Community Engagement Playbook

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name: community-engagement-playbook
description: Builds the student community system for a paid course — platform choice by where students already are, an introduce-yourself onboarding ritual, a weekly cadence of office hours, wins threads, and accountability checks, a hard creator-time budget, and scheduled testimonial-harvest moments. Use when a course creator says "my students aren't finishing the course", "should I use Circle or Slack or Discord", "how do I keep my community active without it eating my week", or "how do I get testimonials from students". Do NOT use for running the testimonial conversation itself — use testimonial-capture-interview instead.
---

# Community Engagement Playbook

A course community exists for exactly two outputs: completion and testimonials. Students who feel seen finish, finished students get results, and results become the proof that sells the next cohort. The costly mistake is treating community as a feature to bolt on — an empty Slack nobody posts in signals a dead course louder than no community at all, and an unbudgeted community quietly consumes the creator's production time until the next launch slips.

This skill runs after launch-email-sequence hands over the buyers, operates against the completion target set by course-outline-architect, and feeds its testimonial harvest back to course-sales-page's proof section. That loop — community to testimonials to sales page — is what makes the second launch outperform the first.

Worked example throughout: Dana, who just closed the "Notion OS for Consultants" launch ($297) with roughly 120 students from her 8,000-subscriber list, budgeting 5 hours a week for community.

## Operating procedure

### Step 1: Collect the inputs

1. Student count and where the audience already hangs out (check where they replied from during the launch; ask 5 buyers directly if unknown).
2. The course's quick-win moment and module milestones from course-outline-architect.
3. The creator's honest weekly hours available. Default and hard cap: 5.
4. Course length and the completion target — this pack designs for 35 percent or better against the 10 to 15 percent industry average.

### Step 2: Choose the platform — where students already are beats features

Rank candidates by one question: which platform are these students already opening daily? A feature-rich community platform they must remember to visit loses to a mediocre one already in their dock. Decision rules:… install to load the full skill