Community Building: Bringing an Existing Community to RYLA
Most communities start with a simple purpose: helping people connect. But existing tools fall short, forcing organizers to piece together multiple solutions that weren’t built for this task. Many communities struggle with:
The absence of a member directory, making it difficult to know who else is in the group.
Heavy reliance on marketing efforts for discovery, making it challenging for potential members to find and join a community.
Maintaining momentum across online and offline activities to support continuous relationship building.
Effortless event co-promotion across multiple groups.
Connecting people across community groups that are part of a bigger ecosystem.
RYLA provides the tools to solve these challenges, helping communities thrive. Keep reading for tips on how to bring an existing community to RYLA.
1. Clarifying Your Why
Before setting up your community on RYLA, it’s important to clarify its purpose. A community should have a clear reason for its existence, including who should join and why they should join. This is separate than the purpose of the organization or business, and should focus on connecting people.
A few starter questions:
What is the purpose of your community?
What value does it provide to members?
Who are the ideal members of your community?
2. Setting Up Your RYLA Cards
To get started, you’ll need to set up both a community card and an organizer’s profile card.
The community card provides the ability to include a picture, location, headline, and up to six social links. The About tab provides space to add additional information like the community’s purpose, who should join, and what members can expect. You can also add upcoming events to the schedule. And, in the Chat tab, post a welcome message to engage new members as they are joining.
For the organizer’s profile card, include a picture, title, company, location, headline, and up to six social links. The About tab can be used to explain who you’re looking to connect with and if there is something you are offering. Add any upcoming events to your personal events schedule, including those shared on your community card.
3. Introducing RYLA to Your Community
In an email introducing members to the new community space, I recommend being clear on the value they will receive for joining and instructions on how best to set up their profile card.
By creating a RYLA profile card, members can share who they are, link key resources, and display the communities they belong to. They can also connect with others, see who is attending events in advance, discover relevant events, and organize and share their events schedule.
For giving direction on creating a new profile card, a few ideas:
For networking groups it may be helpful for people to add keywords like “hiring” or “looking for work”.
Members can create a profile card for their second career, when more relevant to the group.
Try writing the types of connections they are looking for, or what they are offering.
4. Inviting Existing Community Members to RYLA
To make it easy to invite members, RYLA offers different invitation methods.
On free and paid cards, you can manually invite members by entering names and emails.
On the Community Plus plan, a bulk upload for members is possible, which is ideal for communities with 20+ members.
Note: if inviting members via the type in screen, user accounts will automatically be created. New users will receive an email to activate their account, skipping the sign up flow.
5. Building Engagement and Conversations
Once your community is set up, the next step is to engage members by facilitating conversations. Start with one chat topic per week:
Use announcements to share updates about events, participants, and programs.
Create discussion topics that encourage participation and align with the community’s purpose.
6. Creating Sub-Groups
Consider forming sub-groups with additional community cards.
If you have a leadership team, you might create a private group to coordinate efforts.
Or you can create breakout groups to work on different initiatives.
Create additional spaces to organize members by geography or specific interests. For example, a travel community could have separate sub-groups for each trip, allowing members to coordinate for the trips they will be on, in addition to being a part of the main group.
7. Using RYLA at Events
It’s helpful to have an activation plan at events. Some tactics to consider:
Assign ambassadors to help onboard new members.
Share a QR code with ambassadors to make it easy for members to scan to join.
Encourage people to connect with others they meet in person on the RYLA app.
Building a thriving community requires thoughtful planning and engagement. By leveraging RYLA, you can streamline member connections, event promotion, and community conversations. Whether you’re launching a new community or transitioning an existing one, RYLA empowers meaningful connections and drives sustainable engagement.
Ready to get started? Set up your community on RYLA today and begin building connections that matter!
Get started for free at ryla.app
