Community outreach starts in a public room where people solve things together. As the relationship develops, move to a more focused workspace. The handoff from public discussion to shared coordination is easy to miss. A shared Slack channel can put participants in a room together and reduce the communication burden on the prospect's contact.1 Shared Slack channels have been successful when used during sales cycles.2 Use the public room to learn the conversation, then bring the working group together when a pilot needs coordination.
Find a live room
Start with room health. A relevant community with no current participation gives you little to work with.
Join the most active public Slack groups relevant to your prospects.3 Check whether people still post and check the feed. Fewer people post as a community decays,4 and people eventually stop checking its feed, forum, or board.5
Read recent conversations before you speak. Look for recurring problems, the language members use, and whether other members respond with useful detail. Move on when the room has activity without real interaction or when the conversation has gone quiet.
Choose the platform
Choose a platform based on how members communicate and what the room needs to support. Use a familiar option only when it matches those conditions.
Slack fits when members already use it for work.6 It also fits when threaded conversations in realtime chat matter.7
Discord fits when realtime chat needs advanced permissions and moderation8 or when unlimited message history matters.9 A concern about asking members to join another Slack group is a reason to consider Discord.10 Check that the community accepts its casual, gamer-centric aesthetic before using it for professional conversations.11
Check message history before you depend on old discussions. Slack's free plan retains only the most recent 10,000 messages and archives messages above that threshold.12
Participate before you approach
Enter as a participant first. Understand the room well enough to contribute without steering the conversation toward your offer.
Bring like-minded people together, have them introduce themselves, and discuss topics of interest to get a community going.13
Good communities provide different spaces for different member needs.14 An implementation question may belong somewhere other than a peer discussion or working session, so follow the room's structure instead of forcing every interaction into the busiest channel.
Keep notes on recurring problems and on the people who add useful context. When a discussion becomes specific enough to involve a live piece of work, consider a more focused working channel. Until then, stay useful inside the community's existing conversation.
Move into a shared channel
Use a shared channel when the relationship has work to coordinate. It should make participation easier for everyone involved.
When you are working on a pilot, open a shared Slack channel with the prospect.15 Bring the relevant participants together, answer questions in context, and keep decisions visible to the people doing the work. Respond in real time and keep the channel open through the relationship.16
Slack's constant availability lets people participate at different times, so discussions can happen asynchronously.17 Set a clear expectation for what belongs there, then keep updates and questions in the channel so the prospect's contact does not have to relay every message.
If you run the community
Building your own room can support outreach and requires upkeep. Plan for that work before you invite people into it.
Running a community is harder than starting one, and most online communities begin to decay within a few weeks.18 Curate membership and moderate participation so the right people enter and participation remains healthy and professional.19
Connect members and use activities such as AMAs, polls, and workshops to increase engagement.20 Keep a predictable calendar of events that members can anticipate.21 Build a layer of additional leaders to distribute responsibility, so the community does not depend on your intervention for every useful exchange.22
What not to do
These mistakes damage the room before they damage your pipeline, so keep them out of your operating routine.
- Do not treat the community as a follower list. People seek well-nurtured communities where members engage and interact meaningfully.23
- Do not let a loud core control the whole conversation. Without spaces for different participation styles, the loudest five percent can dominate ninety-five percent of community conversations.24
- Do not make yourself the only source of activity. Communities often rely heavily on their founder and seldom function without that person's intervention.25