Slack community building has continued to rise as a leader in community building management, from just an internal message tool to a varied dashboard to help you keep track of all your members’ interests, and helps your team operate seamlessly. 

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Slack helps you reach a greater audience, interact with them, and helps your audience too, by giving them a space to connect with like-minded people, be it for official reasons such as virtual work or for discussion groups created around a specific topic, such as books, fitness enthusiasts, fan groups, etc.

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Considering the fact that there are multiple platforms available for your use, you can choose one which will fit your specific needs. If you are just getting started and don’t envision your needs going further than requiring a forum, then a Slack community may just be what you need.

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Slack communities are an amazing way to grow your brand awareness, while it may be a bit intimidating to create and maintain an online community, we have created the ultimate community building guide to a high-value slack community.  

What you need to know before building your Slack community:

• Intent! Intent! Intent!

Community Building may seem very daunting, and which is why you need to be very intentional about your slack community. A simple way is to create channels with specific functions. The way to segregate these channels can be based on various criteria, such as general guidelines, FAQs, Private chat rooms, subgroups for pointed conversations, etc. 

• Clarity! Clarity! Clarity!

Clarity is very important in your channels, it ensures that information doesn’t get mixed up in the slack community. You should add your guidelines and context to you’re your channel description to ensure that your members know what discussions are appropriate for the specific channel. This is a great community building exercise as it ensures that any new members find it easier to transition into your slack community.

• Be Flexible, B-E Flexible!

Slack communities are ever growing and you need to be able to change as your community changes. You need to reassess your slack community as your community grows and create strategies that will benefit your community. Before making changes, you need to conduct a survey with your members so you know what to keep and what to change. 

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Now that you know what you need to remember before creating your Slack community, let’s get to the how-to of creating your high-value Slack community. Given below are the 5 steps of slack community building that you need to follow.

Step 1: Pre Plan your theme and ideal member for your Slack Community

Decide what your community is about and who will be the ideal member of your community. You need to have a unique perspective and niche to set yourself apart from the competition and give your audience a reason to choose your community over others. Planning your ideal member is similar to looking in the fridge at a hodgepodge of ingredients and making a meal out of them. You talk to a multitude of potential members and select the qualities you want in your ideal member and plan your community around that.

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You should also be able to commit your time, patience, and a lot of energy to it because a thriving community is only built when community enablers (Community managers, Community organizers, Community developers, etc). 

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Without planning your members will see that you are not truly passionate about the community and they will begin to lose interest in the community. 

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Step 2: Select your Slack Community Plan to begin Community Building

Slack offers a variety of plans with a variety of features for each plan. You need to be able to know exactly what features you need for your community. DO NOT buy the pan with the most features without understanding all of the, chances are you will never use them while building your community building. 

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Slack community building, rather community building is very much a game of research and planning, you need to know what your slack community requires, what features you will use the most and how you will incorporate them in your community building process. The various features offered to Slack Communities and community building processes are :

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Step 3: Add Personal Welcome Messages in your Slack Community

Once you have set up your Slack Community it’s to begin community building, and an integral part of it is attracting and retaining community members.

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Anytime anyone attends a party or an event, what do you think is the most impactful part of the event? The music? The food? The décor? 

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You would be wrong on all three accounts. It’s the host and the reception of the host. Based on the same premise, a personal message can be the difference between an uninterested ember and an enthusiastic member. 

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It shouldn’t stop there though, every conversation, every post, every campaign should have a ‘hook’, something that will ‘bait’ your members and keep them reeling back in. 

Go fishing for members!

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Another way to personalize your Slack Community and let your members add a little bit of personality is by setting emojis as their statuses, which let’s others identify them easily by their emoji. 

Step 4: Slack Community Channels and Guidelines 

Community Enablers need to know your guidelines so that they can help build a community which will represent your core values.

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Now that we have set up our slack community it’s time to create our channels. You need to decide what you want to talk about, how many channels you want, if you want private chat rooms or not. You also need channels outlining your community guidelines and rules for members to follow. 

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A channel could be dedicated to member spotlights, where you highlight a different member every week.

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Assign a few consistent members to look after the community, instigate conversations and help monitor channels.

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Step 5: Learn from and grow your Slack Community 

Now that you have a growing Slack Community, your job is not done. Community Building does not have an end, it is a continuous process that keeps looping. You understand from your current Slack Community, talk to your members, find out what is lacking, and make changes and implement them, throwing you into a cycle of Community Building.  

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This keeps your Slack Community growing continuously and helps even you grow. As you learn more about your community and members, your leadership skills and soft skills increase, as you are essentially tuned to work around your members and cater to their needs.

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