Activating Your First Ten Community Members  ## Metadata - Author: [[noeleflowers]] - Full Title: Activating Your First Ten Community Members - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #community - #engagement - #earlymembers Author: Noele Flowers Source: Noele Flowers’ Blog Reference: https://www.noeleflowers.com/post/activating-your-first-ten-community-members date created: 2025-08-23 00:00 --- # Title: Activating Your First Ten Community Members ## Table of Contents: - [📚 References](#-references) - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#-notes) - [📖 References](#-references-1) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 📚 References: - Noele Flowers, “Activating Your First Ten Community Members,” January 23, 2024. https://www.noeleflowers.com/post/activating-your-first-ten-community-members ## 📝 Summary: Noele Flowers argues that your first ten members are “a vector for scale,” shaping culture and future engagement. While scalable tactics matter, the earliest phase benefits from intentionally “doing things that don’t scale,” such as 1:1 onboarding, personalized prompts, and going above-and-beyond to build loyalty. She recommends de-centering forums for very small communities in favor of live, high-touch formats. Flowers introduces the “stoplight method” to classify member engagement (red/yellow/green) and target interventions, then systematize what works. She frames this stage as de facto beta testing: co-design with early members, pivot quickly, and let their feedback inform programming, scheduling, and pricing. ## 📖 Main Content: - The first ten members determine culture, norms, and the engagement flywheel. Prioritize depth over scale initially to seed credibility and peer-led momentum. - Reframe “scalability”: in communities, people themselves can scale outcomes by taking on roles (welcoming, prompting, hosting). Invest early so members become multipliers. - Tactics that intentionally don’t scale (yet): - 1:1 or small-group onboarding to model desired behavior, answer questions, and delegate welcoming/intro responses. - Direct outreach (DM/email) to suggest concrete contributions and timing; use scaffolding when the feed lacks examples. - Over-serve early members with custom resources to build goodwill and evangelism. - De-centering the forum: - With ~10 members, forums can feel empty and create a false sense of failure. - Center live formats: expert workshops, office hours, co-working, intimate calls to foster authentic connection. - Stoplight method: - Select a small cohort (e.g., first ten). - Classify: Green (autonomous), Yellow (prompt-dependent), Red (inactive). - Intervene: reward greens, escalate yellows, incite reds; reassess after a period and operationalize what works (templates, automation). - Treat this phase as beta testing: - Co-design with early members; pivot based on feedback. - Example changes Flowers made: meeting times, themed coaching calls, pricing simplification. ### 🗒️ Notes - First-ten-as-scale: - Early adopters shape norms and influence others. - Aim for autonomy and role ownership. - Doing what doesn’t scale (purposefully): - 1:1 onboarding to show the ropes and set expectations. - Direct asks: “Could you welcome X tomorrow?” “Would you host a mini Q&A next week?” - Bespoke help creates loyalty flywheel. - De-center forum for small n: - Avoid “ghost town” effect. - Prefer synchronous intimacy: recurring office hours, micro-workshops, co-working. - Stoplight method (engagement segmentation): - Green: recognize and reward; invite leadership (host events, draft prompts). - Yellow: timely nudges, specific calls-to-action, low-friction roles. - Red: personal check-ins, clarify value prop, reduce activation energy with 1:1 support. - Close loop: measure movement and productize effective plays. - Beta mindset: - Early members are credible advisors. - Make practical, member-informed changes (scheduling, program structure, pricing). - Strategic throughlines: - Avoid vague “connection” justifications—tie to outcomes. - Scale via people and processes discovered in this phase. ## 📖 References: - Primary: Noele Flowers, blog post linked above. - Related concepts (general knowledge): Engagement ladder, cohort-based onboarding, peer moderation, community flywheel. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: - Original idea: “Do things that don’t scale” isn’t a blank check. Community pros shouldn’t over-rely on intangible “connection” without linking it to business impact. Scalability in communities is nuanced because people can be vectors for scale. - Paraphrase: While hands-on tactics can be smart early on, avoid hiding behind fuzzy notions like “connection” unless you can connect them to real outcomes. In communities, “scaling” often happens through empowered members who propagate behaviors and value. - Original idea: Very small communities may feel awkward in forums; you might think you’re failing just because you launched a forum too early. - Paraphrase: With only a handful of members, a forum can misrepresent momentum. The emptiness can be demoralizing and misleading—better to delay or de-emphasize forums until there’s enough activity to sustain them. ## 📰 Newsletter: This week in the WordPress and open source corner: learning paths, fresh plugins, and community power-ups! - Learn web dev faster: If you’re diving into PHP, JS, HTML/CSS, or Git, start with “small wins” projects—build a settings page, a REST endpoint, and a custom block. Stack them, ship them, document them. Your future self (and your contributors) will thank you. - Recent updates: WordPress core performance improvements continue apace; keep an eye on field trials for Editor workflows and the latest sustainability discussions in Make blogs. - Community highlights: Early contributors shape a project’s culture. Borrow the “stoplight method” for onboarding new contributors—tag folks green/yellow/red by activity, then target nudges: reward greens (mentor a PR review), escalate yellows (pair on a ticket), and incite reds (1:1 check-in to match a good-first-issue). - New plugins worth a look: - Performance Toolkit Lite for quick audits - Block Patterns Organizer for tidy editor workflows - CLI Deploy Buddy for repeatable releases Pro tip: give maintainers context in issues—environment, steps, expected vs. actual—your bug report is a gift. Want to join a welcoming contributor cohort? Reply with your focus (docs, testing, PHP, JS), and I’ll match you with a first issue and a co-reviewer. Open source is a team sport—bring your curiosity! ## ✅ Action Items: - Prompt to align articles with your Developer Advocate/OSPO trajectory: “For the provided article, analyze: 1) Contributor Engagement: Identify practices that onboard, mentor, and retain newcomers (e.g., cohort onboarding, role scaffolding, recognition). Map to WordPress contributor pathways and sustainable funding narratives. 