Community Migration 🤯 Slack CM Newsletter Issue 2
This issue's content
- Community migration, the 2-word community horror story.
- More community content (Slack engagement & community consultants)
- Let's write this newsletter together
- Goodbye 👋
Slack Community Migration
Slack wasn't made for communities.
The message limit deletes our valuable conversations. The pricing is ridiculous. And don't get me started on the analytics.
So why not move?
We all thought about migration at one point, and it's scary.
Mess up the migration process and your community can die. You can lose tons of members and waste countless hours and dollars moving to the wrong platform.
So, let's talk about it.
Sections:
Migration won't solve all your problems.
Your 5/10 next-door coffee shop.
Don't migrate for features (that no one ever asked for)
Alternatives to migration
When to migrate
Migration won't solve all your problems
Community is not a platform. It's people and conversations.
Community works when your members get value from gathering in the same place. It works if you help people build the habit of showing up.
Slack's biggest benefit is that millions of people use it every day. If your members are already on Slack every day, then you'll have a much easier time helping them show up in your community.
If your members are on Slack, but never check your community, then changing the platform won't make that better. It'll make it worse.
If they never use Slack, then you need to go where your members are.
More about this in the next section.
Questions to ask yourself for your community:
Is Slack the reason why my community isn't engaged?
Do my members use Slack regardless of my community?
Your 5/10 next-door coffee shop
Imagine this scenario:
You wake up on a Sunday morning and want a quick coffee.
You have two options.
Option A: You go to your next-door coffee shop. It takes you less than a minute to get there. The coffee isn't amazing, but it's good enough.
Option B: You go to the super coffee shop on the other side of town. The coffee is great, the service is out of this world. But it takes you 3 hours, 2 trains, and 1 bus to get there.
Option A is Slack. It's easy to get on Slack. We open it multiple times every day. It's not the best community platform out there, but it is definitely good enough.
Option B is the fanciest new community platform. It has all the features you can think of. But the journey to get there is too long.
Your members won't download a new app or get used to a new URL just for your community.
Ask anyone who's ever built an app. Getting users to open it once is easy. Making them open it, again and again, is a nightmare. The habit just isn't there.
Now let's speak about all those fancy features.
Questions to ask yourself for your community:
Am I ready to educate my members about a completely new platform?
Will my members put in the effort to visit an unknown place on the internet?
Does my community have any initiatives in place that constantly push members to my community?
Don't migrate for features (that no one ever asked for)
One of the golden rules in startups and product building (my full-time job) is to never add features that no one asked for.
It's the same with communities. When your members ask for something, they want it. If they don't, then they probably don't care.
I learned this the hard way.
It doesn't matter if the other fancy platforms have live-streaming, and heartbeat monitoring features. If your members didn't ask for these things, they won't use them.
It's easy to feel FOMO when looking at a community platform website and seeing all the things you don't have access to.
Don't worry about all that. And remember, every extra feature can also mean extra work for you to set it up.
On the other hand, if your members ask for things Slack can't provide, then migrating might be smart.
For example, you lead a technical community and most messages contain extremely helpful lines of code.
But your members can never find the answers because of the message limit and Slack's limited searchability.
If this is the case, you might want to migrate to a forum. It's a proven and valuable feature that your members asked for.
Questions to ask yourself for your community:
Do my members desperately need a feature that Slack doesn't have?
What do I need that Slack can't provide right now? Are there any apps or integrations that can get me where I want to be?
Alternatives to community migration
Even if you're reaching the absolute limits of Slack, migration isn't the only answer.
Here are some alternatives to solve the problems you're facing.
Slack + Forum
A single community can exist on multiple different platforms.
You don't have to be a Slack-only or Forum-only community.
You can have both and it's more common than you might think.
A good example is the Confluent community.
Their Slack community is great for DM's, building relationships, and asking quick questions.
Their forum is useful for long-form, technical questions.
Each platform serves its own purpose.
Slack + Knowledge Base
Are your members tired of constantly seeing the same questions or never finding that super useful resource? Build a knowledge base.
Store the most important questions, conversations, and resources in a single, easily accessible space.
For example, Waves lets you find, save & analyze your community's most valuable conversations and store them in an easily accessible community library.
You could even use Notion, Airtable, or good old Google docs.
When to migrate
1. Your platform is keeping you from delivering your #1 community value proposition.
Let's go back to our example of the technical community.
The main value proposition (and the main reason why members join) is to quickly and easily find answers to technical questions.
If your community platform doesn't make that possible, then you won't be able to deliver the value you promised.
Slack and Discord would not be the greatest options for this kind of community. Slack deletes old messages and Discord is very chaotic. Both platforms are also not great when it comes to searchability.
2. Your members are just not there.
This is the most common example: Don't start a community for 13-year-old gamers on Slack. They don't have the app, they won't use the platform.
Don't start a Discord community for middle-aged moms from the Middle East. They don't use Discord. And they don't want to learn how it works.
Don't start a forum for extremely busy professionals. They won't have the time to read through the long-form forum posts. But they do open Slack 18 times every day.
The good thing about choosing the wrong platform is that you won't get a ton of members that you then have to migrate.
More Community Content
How to Increase Community Engagement for Slack
6 Reasons Why You Should Hire an Online Community Consultant
Community Q&A with Yurii Lazaruk: What do Community Consultants do?
Let's write this newsletter together.
You're the reason why I write this newsletter, and I want you to have more decision-making power over what and how I write.
Can you think of any Slack community problems you have? Reply to this email and tell me about them. I'll do the research and find a way to solve them!
If you don't like replying to emails (who does?) we can also get on a call. Here's my calendar link🤘🏻
Goodbye 👋
My main job is building community products with my startup.
Before that I've built and managed communities.
In between, I've tried building products for many different kinds of people.
And let me tell you... community people are the kindest, most loving, empathetic, and helpful people I've ever worked with. Your energy is unmatched.
I love what I do and you're a big reason why. Thank you❤️
See you next time and if you liked this issue, please share it with a community friend. My goal is to one day turn this newsletter audience into a focused community for Slack CM's. I want you all to meet each other and the more people we have, the more ideas and learnings we can share.
Until next time,
Kourosh - The Waves Guy🌊