Set the Tone With Your Community Values

Somewhere between choosing your promise and opening the doors, you'll hit a question every builder hits: how do I make sure people do things in there and be good stewards of the space?

What if everyone just self promotes? What if nobody posts anything? What if people are RUDE???

There's a way to solve for this without bringing the hammer down. It's simpler than you might even think!

The most common solution is a long-ass community guidelines document with fourteen checkboxes before a member can say hello. Some Facebook groups have turned this into an art form. If you've ever abandoned a join flow halfway through a questionnaire, you know the feeling.

It makes sense to some extent why "Community Guidelines" became the default term used. They are guidelines and the intent behind those forms is completely legitimate. Your brand is responsible for what happens in your room. You are hoping members follow certain behaviors, hold themselves a certain way, contribute rather than extract only. And being transparent about your expectations is always better than hoping people guess right.

The delivery is what's broken. Nobody reads the fourteen checkboxes. Nobody remembers what they agreed to. Nobody wears the values or sees them as part of a culture.

You can just do things…and you can just state things.

If you're a creator or publisher, your audience already trusts you to deliver great content. They have now clicked something to enter something you've put together.

Just tell them what your values are and what you hope they'll do here. It always lands a lot better than "guidelines" that say "no self promotion."

Put your values in your welcome message. Pin them as a post. If your platform allows it, make them one of the first things people see after they choose to join. Put them on your landing page. Then reference them often — in your posts, in what you celebrate, in how you show up. Lead by example, obviously: the room copies its host.

Every community will be unique in this. But stated + clear values get read, they get remembered, and eventually they get repeated. Guidelines don't.

Some values I'm proud to have brainstormed with creators over the years:

We just plainly stated 4 with an emoji in front of them. Nobody signed anything, and yet a new member who read these five lines knew exactly how to act: what gets celebrated, what won't fly, what kind of people they're about to be surrounded by. A good value works on members subconsciously — it makes the desired behavior feel like the obvious behavior.

And there's a bonus effect: the person who bristles at "drop the ego at the door" was never your person anyway. Values are a filter on the door too. They shape your promise by shaping who self-selects into it.

Work backwards from behavior, the same way you'd design any product experience. Ask yourself: what are the four values that would subconsciously make a member act the way this room needs?

If your community's promise depends on people sharing real numbers, you need a confidentiality value (what's said here, stays here). If it depends on experts showing up humbly, you need an ego value. If it depends on beginners asking "dumb" questions in public, you need a generosity value that makes answering them a point of pride.

Four is plenty. Write them like you'd say them out loud, put them where people will actually see them, and then live them so visibly that members start quoting them back to you. OR literally reference them in your comms with members.

You'll know they took when a member cites one of your values in a thread you never touched. I have seen this happen multiple times! It's incredible every time.

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I lead Community at beehiiv. Everything here is my own view.