2) Open Source Advocacy: Extract arguments that connect ‘community value’ to measurable project outcomes (maintainer bandwidth, time-to-first-PR, release quality). Propose policies an OSPO could adopt (metrics, governance, contributor care). 3) Education & Inclusion: Translate tactics into instructional artifacts (checklists, playbooks, workshops) for different skill levels and learning styles. Ensure accessibility and DEIB alignment. 4) Program Design: Describe how to operationalize the tactic in an OSPO: roles, workflows, automation, KPIs, and feedback loops. 5) Transparency & Sustainability: Show how the ideas support transparent decision-making, funding models (sponsorships, fellowships), and long-term maintainer health. Deliverables: a one-page brief, a contributor journey map, and a metrics dashboard spec. Conclude with speaking abstracts for conference talks that merge pedagogy with co - Summary: Activating Your First Ten Community Members provides strategies and tactics for engaging and activating the first ten members of a community. These early members are crucial as they set the direction and culture of the community. The article emphasizes the importance of personalized engagement strategies for small communities, even if they are not scalable. It suggests approaches such as live onboarding sessions, personalized support, and de-centering forums in favor of more authentic peer-to-peer connections. The article also introduces the "stoplight method" for tracking and engaging with specific members based on their level of engagement. Finally, it highlights the value of beta testing and responsiveness to early members' feedback in shaping the community's growth. - URL: https://www.noeleflowers.com/post/activating-your-first-ten-community-members Strategies and tactics to form critical relationships with your early members, plus, a practical template to help you implement.  As I’ve been working through the early days of [my community membership program for community entrepreneurs, The Community Center](https://www.noeleflowers.com/on-demand-coaching), I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences and intricacies of communities at different sizes. That prompted me to create my last post, which focussed on taking a macro-look at how community engagement strategies differ based on scale. Today on the blog, I want to take a closer look at one extreme end of the spectrum of scale: the first ten community members. Your first ten community members are incredibly important people: they’re early adopters who believed in your vision and took a chance on a brand new community, and they’re the ones who are likely to determine the direction and culture of your community going forward. In today’s post, we’ll focus on strategic and tactical approaches to activating them. Plus, if you stick around, you can download a brand new template to help you put some of these strategies into action. Like I mentioned in the intro, recently [on the blog, I wrote about how which engagement strategies work best can vary based on the size of the community](https://www.noeleflowers.com/post/how-community-size-impacts-engagement-strategy-in-online-communities). One of the things that came up quite a bit, not only in my own experience, but in speaking with other experts on this topic, is the need, in large communities, to focus on engagement strategies that are scalable. And while this is largely true, your very early members may be a place to break from form—somewhat. “Do things that don’t scale” is nowhere near an original statement nor is it unique to communities. It’s actually probably *over-repeated* in the community world, so I want to be clear—we should still be wary of putting our effort into things that have no clear return, and shouldn’t use this phrase as a justification to do work that's less rigorous. *(A quick soapbox: I think community pros who over-rely on largely unmeasurable factors like “connection” as justification for their strategies, without* [*ultimately linking those factors back to business impact*](https://www.noeleflowers.com/post/the-three-metrics-every-community-manager-should-use)*, do more harm to the community industry than good).* However, I do think we should understand that in a community context especially, what it means for a strategy to “scale” is a bit more nuanced. A broader interpretation of what it means for something to “scale” tells us that the strategy has to be *possible to apply to a wide swath of people or situations*, that it has to be possible to at least batch or ideally automate. In other words, for something to scale it has to be able to withstand growth without becoming less effective or so costly that it is no longer justified. So, a broader example of a scalable strategy might be not just emailing one-on-one to provide support, but using knowledge bases or AI chatbots to answer common questions. In a community context, though, we get an advantage, which is that we get to see the *people themselves* as a possible vector for scale. So, we get to think about not just whether the strategy *itself* is possible to apply to wide swaths of people, but we get to think about whether the strategy has potential to create a person inside the community who “scales” the strategy *to others.