or a spreadsheet that has recurring and common FAQs on it.

Speaker 1:

Next is probably one of the most important. It's expectation boundaries. The first thing that you need to do when you create a community from day one, you need to set clear guidelines from day one. You need to set clear guidelines. We've talked about how important it is to tell people what the community is for, what they should be posting so that they really have a purpose and they ask the right questions in the community. Also, rules no fighting, no swearing at each other, no inappropriate content. That sort of thing Seems obvious, but the amount of communities that don't have it is crazy to us.

Speaker 1:

Set those expectations of response times what support levels you're actually going to be giving in the community? Are you going to jump into every question? Tell people, hey, answer people's questions like make it clear that it's not just a like Q&A for you, but tell people, hey, respond. I'd love to see everybody's input. Tell them and they'll do it. And then access limits. So let them know from the start you have six months access to the community or, whilst the course is 12 weeks, you actually get lifetime access to the community. That's just a sort of 101. People will ask make sure you've told them from the start. So that's all about boundaries. It's not a negative thing. You need to set them, people will respect them, but it just means your communication is strong, because and strong boundaries create safe spaces for everyone. Okay, guys, I hope that clarified whether you actually need a community or not and made sure that, if you have one, what it's going to be about. What's the purpose of your community as as a learning tool? What is it going to contribute to your course?

Speaker 2:

I also hope this showed you that it also isn't either end of the spectrum. It's not a tick and flick task. You cannot just run a community and expect people to be in there loving on each other and making friendships when you're not even in the community. But it also doesn't need to be something where you're glued to your phone 24-7 up at 3 am, blinding your husband with a screen brightness because someone's asked a question in the community. That's not appropriate either. I hope that this has really helped you dispel a lot of those myths and show you that having a community is a lot easier than you might think and a little bit more work than you might think.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a real balance and you might have a bit of trial and error at getting it right, but I promise you, if you implement these tips in this podcast, it's going to make your life so much easier. It's going to make your community a really positive, safe, fun environment and it's going to make it way more enjoyable for you.

Speaker 2:

That is about it from us, though, guys. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next week. Bye.