The One Thing You Need to Build a Thriving Community: A Big PurposeA Big Purpose is the motivation for your community.It’s the reason why your “Ideal Members,” or the people who need your community the most right now, will show up, join, pay, engage, contribute, and build relationships with other members as they move towards the results and transformation that they want in their lives. The best Big Purposes are specific and speak to the lives and motivations of your Ideal Members. Capturing and promoting a successful Big Purpose is the difference between growing a thriving community where members want to both contribute and invite other members versus leaving you struggling for engagement. A Successful Big Purpose Follows a Proven FormulaA Big Purpose follows a specific sentence formula designed to attract the right people to your community as effortlessly as possible. Thousands of people have used it successfully.
I/We bring together ________[your Ideal Member with a transition]________________ to _________[the bridge, or the activities your members will do together]____________, so that we can ________________[achieve the results we want] __________________________.
Here’s how to easily create yours.
Step 1: Focus on a TransitionYour Ideal Members—or the people most likely to join a community, take an online course, or sign up for a membership—are people looking to enjoy, create, or master something new in their lives. They’re either in transition or about to begin one—finding that transition and speaking to it directly is the first section of the Big Purpose formula.Step 2: Define ResultsOnce you have your transition, skip to the end of your Big Purpose to define the results. These are the things someone in your transition wants to get. They might include building better habits or practices, finding amazing artists to collaborate with, navigating work to build a successful career, making decisions that will lead to better health, or mastery of an all-consuming interest. This is the “so that we can” finale to the Big Purpose formula. Now an Ideal Member can see the promise of your community by the results they will be able to achieve. The only remaining step now is to capture the activities that members in your community or courses are going to do together to move from their transition to the results they want. This is the “to” line of your Big Purpose. Step 3: Choose Your BridgeWhat you do in your community—the activities—are what “bridge” your Ideal Member from the transition they want to undertake to the results they want tomorrow. While there are an unlimited number of transitions, the results and bridges are relatively universal, so you can literally copy and paste the ones that resonate with you and your Ideal Member.
Creating Your Big Purpose is now radically easierThe most important question to ask yourself when you start building your community is: Who do you want to bring together? You get to close your eyes and picture who you’d love to bring together in your new community. Are they recent college graduates starting their first job in performance marketing? Or perhaps meditation or yoga novices excited (or scared) about starting a new practice? Or solo travelers considering working their way around the world?