* > *You should see your first ten members as a vector for scale themselves.* All this to say: *you should see your first ten communities as a vector for scale themselves.* In other words, your objective with early members is to make them so engaged and so autonomous in their usage of your community that their presence in the community might have a big impact on activating others. For example, highly-engaged members might take on valuable tasks in your community, whether formally or otherwise, such as creating engagement content and prompts, leading live group events, welcoming new members, and more. Because these activities can be so valuable in allowing your community to meaningfully grow, they often warrant the effort to do not-very-scalable things you might otherwise avoid—as long as you pay attention to how those early investments “scale along the vector of people.” For example: * Having 1:1 or small-group live onboarding sessions ([rather than more automated, scalable sequences](https://www.noeleflowers.com/post/the-complete-guide-to-online-community-onboarding-on-owned-platforms)) with new members where you show them how to use the community and help answer some of their questions, ultimately delegating “hard to scale” aspects of onboarding like responding to new member intros * DMing or emailing members directly to suggest how they can contribute to your community and when—sometimes in a very early community, in the absence of lots of examples in the feed they can go off of, early members appreciate this scaffolding. [Check out the flywheel method in this post on engagement techniques](https://www.noeleflowers.com/post/7-ways-to-build-engagement-in-a-new-community) for some support with this strategy! * Going above-and-beyond for your members' requests, even if it’s "over-serving." While your community is still small, you have the opportunity to “wow” early members by giving them a higher level of service than you might otherwise—for example, instead of just responding to their questions for help, creating custom resources for them. While this won’t last forever, it’ll help build loyalty and evangelism for your community. The strong good will of your early members can be incredibly important to build on as you grow. #### De-centering the forum When we think of “communities” online we’re often thinking of text-based environments where members can start and respond to conversations with one another—in other words, forums. Community professionals have been very protective about “definitions” of communities, and for a few good reasons—namely, they’re protecting against the dilution of the profession by brands engaging in “community-washing” (i.e., using the term community for to “re-brand” traditional broadcast marketing strategies, like email lists, without actually launching any meaningful peer-to-peer experiences). However, this protectiveness over terminology can have its downsides, as it can lead to an industry where we’re more focussed on reproducing what we think is a “real” community than creating something that’s an appropriate strategy for our scenario. In very small communities, it can sometimes be appropriate to eschew even aspects that may feel core to building a community at all—like the forum—in favor of creating opportunities for peer-to-peer connection that are authentic to the size of the group. In most cases, a community as small as ten people is going to be difficult to maintain what feels like a lively discussion in a forum environment. You may feel awkward and inauthentic trying to create a “big community feel” with a small group of people, and you might feel your *community* is "failing" simply because you launched a *forum* too early. > You might feel your *community* is failing simply because you launched a *forum* too early. One option is to either de-center the forum experience or not introduce it at all until you reach a larger, critical mass of people (or your members actively ask for a forum). With your first ten, you can instead focus on formats that are more authentic to the group size and give you the opportunity to build deeper connections. With my clients whose communities are in this phase, centering their community experience around live events and calls is a popular strategy for both builders and members. That can look like something pretty formalized—like visiting expert workshops you curate for your members—or something pretty casual—like recurring “office hours” where you co-work together with your members or answer questions. In this way, you can take “engagement for engagement’s sake” off the table a bit and focus more on activating your early members through meaningful, authentic engagements. #### Using the "stoplight method" (template included) Even when I’ve run huge communities with tens of thousands of people in them, I’ve always felt there can be some value in focussing on small groups of people in my community management strategy. One strategy I’ve used frequently in large community settings that also works well with communities at inception is something I call the “stoplight” method. This is essentially a method for tracking the engagement of a small group of people and choosing catered approaches to engage them based on the behaviors they’re exhibiting. 1. If I were running a big community, I would pick ~30 members somewhat at random to focus on for the period of a month or a quarter (on top of the rest of my community engagement strategy). For our purposes in this blog, we’d use our first ten community members for this. 2. I would then assess the group’s engagement level, giving each selected member a color code: red, yellow, or green. I’d give a label of green to someone who I think is *autonomously engaged*—i.e., doesn’t need much prompting or reminding to engage actively. I’d give a label of red to someone who is *not engaged*—i.e., I don’t hear from them at all, getting them engaged would be a 0-1 strategy. I’d give a label of yellow to someone in the middle—i.e., they engage, but only when prompted or reminded. *If you have a data source that can help you make these buckets a bit more concrete, that’s great—but, gut checks are also fine for this purpose.