A Guide to Community Discovery

This Guide to Community Discovery as a PDF is in the current Beta and discounted period. Purchasing this also gives you access to all future updates.

It's a comprehensive guide to community research with strategies and tactics to learn about and with your people. Ultimately the goal is to build a better business.

At the heart of Community Discovery is the focus on research to benefit the whole business. In essence, it is living, breathing, active, and continuous community research.

I've been building community for 20 years. As I was trying to explain how I approached building community I felt that the approaches that existed did not align with how I've built community.

To build community we should start with Community Discovery. Once we know about it, we will then realise it is an ongoing effort that never ends as building community is continuous, not static.

Community still feels mysterious to many and a big part of this is down to a lack of understanding of our ecosystems and how everything is interconnected. Community Discovery is about trying to make sense of all the nodes so that we can make better decisions and build better products.

Community work is pure gold when we know what to look for what. A mindset of Community Discovery helps us look for what matters in ways that can give value and bring impact to the wider business. Gone should be the days where community works in silos. Community Discovery can empower the whole business with powerful community knowledge.

The ideas within this guide are things that I actively practice. To me, this is not theory. This is the real work of building community, there is real method to my madness!

You can find out more about me and my work: Rosie.land / Bluesky / LinkedIn / rosiesherry.com

Contents: (124 pages)

0. Hello and an introduction

1. Introducing Community Discovery

2. What is Community Discovery?

3. Community Discovery Goals

4. Trusting Community Discovery

5. Practicing Community Discovery

5.1 From Ecosystem to Community

5.2 Mapping your Ecosystem

5.3 Exploring Conversations with Intention

5.4 Create a Surround System

5.5 Capturing Community

5.6 Community Knowledge Management

5.7 Community-Knowledge-Management-as-a-Service (CKMaaS)

5.8 Continuous Community Interviews

5.9 Continuous Community Polls

5.10 Community Pain Research (CPR)

5.11 Community is Research

5.12 Stories as Community Discovery

5.13 The Spectrum of Community Reach

5.14 Community Prototyping

5.15 The Community Search Engine Mindset

5.16 Create your own Slack Tracker

5.17 Community Memory Management

6. Community Discovery going forward