Every online community platform includes the ability to set up groups or sub-communities of one sort or another.

Discussion forums use separate discussion threads or even a parallel forum for this purpose. Tools like Slack or Discord allocates different channels. Private and public social networks like Mighty Networks, Facebook, or LinkedIn call them groups or sub-communities.

In each case, as the person setting up and managing your community, you will need to make decisions about how many to start with, how public they will be, and how many you have the capacity to manage over time.

It's a complex set of decisions.

What is the value of sub-communities?

The value of having sub-communities or groups is that they dedicate a space in your community for people interested in more specialized, deeper discussions.

They enable groups that might not otherwise feel heard or comfortable to gain confidence.

They allow for conversations around potentially volatile subjects in a more intimate setting.

They enable a smaller group of members to feel more connected and comfortable with one another — something that is particularly useful for new cohorts of members, of learners, or of underserved groups.

There are several types of groups you will want to consider:

1. Starting Groups

2. Administrative Groups

3. Temporary Groups

4. Specialty Groups

Let’s take each of these in turn.

1. Starting Groups

Starting groups are a pretty standard choice whenever you create a new online community. Some of these groups may even exist as default options for your community. They may include:

• A welcome group for your newest members where they can ask questions that might be seen as repetitive or annoying to the rest of your members if they were dropped into your main news feed.

• A “no stupid questions” group for anyone to ask a question about the community, from technical to subject-related matters. The Heartbeat platform offers this as a group channel straight out of the box.

• An introductions thread where new members can tell others who they are and what they hope to accomplish in the community.

• A random thread, sometimes called a “watercooler,” where members can go far off-topic to talk about whatever is on their minds, post funny memes, and generally kick back and get to know each other better.

2. Administrative Groups

Administrative groups serve necessary functions in the community. Some examples of administrative groups include

• An announcements group for  upcoming events, system outages, or other important alerts. Depending on the platform, these might be a special function instead of a dedicated group.

• An events group may be a place where all events of interest are collected or it may be a group dedicated to a specific event where all related content and conversation about it is contained.

• An administrative support group where a team of community professionals or an organization’s other team members can have private conversations related to community operations.

• An ambassadors support group where those who evangelize and volunteer their time to support other community members can converse and consult with each other privately.

3. Temporary Groups

Temporary groups can include aforementioned events groups, but events typically maintain an evergreen value well beyond their expiration date.

Instead, temporary groups exist to bring together a small team for a finite period of time in situations where the assets and ideas shared will not require permanence: a cohort of learners, a contest, a project, a holiday celebration.

Sometimes these groups can simply be locked or archives so that they are still searchable. But it’s unlikely that anyone will need them again. Still, it’s a good idea not to delete anything that you don’t have to.

Archiving inactive temporary groups is a best practice solution, especially if your community platform’s search engine can exclude them from search results unless that person was a member of the temporary group.

4. Specialty Groups

Specialty groups are places where deep discussions happen. The members who join these group are numerous enough that they can sustain discussion about the topic and keep the group energetic over the long haul.

However, speciality groups are what’s most likely to cause you governance headaches. During the course of your online community’s life cycle, you will receive many requests to create special purpose groups for members of your community. These requests are always suggested with the best of intentions but often come from individuals who don’t understand what they are getting themselves, or you, into.

Worse yet, if you enable your community members to create a group without any approval process, you’re likely to end up with hundreds (or more) underused and redundant groups.

Put an application process in place for new group requests. That way, you will be able to vet these requests against existing groups that may already be fulfilling the same or a very similar purpose. You can also make sure that there are at least several individuals who are willing to take on the responsibility for facilitating discussion in the group.

Otherwise, you may find yourself in a position where your well-meaning community group leader takes time away, or never returns, and you’re left managing a group on your own. As the overall community leader, your mental health is at risk from situations like this, so you must do all you can to balance the need for this group with your own well being!

How many groups should I start with in my community?

You will know your community best, but the answer will always be fewer than your leadership team thinks they will need at the outset. In my experience, this has been a particular problem with large scale enterprise organizations that think they need to create a subgroup for every product, for every department, and for every special topic they think their stakeholders will need.

Too many groups is overwhelming for new members and bad for adoption. As they join your community and see more than a few choices, they are likely to shrug and go away rather than try to figure out where and how they might start interacting.

Start with a welcome group where members can introduce themselves or talk about what they are working on. Include a “water cooler” for off-topic conversations. Finally, include the administrative groups that make sense for you to include. 

But be wary of the speciality groups. Each one of them that you add is like standing up a community-in-miniature. If you don’t have someone to watch, manage, and foster conversation in the specialty group, you are better off not to have it at all.

Instead, start modestly with speciality groups. Start up your first one or two only after the community has begun to buzz with activity. Watch for conversations that seem to be taking off. Who are the people leading those conversations? If they have not approached you already about starting a private discussion group or topic, then you might reach out to one or more of them privately to see if they feel there are long term possibilities for sustained conversations around the topic.

If so, provide them with some basic community management training and set up the group for them. [Download the Clocktower Advisors Timely Guide for Group Managers].

How do I handle groups that have gone quiet?

Even the most active group will eventually lose energy and momentum. This can happen for many reasons, but the most common one is that one of the group managers has left, or something has changed with their situation and they are either no longer interested or they don’t have the time.

In these cases, you should make every effort to try to find another suitable group manager who had the time and energy to facilitate conversations, or else consider sunsetting the group. Most platforms will allow you to archive an old group so that it can still be searched by those who once participated there but does not clutter current search results. The community can also be locked so that new contributions cannot be added.

Community group governance

As a rule of thumb, groups that are inactive for more than three months ought to receive a check-in. Ask the group manager if anything has changed and explain your reason for reaching out is that it has been a quiet group.

Suggest that if the group does not return to some level of activity within the next month or two, you may elect to archive it.

Yes, this puts some pressure on the group manager, but consider the effect on new members of seeing a large number of groups with very little or no activity. If you get too many groups like this, your members will not know where to go to find conversations. Worse, if everything looks dead to them, they may not log back in at all.

To help ensure that your groups don’t get to this unfortunate state, require that all of your group managers spend at least some time with you to understand the basics of community management. They are, in effect, managing smaller communities within your larger one, so it’s only fair to share with them some ideas about how to initiate conversations and to keep them going sustainably over time.

Managing your community groups: conclusion

Groups are an important part of thriving online communities. They serve as tiny islands of conversation that amplify connection, collaboration, and friendships. Whereas the community as a whole is a village of people friendly to a given purpose or mission, your groups are individual houses and meeting places in that community that afford greater intimacy and increase the depth of understanding around a topic.

But communities can be overwhelming if there are too many to begin with or if they grow to be too numerous over time. A community full of hundreds of subgroups with little or no conversation in any of them is going to wither and fade. Like a good gardener, you need to do some pruning in order to ensure healthy growth. 

You do this by favoring the groups that are performing and finding ways to archive older groups so that they no longer show up in a regular list of groups that your members will see while browsing or searching.

Finally, your strategy for groups needs to include some basic community management training for group leaders and a governance plan to ensure that you are being thoughtful and selective about the groups you allow.

What successes and challenges have you experienced with groups in your online community?