* 3. Then, I’d go about trying to escalate the engagement level of each person on my list (with the exception of those with a green label) by using strategies targeted at that specific group. Generally, those strategies either center around rewarding, escalating, or inciting engagement for my green, yellow, and red groups respectively. 4. Then, at the end of whatever time period I'm looking at (month, quarter, duration of a beta test), I'd re-assess what "bucket" the person's engagement fell into. For any strategies I used that were effective in escalating an engagement ranking, I'd look for ways to automate that effort or otherwise programmatize it into my community experience as a whole. This strategy is sort of like a more structured version of [the engagement ladder concept](https://www.noeleflowers.com/post/the-online-community-engagement-ladder)—it’s all about using engagement strategies that recognize and cater to where the member actually is rather than using broad-brush engagement strategies on everyone. If you’d like to use the stoplight method—whether you’re using it as a strategy for your first ten members or on a small group in a large community—I’ve put together a template you can use to structure your work that includes some suggested engagement strategies for each segment. You can download that, and any other templates in my template library (when you get one thing on my blog, you get them all), using the button below: #### Beta testing, even if you're not beta testing As you’ve been reading this post, you may have been wondering: who counts as my first ten community members? Are we talking about my beta testers here, or are we talking about the first ten people who buy my community membership at full price after general admission? The answer here is that when your community is at this size, you’re still beta testing in every practical sense, even if you’re not calling it that. In practice, this means that when you’re working with early members, you should be ready to pivot to deliver what they want, even if it doesn’t match up with the plans you originally made. This testing mindset and responsiveness is a great tool in your toolkit for any stage of your community-building journey, but it’s especially important here. Unless there's a reason to think that your first ten community members are not a great representation of who you're ultimately looking to attract to your membership, you should see them as an extremely credible source for co-designing a community that will be valuable as it grows. For example, even though I did run an extensive beta testing round for [my community membership program, The Community Center](https://www.noeleflowers.com/on-demand-coaching), I ended up making three semi-major changes after launching based on the feedback I got from early members: * On the practical side, I changed the time of my recurring group coaching calls based on the suggestions and availability of early members * I started theming group coaching calls based on what was coming up for members in the group, rather than keeping them entirely open-ended * I changed the pricing scheme I launched with to make it easier to understand and to make sure everyone in the community was getting the most value possible Those are three pretty big changes, and they won’t even be the lasts ones I make based on the counsel of my early members—at the end of the day, I see my early members as my core and most important advisors, and as the people I’m most invested in helping. Community Center members, if you’re reading this, ***huge shout-out to you!*** For everyone else, I hope this article has supported your thinking about activating your first ten members. If this article brought up questions, please feel welcome to leave them as comments or write to me at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])—I love hearing from readers and I’m always keen to update my blog posts to make them more beneficial to you. #### Want to take any of this a step further? I hope this post has been helpful for you and given you a strong start to thinking through your early member activation. That said, I understand that this can be complicated stuff, and sometimes you need a hand to help put it all into practice. The reality is that no matter how comprehensive a post I try to make, there will still be lingering questions that apply to specific projects. I work with clients every day as a strategic coach for online community projects, and community engagement is one of the most common topics my clients want to discuss. If you would like to work together 1:1, you can learn more about how I work and get in touch [here](http://noeleflowers.com/work-with-me). If you're reading this at the time of publishing in January 2024, I have a new client special running that will get you a discount on your first session. For folks who want to deepen their community work but don't have the budget to work with me 1:1, I also offer an online program called the **On-Demand Coaching Core Bundle**—it distills the most common topics I work with my 1:1 clients on into a self-paced format with videos, my most in-depth templates (seriously—there are five of these templates and most of them are 5-10 pages long), coaching scenarios. Plus, when you purchase the bundle you get access to a quarter free in my client community with bi-weekly group coaching. All of that comes for a one-time purchase of $500 USD, less than the cost of 2 1:1 coaching sessions with me. You can learn more about that [here](https://www.noeleflowers.com/on-demand-coaching) or enroll now below: I hope I'll see you in the community center—thanks again for reading!, Activating Your First Ten Community Members, noeleflowers, 01hmxwxpqs4nj0c7crz6fzpa6f.