The 4 Types of Communities and how they support your business (+ Take The Quiz!)

There are four types of communities you can build for your business. Each has their own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. The type of community you choose to build has massive implications for how that community will support your business, your marketing engine, the technology you choose to host it, and the types of programs you run inside. If you're not careful, you'll find yourself managing a community that is completely misaligned with your business goals, capacity, and marketing strategy.

Take the quiz below to find out which type of community is right for your business.

The 4 Types of Communities and how they support your business

While most mature communities might have elements of their community in each quadrant, I've found the more you can identify in one quadrant to start, the easier it will be for you to manage and for your members to understand what happens in your community.

Y-axis: education versus connection.

Every community has a combination of education and connection. Depending on if it's more education centric (a guided, intended learning journey for your members, usually time-bound), or connection-centric (a broad container that holds the interactions between your members), you sign up for certain strengths and challenges.

You might decide that your community is split evenly, 50% guided communal learning and 50% programs that prompt member-to-member connection. In this case you get to leverage the strengths of both sides of the graph, but you also might take on more challenges as well. The more complex your initial community concept, the more cautiously you should proceed. Keep in mind, while education usually has a clear outcome associated, connection is the conduit for another outcome. If your community is more connection-centric, you'll need to be able to articulate a more specific outcome than connection.

X-axis: free versus paid.

While most brand or startup communities tend to be a free service that supports an end product or service, paid communities tend to offer valuable experiences or networks that their members are willing to pay to have access to.

Nurturing Communities

Nurturing Communities are designed as guided, communal learning experience that supports an end product or service. An example of this type of community is a community created for a challenge or course that helps people learn how to maximize their use of a Saas tool.

Transformative Communities

Transformative communities are paid, guided, educational experiences. They are commonly time-bound or cohort-based with everyone arriving and departing at the same time. A great example of these types of communities are series of worshops or a masterclass where members learn and practice together.

Networking Communities

Networking communities are paid spaces where the value comes from the connections between members. They are a container that holds people with a common purpose and interactions coming and going in lots of different directions.

Collaborative Communities

Collaborative communities are free, connection-centric communities. These communities often originate on social networks and many businesses leveraged FB Groups to host them and they can serve a variety of different business departments and goals.

Take our quiz below to learn the strengths, challenges, and get links to examples of each type of community.