Acknowledgements: A huge thank you to the Hive team and the many community builders who have shared their wisdom with us over the years. This post is an attempt to synthesize those lessons. Special thanks to Therese Veith, Gergő Gáspár, Sam Chapman, Sarah Tegeler, and John Salter for reviewing this post. All mistakes and oversights are our own.
TL;DR:
This post walks through some of our key insights from building Hive, a global community for farmed animal advocates, and other communities within and outside of the EA space. We walk through a three-phase approach to community building, and extensive notes in the footnotes. In short:
- Phase 0: Solve a Problem, Don't Just Start a Group. Before you build anything, a specific group of people needs a compelling reason to gather.
- Phase 1: The Cold Start Problem & Initial Growth. Obsessing over your first users, doing unscalable things to provide value, and being strategic about who you invite in.
- Phase 2: Scaling, Setting up Systems, and Navigating the Messy Middle. This involves handling growth, building systems, and cultivating a culture that lasts.
- Phase 3: Maintaining and Supporting the Ecosystem. This involves continuously improving your community, staying hands-on, and seeing your community as infrastructure for the wider movement.
We also cover common pitfalls we've seen, like underestimating the workload and losing focus, as well as topics like handling conflict, preventing burnout, and knowing when to stop or sunset a community.
Why We're Writing This
Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions about how to start and grow communities. This post is our attempt to summarize the lessons we've learned while building Hive.
This isn't a definitive guide, but rather a collection of reflections, tips, and mental models that have helped us. Community building is ultimately personal work, but we hope that by sharing our journey, we can help others navigate theirs. While our experience is rooted in EA communities—particularly farmed animal advocacy—most of these principles apply broadly to mission-driven communities. As is common with such collections of tips, take what you find valuable and leave behind what you don’t!
Phase 0: Solve a Problem, Don't Just Start a Group (Before you launch)
It's tempting to start a community based on a shared identity ("let's gather all the EAs interested in X"). But we've found that the most durable communities combine identity with a concrete problem-solving approach. A shared interest or identity isn't enough to sustain a community over time.
Here are some questions we've found helpful when assessing the need for a new community:
- Where are your people now? If they're all in one place, maybe you just need a channel or a sub-group within that existing community. If they're scattered everywhere, that fragmentation is your opportunity.
- What new value is created by bringing them together? What insights, resources, or connections will they gain counterfactually in your space? If they can get most of this value elsewhere, your community might struggle.
- Why would they choose your space over existing ones? Your unique value proposition should be clear and compelling. For a potential member, the choice should be simple: "If I want to do X, I go to [existing space]. But if I want to do Y, I come here."
- Is this worth the significant time investment? Building a thriving community often requires at least 15-25+ hours per week from at least one dedicated person. Depending on the scale of your community and your vision, this could require vastly more. Do you have the capacity, and is this the highest-impact use of your time? If you're testing whether community building is right for you, you might start with 5-10 hours weekly for a small pilot, but successful communities rarely remain side projects for long.
Phase 1: The Cold Start Problem & Initial Growth (Months 0-3)
The beginning is all about delighting your first users. Forget about big numbers. Your only job is to create an exceptional, high-touch experience for the few people who show up, overcoming a cold start problem.
- Choose the right platform: We chose Slack because it's a high-quality tool and, more importantly, because our target audience was already using it for daily work. Slack can get expensive, and other options like Discord or Facebook Groups all have pros and cons. Ideally, your platform should meet people where they already are and provide the functionalities necessary for the type of interaction you imagine in your community.
- Understand who you (don’t) want in your community: Your early community members set the culture for those who are yet to join. Many communities start off with a facilitated program, but if your prospective community members are not filtered through such a mechanism, you will need to be more strategic and clear.
- Embrace multiple funnels for outreach: Start with several avenues to bring people in. For instance, you can go to relevant conferences and promote in existing, adjacent communities. This gives you good control over who joins your community. But it also ensures that there is unique value in your community because you are reaching people who are evidently fragmented from a variety of places.
- Focus on giving, a lot: In the early days, you are a significant part of the community's value. You make the introductions, you find the resources, you answer the questions. We spent many hours in 1:1 calls with our first members, learning their stories and figuring out how to help. This doesn't scale well directly, but it builds the base you need to scale. Especially in the early days, your goal is to provide immense value before asking for anything in return. People will stick around if they feel like they've found a place where they are seen, valued, and supported.
Phase 2: Scaling, Setting up Systems, and Navigating the Messy Middle (Months 3-12)
This is often the hardest phase: Initial excitement from launch has worn off, but you haven’t yet established stable engagement. A few strategies helped us:
- Create reliable rhythms: Even if it’s just one monthly event or a weekly discussion prompt, consistency helps people know when to show up.
- Celebrate small wins publicly: Highlight connections made, problems solved, or resources shared. This reminds members why they’re here and helps build a stronger pitch to new members/supporters.
- Accept the dip: Engagement will fluctuate. This is normal. Focus on serving the people who do show up, not obsessing over those who don’t. The exception, of course, is that you are just missing your target audience(s).
