Community, by design
Most communities are run by marketing.
We design the ones that run on culture.
Communities are frequently confused with audiences, events, and calendars.
People do not belong because they joined something.
They belong when there is a common reason to gather, moments they can count on, and relationships they can carry with them.
What scaling a community really looks like.
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10-150 members
You are bringing your first people together and finding out what kind of community they want you to lead. You test ideas to see what holds. You model the behaviour you want everyone to pick up, because for now you are the only reference point they have.Working when: members start showing up for each other and offering support without being asked.
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150 - 500 members
People are joining because they recognise something in the culture the early members built. The waitlist is growing, the work coming back at you is more than you can hold, and every instinct says keep up. This is the phase to slow down and build the systems, the data, and the team that let you welcome hundreds properly, without letting down the people who championed you first. Communities that skip it lose the thing that made them worth joining.Working when: the community keeps running while your team takes a week off, and your team is looking forward to the next thousand members rather than bracing for them.
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500 & beyond
Your language, your products, your ideas and your champions start appearing in the right places without you putting them there. Members run their own programmes alongside you. Partners arrive unasked. The community carries your mission outward and begins to reshape the category you sit in.
Working when: people outside the community buy what it makes, use its words, and start behaving the way its members do.
We help you navigate this three phase journey
Communities move through three phases of growth. Each one asks for different resources, different strategies, and different measures of success.
Rushing through them is the most common mistake we see community builders make, and the damage usually shows up a phase later.
Some of our active projects
The Whole Truth
We are designing the The Whole Truth’s community and lead their in-house team.
With over three maxed out groups, multi-city gatherings, member led initiatives and a waitlist of over 10,000 new members in the wings, the Truth Seekers community is well into phase 2 of its scaling journey.
We are currently getting their team ready to handle phase 3.
The XMA is our first incubated community.
We are trusted by their members to run the community and its entire business development.
It is unique in its wide distribution of community leaders all driving different programs in perfect alignment with the organisation’s mission.
The XMA is a frontier community that benefits (& suffers) from some of our more riskier experiments. It is about to enter phase 2 of its scaling journey.
Xavier’s Media Alumni Network
How we work
Community Accelerator
Twelve Week Program
for community teams looking to resolve specific challenges
Community building is a long journey and sometimes teams need help getting unstuck. That’s where we come in. Say you’re launching a new community program and need help designing it, or you’ve got people coming in the door but are struggling to retain them, or maybe you are just starting off and need help finding your first steps; we’re here to make sense of the challenges, design solutions, and help your team get over the line.
Community Designers
Retainer
We lead your community team
We embed in your organisation, either leading the community team you already have or setting up a dedicated pod for you. Then we stay in the build. Designing programmes, growing member leaders, building the tools & systems, surfacing the data and what it tells us, and building your team's capacity as we go.
This is the work we do with The Whole Truth and XMA.
We build this with you
It works when your organisation has a dedicated team for community, when your leadership is willing to let members shape things rather than just receive them, and when you can give the foundations a full quarter before judging them.
If you are looking for someone to run events while everything else stays as it is, this will not be the right fit.