Objective: You will be able to apply best practices to keep your community engaged with your business before, during, and after your Backers campaign.
We’ll look at this in three phases: pre-campaign, during your campaign, and after your campaign.
Pre-campaign
This is about combining everything we’ve been talking about already. Choosing your community, growing your community, loyalty programs, what type of community platform you use, how you consistently create content that adds value to the lives of people in your community, and so on. We don’t need to go into more detail here!
During your campaign
The key here is that you focus your content and communications on your Backers campaign, but at the right level. You want to continue adding value to your community members’ lives, and you want to show that supporting your Backers campaign will be a great action they can take to enhance the value they’re receiving from your business and the community. However, you don’t want to put-off your community by making it seem like you’ve only built this relationship with them to be able to upsell them on equity. You want to show you’ll be there for them whatever they decide. Ultimately, what is essential here is that you continue your authentic engagements with your community. When people do support you on Backers, give them a shoutout in your community or do something else that makes them feel special and that incentivizes other people to join in as well.
After your campaign
Hopefully your campaign was a big success and things will never be the same again! Well, some things should stay the same actually. Everything you’ve built up before and during your campaign should continue. You should continue to engage your community and bring more people into it. You should continue to create frameworks that allow you to scale your community and eventually get into auto-pilot mode where your community is creating and sharing content with each other rather than you having to push everything.
You should celebrate your success, and make that celebration inclusive of everyone in your community old and new. The key here is integrating your upsold Backers (people who were already in your community who now bought equity) and your new Backers (people who weren’t in the community and now bought equity) back into your larger community in a way that makes them feel special and unique without making other people feel bad. Adding them into some of your super user or other exclusive community tiers could be a great idea! Creating a forum only for your Backers is smart too – you want them to feel that their feedback is heard and respected, especially because they really have their skin in the game with your company. This obviously does not mean you need to do anything they suggest, but listening to their thoughts and feedback and giving them space to discuss amongst each other can give you valuable information and insights you would otherwise not have access to.
Action Item(s):
- Write up a few pieces of content that aim to upsell your community on equity without making them feel you only built a relationship with them for that purpose.
- List a few ways you could make your community members feel special during the campaign for supporting you on Backers.
- List a few ways you can make your new Backers feel special (without making others feel bad) as you integrate them into your larger community.
