I spent a day this week at Ideas Fest, and came away with a notebook full of things worth stealing. One session in particular stuck with me, a fireside chat on building and monetising communities from someone who’s done it at real scale. It wasn’t about sport specifically, but almost everything in it applies directly to the work I do.
Audience and community are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is where most organisations go wrong. An audience is reach: followers, impressions, the number of people who saw a post once. A community is the much smaller group who actually come back, and the distinction matters more than it sounds. The founder running the fireside chat put an actual number on it: LinkedIn’s monthly active rate sits around 35%, against 72% on average across the private communities her platform runs. Same idea of “people who follow you,” two very different answers to “who actually shows up.” You can have a huge audience and be one viral competitor’s Reel away from being forgotten by all of it. A real community sticks around for years, not days, and that’s the difference between an audience that costs you money to keep reaching and a community that keeps buying, keeps advocating, keeps showing up.
The content trap is a bigger problem than most people realise once a community gets small enough to actually be a community. Big social works because an algorithm with billions of users can always find you something relevant to scroll to next. A community of a few thousand can’t produce enough content to do that, and trying to anyway just burns out whoever’s running it. One story from the day stuck with me: a major hospitality brand hired an entire magazine editorial team to produce content for their members-only app. With over 200,000 members, each piece of content averaged around 300 views. The fix wasn’t more content, it was building the app to be a place members talk to each other, not a place they get talked at.
A thousand is apparently the real threshold, not the round number it sounds like. Only 1 to 5% of people in any digital community post regularly, everyone else is what the crowd called an “active lurker.” Under 1,000 members, that’s too few voices to keep the thing feeling alive, which is exactly why a WhatsApp group often works better at that stage than a dedicated platform, people are already checking it. Past 1,000, that’s when a private, owned platform starts to earn its keep, and the advice was blunt about why: on a platform you don’t own, you’re building someone else’s business with your own community’s time and data.
And the community that scales is the one members are running for you, not the one you’re single-handedly keeping alive. The best example from the day was a member club that had let roughly 30 different WhatsApp groups form organically around specific interests, each one run by a member who cared enough to volunteer for it. Those same people ended up running the club’s live events too. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s the same principle behind why the strongest fan communities I’ve worked with are never actually run by the rights holder alone. Find the people who’d do it for free because they care, and build the structure around them.
None of this is really about tech founders. It’s about what it actually takes to get a group of strangers to care about the same thing long enough to act on it together, which is the exact job I do for sports organisations, just with a different starting audience. Worth remembering that the best thinking on it right now isn’t only coming from inside sport.
