Your Community Platform Is Not the Reason Your Members Aren’t Moving
Look, we all know that collaborative spaces can help people move faster. But not all of them work as effectively. Why?
There are a few key factors that make all the difference, and most communities only check a few of the boxes. I’ve seen the same scenario play out in a million different ways.
There are three main characters in this story. For simplicity, we’ll call them the paradigm, the people, and the platform.
The paradigm is the transformation your community promises. It is what your members seek from the space and the specific genius you bring to it.
The people are you, as a thought leader, and all the individuals who engage with, apply, and contribute to the experience of playing in that paradigm.
The platform is the space, virtual or in person, that makes learning, connection, and continued participation possible.
Now that you know the players, let’s look at the pillars that create a successful community experience. In this scenario, I’m defining success as active member engagement that leads to the promised transformation and beyond.
The eight pillars of success
Purpose. Members understand the shared purpose of the collaborative space and can connect the dots between their participation and the transformation they seek.
Belonging. Everyone feels known and welcome to show up as they are, even when their work is unfinished or they are unclear about how to move forward.
Access. Members know where and when to find the resources, opportunities, and people they need to keep their momentum going.
Agency. Everyone can navigate the experience at a pace and in a way that works for them, even as their circumstances change. That includes the leaders in the space.
Contribution. Every individual feels that what they bring is welcomed and valued. Members can share their experiences and strengths instead of receiving from only one perspective.
Application. There is time, space, and support to use what is being learned in real time on real projects. Consumption without integration or application can lead to overwhelm, disengagement, and disappointment.
Accountability. There are structures and people who understand what you’re working toward, offer checkpoints, and help you keep moving without overriding your autonomy.
Continuity. The experience keeps evolving between scheduled gatherings or content delivery. It becomes a living progression that is personal and applied to each individual’s experience.
The paradigm gives the work, individually and collectively, purpose and direction. The platform makes access and continuity possible. The people, learners and leaders together, create belonging, contribution, application, and accountability.
For all eight pillars to be activated, there needs to be a strong relationship among all three characters. None of them can become the main character or, as I’m going to call it, the diva. They need to play harmoniously supportive roles.
Where I see things go off the rails most often is when one character becomes the diva and is too heavily relied on to make the whole experience work.
When the paradigm is the diva
The promise, teachings, and content are expected to create the transformation on their own. The platform stays busy delivering material, which may create inspiration and insight at first, but leaves a gap in support.
When momentum slows, the leader steps in to fill that gap, or learners are left to fill it for themselves. Ultimately, this can create a feast or famine cycle that is unsustainable for everyone.
When the platform is the diva
This can lead to mental constipation or crickets in the space.
People are left to their own devices, literally on their own devices, trying to swim through the content and apply it by themselves. Interaction feels detached from others, and they can lose sight of the vision that brought them there in the first place.
When the people are the divas
Let’s be really honest about this one. There are so many pitfalls here.
Too much dependence on any one person’s perspective can create guru behaviors. That shifts the power dynamic into dangerous diva territory. On the other hand, people gathering without a clear purpose or structure for engaging with it is just a party. Parties are fun; everyone gets to be their own diva, but they aren’t always productive.
So how do you find the balance?
You need something larger than yourself.
As a thought leader, you want to give your work a home where it can grow beyond the confines of your calendar. This is why platforms like Skool and Substack are so popular. They offer ways to publish your perspective, gather people, and host live interactions. That is a meaningful step in the right direction.
However, the ability to host live interactions is only one part of cultivating an ongoing, thriving culture of engagement. It is still up to each community leader to create the rhythm, invite participation, bring people together, notice when someone stalls, step in to help, and support relationships among members.
You can build that culture yourself. It’s possible, but it takes time and dedication that can pull from the resources you need to move your own thought leadership and body of work forward. You can share the responsibility with others, which takes time to develop trust and a leadership dynamic. Or you can hire a team, which still requires your time and resources to get everything set up and moving.
Honestly, every option requires some level of commitment. Time, energy, resources, money. I tried these approaches myself in the early days. I never wanted to do it all alone, but I struggled to get the momentum I needed. One of the biggest factors was critical mass.
At different times, that meant different things. I didn’t have enough people, resources, or momentum to keep things growing without putting myself right at the center of it all.
Then I found Monica, and she really got it. She was already building something similar. She understood the vision and had started creating a platform for it. We had a shared vision, the paradigm. We had each gathered people, though neither of us had enough on our own to create the momentum we wanted. And we each had platforms we were working with.
Combining those forces made a big difference.
Today, we call what we’re building the Mingle! Learning Collaborative. Mingle! offers an existing collaborative environment that community leaders can add to what they’ve already built. It doesn’t matter what platform you use because we are a connection point. We add to your community, not replace it.
Our emphasis is on real people working together in real time. Our calendar draws from the contributions of multiple communities, creating shared capacity. Instead of continually drawing from your own resources, you can be part of something that gives you and your members more to draw from.
One of our most utilized features is our virtual coworking space. We also have in-person coworking spaces in multiple cities, but our virtual space is open 24/7. It gives your members somewhere to stay accountable and keep things moving without you shouldering the whole process of transformation yourself.
It’s where they can go to do the homework between the live gatherings you offer.
That is what balance can look like. Your paradigm stays at the heart of the experience. Your people have a place to connect, contribute, and put what they are learning into practice. And the platform supports that work without asking you to be present for every step of it.
The transformation you promise is still yours to guide. Mingle! helps create the continuity around it, so your members have somewhere to go when it’s time to turn insight into action. You get to spend more of your time developing your work and showing up for the moments where your leadership matters most.
If you are leading a community and wondering what it could become with more people, more collaboration, and more support between your live gatherings, come meet with us and let’s explore whether Mingle! is the right addition to what you are building.
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