- Ensure a well-designed onboarding process: As your community scales up, it can quickly become difficult for new joiners to understand how to best leverage your platform - and you won’t be able to have a 1:1 call with everyone. A great onboarding process can ensure that you set people up for success. A simple form + good intro message or email series setup can go a long way.
Create guidelines and policies: While not strictly needed early on, the earlier you set them up, the better. We set up basic guidelines and policies right away and evolved them over time. We have found that it’s much easier to moderate and keep your community focused if you have written down policies that you can refer people to. Our own community guidelines are constantly evolving and often the result of things going wrong. You can ask existing communities for guidelines and moderation policies so you don't have to start from scratch.
- Encourage live interaction:. Regular video calls, co-working sessions, or in-person meetups can deepen relationships in ways text channels cannot. 1-1 matching systems, such as Donut intros (we got a free 12-month trial when we started out!), facilitate calls between community members without you needing to do anything. Find the right mix for your community’s needs and geographic distribution. This might shape how you perform outreach, fundraising, source volunteers, and where you hire.
- Handling growth spurts: Occasionally, you’ll experience sudden influxes (think 50+ people joining after a conference, viral post, or new funding). Plan for this.
- Pause open invitations if needed.
- Create a dedicated “welcome” or “introductions” channel where new members can connect.
- Consider a special onboarding session or welcome call for large groups.
- Ensure your moderators can handle the increased volume.
- Make sure that people have a way of interacting with each other, not just have 1:1s with the community organizer. For example, a newsletter is not a community because it’s a form of one-to-many communication, even though it unites people who are interested in a particular topic. If they start interacting in the comments of the newsletter with each other, that’s already the beginning of a community. A one-off event is not a community, but it can become a community if the organisers or attendees find a way to consistently keep in touch with each other.
- Get community members involved in operations: You usually can't scale alone, and for many communities, volunteers can be of great support. We set up a volunteer system to help with onboarding, channel leading, and moderation. This reduced our workload and created a deeper sense of ownership in the community. Volunteers also make great first hires; in fact, almost everyone who works at Hive was a volunteer first.
Phase 3: Maintaining and Supporting the Ecosystem (12+ months)
Note: In practice, the line between "scaling" and "maintaining" is incredibly blurry. You don't just finish scaling and then start maintaining; the work of maintenance actually begins during the scaling phase.
Once you have a core, engaged group, your job changes; you move from manual attraction to intentional nurturing and scaling.
- Give your members multiple ways of giving feedback and iterate based on what they would like to see: You can’t do everything they ask, but you can gradually improve the community by regularly considering their needs. Some ways you can do this:
- Create a public channel for giving feedback to you.
- Create a form that people can use to provide feedback anonymously.
- Use 1:1 conversations like chats, calls, or meetings to ask about the members’ experience and ask what they’d like to see you add or improve. By far, most of the feedback given to us comes from 1:1 conversations, but the public and anonymous channels are important systems to set up for transparency and confidentiality purposes.
- Protecting scope and saying no: As your community grows, you'll get many requests to add features, programs, or expand focus. Most of these requests come from a good place, but saying yes to everything leads to dilution and burnout. Practice saying: "That's a great idea, but it's outside our core focus of solving [specific problem]. Have you considered [alternative resources]?" Your community's value comes from doing specific things well, not from being everything to everyone.
- Stay hands-on: This is crucial and often missed. Community infrastructure is not a "set it and forget it" machine. You still need to be in the channels, making connections, and prompting engagement and support. If you have ever nerded out about community building with us, you may have heard the behavioral model B = MAP (Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt). The platform provides the ability for motivated people to realize impactful opportunities, but you often need to provide an additional prompt. A personalized DM, an introduction to another person, or a forwarded opportunity can make a massive difference, and we have found that relying on the infrastructure can often leave an impact on the table.
- Help shape and support the wider ecosystem: A healthy community sees itself as infrastructure for the wider ecosystem, not as the ecosystem itself. Your goal isn't to keep everyone inside your walls, but to make the entire landscape of organizations and resources easier for your members to navigate and gain context in. This means actively connecting people to other key players, building strong referral systems, and collaborating instead of competing. Success isn't just about what happens in your community; it's about whether your members can easily find what they need to have an impact, wherever that may be.
Knowing When to Stop or Sunset
Not every community should, or will, exist forever. Sometimes, the most impactful decision is recognizing when a community has served its purpose.
- Signs it might be time to sunset:
- The original problem you solved has been addressed (or is being better addressed elsewhere).
- Engagement has declined despite multiple revival attempts.
- Leadership cannot be sustained, and no suitable successors exist.
- The community has drifted so far from its purpose that it no longer provides unique value.
- Maintaining it prevents higher-impact work.
- How to sunset gracefully:
- Give members plenty of warning (3-6 months if possible).
- Explain honestly why you're making this decision.
- Help members find alternative communities or resources.
- Archive valuable content/knowledge in an accessible way.
- Celebrate what was accomplished together.
