Community Is the Product
If your engagement strategy doesn’t have that at its center, you’re not behind the curve.
An entire economy has formed around human connection, and as engagement professionals, we need to start paying attention and learning from them.
Hampton is a paid peer community for startup founders. Members are vetted, placed into small core groups of about eight people, and meet with a facilitator roughly ten times a year. It also has a digital community where members can engage between sessions. The whole thing generates around $8 million in annual revenue.
Chief, a network for women executives that I belong to, runs on a similar model. It has curated small groups, structured conversation, and real community with both in-person and virtual options. In 2022, Chief reached the infamous “unicorn status,” hitting a $1.1 billion valuation in just three years.
Starting in Amsterdam and spreading across Europe, The Offline Club has created phone-free hangouts for strangers who want to unplug and connect IRL. Friendship apps (think Bumble BFF, Peanut, Timeleft, etc.) have collectively generated over $16 million in U.S. consumer spending in 2025 alone.
People are paying for structured ways to belong and be in community. That’s not a trend - it’s a societal correction.
In 2023, the Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. Back in 1990, only 3% of Americans reported having no close friends outside of family. By 2021, that number had quadrupled to 12%. The private sector noticed before most of us did, and they built products around it. The design principles those products share are worth studying, because they’re the same ones that determine whether your engagement work succeeds or fails.
And here’s the part most engagement professionals in higher ed and nonprofits aren’t talking about yet: philanthropic behavior and consumer behavior are more alike than we want to admit. People give to organizations they feel genuinely connected to. They stay connected to things that fit their lives, their values, and their goals. The private sector has been studying what makes people feel that way for years. We should be reading those signals.
What the best communities are actually doing
The strongest community products share a set of design principles, and they’re worth naming because most engagement programs violate at least two of them by default: small groups, real structure, low barrier to entry, multiple modes of participation, and designing for the life people are actually living.
Small groups, not audiences or crowds. This isn’t about throwing a big tailgate or a gala. It’s about bringing three to ten people together where everyone is expected to participate and connect. You scale by growing the number of groups, not the size of them. The moment a group gets too big to go around the room, you’ve lost the thing that made it work.
Real structure. Prompts, facilitators, time limits, clear expectations. Nobody shows up wondering what they’re supposed to do. This is actually what makes participation feel safe enough to happen. An unstructured networking hour sounds friendly, but for most people it’s just anxiety with a name badge. Structure removes that friction.
Low barrier to entry. No board seat required. No event to plan, no year-long commitment to make. You show up, you participate, you leave. That simplicity is intentional. The easier it is to say yes the first time, the more likely someone comes back.
Multiple modes of participation. The strongest communities today offer both synchronous and asynchronous ways to engage. A live session anchors the experience, but there’s a way to stay connected between them. Chief does this well. [Advancement Talent Co.](your link here), the professional community I run for advancement talent professionals, does too. We meet virtually every month, and members can engage on our platform between sessions when they need it. Flexibility lowers the barrier to reentry, not just entry. And reentry is where most engagement programs fall apart.
Designing for the life people are actually living, not the version you assume they have. Peanut exists because someone noticed new mothers were isolated in a life stage nobody had built a community product for yet. The alumni newsletter I once helped produce included kids’ activity downloads because our alumni were parents with young children, and meeting them in that reality mattered. The best communities are built around who people actually are right now, not who they were when they graduated or when they joined.
Here’s where things diverge from how most engagement programs actually work.
Most organizations design engagement around output. Attendance. Clicks. Participation rates. We ask how many people showed up, not what it felt like to be there. In advancement, in nonprofits, in membership organizations, engagement often looks like a calendar. A series of events. Communications tied to moments in time. Those things aren’t wrong. But they don’t create connection on their own.
People don’t build relationships because you invited them to something. They build relationships because the environment made it easy to do so. There’s a difference between access and connection, and most organizations are still optimizing for access. More emails. More events. More touchpoints. But access doesn’t guarantee anything. You can give someone a dozen ways to interact and still not create a single meaningful relationship.
The communities growing right now, and charging for the privilege of joining them, aren’t winning because they have better content. There’s no shortage of content. They’re winning because the experience is better. Hampton isn’t selling information. Chief isn’t selling a network directory. They’re selling what it feels like to be in the room. To be with people who get it, who understand you — to not feel alone. Most engagement strategies are designed for reach. The ones that work are designed for belonging.
The design tension that kills engagement
There’s a failure mode on each end of the spectrum, and I’ve seen both up close.
The first is abdication. The institution hands the keys to a volunteer board without defining where the car should go. The board pursues pet projects, consumes enormous staff time, and produces activity disconnected from anything strategic. The members are engaged. The institution is not served.
The second is isolation. The institution designs everything internally, then wonders why participation falls flat. The community wasn’t included in building the thing they were supposed to care about.
The organizations getting community right sit somewhere in between. They design the structure — the format, the timing, the prompts, the purpose — and then invite people into it. They hold the frame. They don’t build inside it alone.
In our first Keynote conversation, John Hill described bringing stakeholders into the room to shape the product from the start. That instinct is exactly right. The best community designers know what they’re building and why, and they build it with the people they’re building it for.
What to do with this
The organizations building the strongest communities right now, startups and century-old institutions alike, are treating community as a core product. Designed. Intentional. Structured for small groups, flexible participation, and repeat engagement.
If your engagement strategy doesn’t have that at its center, you’re not behind the curve. You’re behind a market that already validated what works and is actively scaling it.
The question isn’t whether people want community. They’re already buying it. Ask yourself whether you’re building something worth joining, and whether you’re using the right principles to get there.
More content from Week 1
Keynote: John Hill, VP Story at Whop
From Kristin: AI can enhance the student and alumni experience—but not in the way you think
From Dave: When the Story You Tell About Alumni Stops Matching the One They’re Living
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