#71 Your Community Milestones
This week I taught a session for Alt Summer School on the transformation membership model & someone asked me an amazing question...
What are some prompts to help us figure out our community's milestones along their journey?
I loved this question and wanted to share my answer with you!
If you don't know where your community members stop along the way to the transformation you're serving, then how can you build the right thing?
The first thing you need to do before thinking about milestones (or stages) is to develop your transformation statement.
In simple terms, transformation products take members from A to B.
credit: Rosie Sherry (rosieland)
Here are a few statement examples:
FROM not being able to walk a mile TO completing your first marathon.
FROM less than 50% occupancy of your fitness classes TO booked out fitness studio.
FROM knowing 0 about coding TO being employed as a software engineer.
Take a few minutes and write down your transformation statement.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
If you need help figuring out what your point B is, here are some questions to ask your community members:
What are you working toward right now?
What is your biggest, most audacious goal?
Where do you hope to be in 3-5 years?
What are you really excited about right now that you want to lean into more?
Now that you have your statement, you need to think about the milestones along the way to reaching their end goal.
When you know the milestones you can better plan your products, programming, and surprise and delight experiences for your customers.
I like to think about milestones as something to cheers over (celebrate) or something to have a breakdown about (a low moment everyone goes through).
Here are a few milestone examples:
Your first job rejection
Your first mile run without walking
Your first 100% booked fitness class
In order to figure out what your milestones are, you want to be careful not to base them on solely your own experience.
You are only one data point.
Here are some questions you can ask your community that are at all different stages of the journey:
How are you working toward your goal?
What have you tried that hasn't worked?
What have you tried that has worked?
What was the last thing you accomplished toward your goal?
What is your next step?
You'll start to see themes and be able to create a timeline... which I call a community journey map.
Give it a shot and see what it illuminates for you – I'd bet you'll want to update your customer journey.
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