The Planning Before the Planning
Part 1: Community Strategy Planning for 2023
**UPDATE, added 11/7/22**: Scroll all the way down for a link to EVERY one of the recap articles in this series.
Monday’s event kicked off the five-week Community Planning Sessions on LinkedIn Audio! Many many thanks to all who attended. Shoutout to the guest speaker, Steph Bennett of Burb!
Scroll below for a recap of our four main tips/takeaways.
It’s that time of year that many community professionals are getting ready to plan for 2023. Before you begin your strategic planning, here are four tips we recommend completing so that your planning efforts can be as productive and efficient as possible!
Bring any survey results or interview feedback to the table.
It doesn’t matter if these were conducted earlier in the year or more recently. Ideally, these would already be analyzed and summarized so that the outputs can contribute to conversations for the next year. If you don’t yet have a community, you’ll want to survey or interview your ideal members in preparation for your strategic planning.
Audit your various tools and organize your systems.
Steph had a great tip here, and it involves looking at your tech stack plus all of the tools you’re using. Re-evaluate their effectiveness and determine if you truly need to have all of them moving into the next year. If you’re planning for your very first community, it may be helpful to complete your strategic plan first and then decide which tools will be best to help you implement it.
Pull and analyze metrics reports from the last year.
How will you know what worked and didn’t work unless you have this info? Again, it would be ideal if these were already analyzed and summarized before you come to the table for your planning efforts. If you’ll be launching your first community, no need to worry about this step. Just know that you’ll need to keep it in mind for next year!
If possible, find out the company goals for the next year.
This past week, I was with a client at his team offsite. Community was first on the agenda. He opened the meeting talking about the company’s goals for next year, and that was critical to shaping the conversations that followed. It allowed us to focus in on exactly what the Community goals should be in 2023 so that they contribute to fulfilling the company goals. I know that it’s not always the case that you can have this info in prep for planning, but I encourage you to do everything you can to get some level of clarity on it. (It never hurts to ask!)
Want more? Great! We’ve got part 2 coming up on Monday with Todd Nilson of Clocktower Advisors, plus 3 more sessions after that. Mark your calendars for 11-11:30am Pacific every Monday in October!
**Heads up: LinkedIn does NOT provide a recording of audio events, so make sure you don’t miss this conversation!**
Need hands-on help with your community strategy for 2023?
Let’s chat! Contact me.
More Upcoming Events
10/12, Community (re)Focus, hosted by Grazitti Interactive. A free virtual event!
10/19, The CoLab: A Half-Day of Strategic Planning & Collaboration, hosted by The Community Club. Another free virtual event!
Series Recaps
Session #2 Recap: Setting Goals & How They’ll Be Measured, with Todd Nilson
Session #3 Recap: How to Plan for Programming, with Ashleigh Brookshaw
Session #4 Recap: Understanding Roadmapping in the Planning Process, with Tiffany Oda
Session #5 Recap: The Strategic Plan & Roadmap are Done! Now What? With Ilker Akansel