New Year, New Community

With the new year of 2023, it’s time to start getting back into the swing of things and prepping your community for the year. It’s also an excellent time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d like to improve on for the new year.

Here's our 4-step checklist for starting the new year properly.

Create a Community Strategy

A community strategy outlines your year plan and what you hope to achieve as well as complete. It identifies potential issues that may come up as well as people who can help you overcome those issues. It also allows you to set goals related to your community such as how many members you want to achieve and your retention rate.

Think about what you want to do this year and put it into a month-by-month plan. Don't forget to set some SMART goals as well using KPIs.

Plan Your Community Events

Community events and engagement activities are the lifelines of a community. They allow members to interact with one another and make new connections. It's a good idea to spend some time at the start of the year planning out what events you'd like to have. This means that you have plenty of time to plan for them and aren't scrambling to put them together at the last minute, leading to a poor turnout.

Revisit Last Year

Now's also a great time to reflect on how 2022 went and how things that did not work out as well could be changed. Did you host events at a poor time, or did not chat with your community enough? This is a great time to think about those things and how you can fix them for 2023 to make the community even better.

You could make a list of things that you think didn't work well and ask your staff team/community to comment or add their own suggestions as well as ways to improve.

Last, of all, don't stress too much

This is more of a personal note from myself, but it isn't the end of the world if something goes wrong. It's not good burning yourself out or stress over something that you can't control. Learning is part of the process and each failure or mistake is actually a learning opportunity. Without failure, we don't learn how to improve next time.

Best of luck to your community in 2023. We'll be here every step of the way to help it grow and thrive!