Shana Lynn Bresnahan: Okay? We're not gonna spend a ton of time on this next pillar, but it is important and will become more important as your community grows. But this third pillar is, hold on, my pen keeps going away. Communication.
IT communication is a really essential part of a community, and here's what I find is that the majority of us. Spend a hundred percent of our time focused on outgoing communication. What are we saying to our community? How are we letting them know what's going on, about the live calls we're having, about new feature updates or whatever it might be?
We're always thinking about us to them, but there's two other kinds of communication that we really need to be paying attention to. And that second one is incoming. This is exactly what we were just talking about. How are we hearing from our community? How are we regularly asking them for their feedback and getting their insight?
This I tell you what I've worked with marketers that have eight figure businesses. The difference in these businesses. And a lot of people I talk to is their ability to listen to their community, which gets a lot harder as your community grows. But if you get in the habit now of having those conversations and really listening, even when you have these smaller communities opening up a calendar, Where people can hop on a 15 minute zoom call with you, and you just have a couple questions.
They ask them, can you tell me why you joined this community? What progress have you made so far? What could we do to support you in reaching your goals? Three simple questions you could ask in 15 minutes that opens up the voice of your community. This piece is really important. You wanna be thinking about how am I hearing on a regular, weekly basis from somebody inside of my community?
And then this last one is internal. This is what we think about all the time. These are the this is the back and forth right conversations that there are happening inside of your heartbeat community that you have or where, wherever your community is. It's that conversations that they're having amongst each other.
This is where we're trying to really facilitate engagement, and I'll be honest out of this whole framework, right? This right here, this little thing right here is what most people come to me for. How do I get more engagement in my community? What post should I be doing? At what time should I be posting that post in my community?
How? How do I get my community talking? But I'm telling you like that is such a small piece and it becomes so much easier when you work on the everything else. Okay, so that's the internal, that ongoing conversation. Does that make sense? Have anybody currently doing this incoming piece well, who here is surveying their community, hopping on calls with their community?
Asking call a, asking to chat with their community? Who here could tell us what you're doing there? Anybody? I know somebody's got to be doing that.
Nobody. Okay. Okay. Okay. I love it. So Bree did a video a couple months ago. Do you remember that? Martiza? It was on the values reset. So I actually did that with my community and it was powerful. I asked them, so what are we here for? What are we doing together? And I shared with them some of my values and we did the a visualization exercise, and we all came back with the same top three values, like in different order.
And then we just re, reoriented according to our priority and set our values accordingly. Courtney. I love that. Okay, so be a little bit more specific. So those here that want to implement this strategy can how did you get their attention to get them on a call like this? What did you do?
Was it just a Zoom call like this and you gave them a reason for the call? Yes, so I do month, I do like weekly growth sessions with them, so I had a weekly growth session and I asked for their permission to just use that time for something different that day. And for something that I hope would be like generative for all of us.
And so I got buy-in and they were all like, yeah, let's do it. Like we want something different. And it was spring, I kinda used that excuse like, Hey, it's the turning of a year. Let's do something different. And once I got them in, we just did the exercise and then they gave feedback about it and they're like, we wanna do more of this.
So I'm now committed. And then I did another thing last week. Okay, so this is like what we're doing with our calls. Are we happy with this? Do we wanna do something differently and just have an open conversation. I spent about 10 minutes, honestly, I think I'm spending about five to 10 minutes each session at the end, checking in on something having to do with the community when we're live together.
And so far I haven't gotten any feedback that it's terrible or uncomfortable. Yeah, that's great. I love it. That's a perfect example. It doesn't have to be really complicated, right? One of the things that you can do that I do with a lot of my clients is, I think it's about 21 days in, so about 21 days in.
So before, especially if you have a paid community, before that next payment hits, there's a little email that goes out that just says, Hey, real quick. Just wanted to check in. How's it going? How can I help? Just super simple check-in that we can hear from people or know who we're not hearing from, so that we can reach out to them in another way.
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