- Consider whether a smaller, lower-maintenance format might work (quarterly newsletter, annual reunion).
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
These are some of the most common mistakes we see, and a few we've made ourselves.
- Underestimating the workload. A great community is rarely a side project. It needs someone who sees it as their "baby" and dedicates significant time to it (we'd say 15-25h/week minimum).
- Overpromising and under-delivering. It's far better to do a few things exceptionally well than many things poorly. Don't announce a mentorship program, a job board, and five weekly events all at once. Start small, deliver consistently, and build from there.
- Slow moderation. An unmoderated or poorly-moderated space can lose its value very quickly. Have clear guidelines and be prepared to enforce them. The emotional difficulty of moderation causes many builders to avoid it, but timely, kind enforcement is essential.
- Losing focus. The value of the community is solving a specific problem. It can be tempting to let the conversation drift everywhere, but that can dilute the core purpose and make it less useful for everyone.
- The post-event hype. Excitement at an event often leads to commitments like "let's have a weekly call!" that fizzle out. People are busy, so before committing, ask: "How will this call actually solve a problem for you?" and "Is it a better use of your time than what you'd otherwise be doing?" Starting with a sense of momentum is great and important, but it is much more difficult to stay in touch once a conference or retreat is over than you’d often expect.
Chasing vanity metrics. Your metrics should be aligned with your organizational goals (and the requirements of funders). E.g.: Total member count is likely less important than engagement metrics. A community with 500 members and 200 weekly active users is likely healthier than one with 5,000 members and 100 weekly active users.
Ignoring the emotional labor. Community building involves absorbing others' stress, navigating conflicts, and maintaining enthusiasm even when you're exhausted. If you don't acknowledge and plan for this emotional cost, burnout is far more likely.
Share Your Journey
As is evident by the number of “notes” we felt compelled to add, there is a lot to say about community building. And certainly, there is a lot that doesn’t apply to everyone and a lot that hasn’t been said.
If you’ve built or been a part of a community that you love, I’d be curious to hear:
- What was the specific problem it solved for you?
- What are the small, often invisible things that made it feel like a place worth returning to?
- What is an underrated tip that has made a community work for you?
- How did the community builders handle the hard moments (conflict, transitions, or difficult decisions)?
Appendix: Quick Start Checklist
Right, so, this was a lot. We put together a short, practical roadmap that you might consider adapting as you’re getting started:
Phase 0: Before you launch
- Identify the specific problem your community will solve
- Confirm people are currently scattered/underserved (not already in one place)
- Determine if you have 5-10 hrs/week to dedicate (at least initially) and 15-25+ hours long term
Phase 1: Months 0-3
- Choose a platform that your target audience already uses for lower entry barriers
- Recruit 10-30 founding members through personal outreach
- Have 1:1 conversations with each to understand their needs
- Create basic guidelines and community norms
- Start giving value before asking for anything
Phase 2: Months 3-12
- Develop a simple, scalable onboarding process
- Evolve your guidelines, community norms, and policies
- Create 1-2 regular rhythms (weekly discussion, monthly call, etc.)
- Recruit 2-3 volunteers from engaged members
- Start documenting your processes
Phase 3: Months 12+
- Stay hands-on
- Assess whether growth should continue or be capped
- Implement formal moderation procedures
- Create a sustainability plan (funding, leadership succession)
- Gather systematic feedback from members
Thanks for sharing this comprehensive guide, Kevin, Sofia and Kyle! I wanted to respond to your questions based on my experience with EA Austria community building over the past year and co-initiating an Effective Animal Advocacy group with you, Kevin and Therese two years ago.
What problem did it solve for me?
I was doing street activism but found myself questioning, "Is this really effective?" Learning about effective animal advocacy through our community helped me focus both my career and donations more strategically. It gave me the frameworks and knowledge I needed to move from activism based on intuition to impact-driven work.
What made it worth returning to?
The combination of monthly socials (game nights, dinners, picnics) and topic-based events (discussions, workshops, lightning talks) created a space that never felt like work. Many people who came to these events became close friends. It's meaningful time with people I enjoy, where we have helpful discussions about effective animal advocacy. That blend of social connection and substantive conversation is what keeps bringing me back.
An underrated tip:
Community is bidirectional—it's about both giving and taking. While I can provide resources, connections, and advice to others, I can also reach out when I need help. Creating a culture where it's normal to both contribute and ask for support has been crucial for making the community sustainable and genuinely valuable.
How we handled a hard moment:
With EA Austria, we had to remove someone from the group for six months because other members felt uncomfortable around them. This was one of the most difficult and energy-consuming decisions I've made as a community builder. The biggest mistake was waiting too long. We saw multiple signs—people stopped attending events when they knew this person would be there—but we hesitated to act.
My advice to other community builders: If a member's behavior is causing others to disengage or avoid events, address it quickly. Find a solution that protects the broader community's wellbeing, even if it means asking someone to leave. Acting sooner would have prevented more people from having negative experiences and saved everyone involved significant stress.