Facility managers association newsletter, ~1,100 paying readers, board-mandated member Slack for 400 members.
What changed
Launched and moderated a Slack for the full association membership, running alongside the paid newsletter.
Result
Eight weeks in, ~11 regular posters. Newsletter reply rate down roughly a third as questions moved into Slack threads with almost no audience.
Limitations
One association, one niche, one year. Doesn't prove forums never work — proves running two surfaces in parallel on the same questions split attention and hurt the one that was already working. The board's number target drove the decision more than the members' behaviour did.
I run a paid newsletter for German facility managers, two years in, about 1,100 paying readers. Last year the board pushed for a member community — a Slack for the association's 400 members. I was against it. I ran it anyway.
What happened: activity collapsed to about eleven regular posters within eight weeks. Most of the 400 just read. Worse, a good chunk of them stopped replying to my weekly email thread and started posting their questions inside Slack instead — where nobody outside the eleven saw them. My reply rate fell about a third.
What I'd do differently: keep the newsletter as the main surface, run the community for the eleven who actually want to talk, and never let the two compete for the same question. The board wanted numbers. I gave them numbers. I should have given them a smaller thing that worked.
Following. Curious whether the eleven stayed because of you or because of each other.
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Noor BakkerNewsletter Writer · productised service
Netherlands·Scaling·6d ago
This is going to sound blunt: 400 is a number, not a community. Twenty people who talk weekly beat four hundred who read. You built it for the board, so it never had a job. If I had your list, I'd pick one question a week, post it to the whole audience, and let the eleven be loud in public where the rest can watch. That's the asset. Not a private room.
Uncomfortable thing first: eleven regular posters out of four hundred isn't a failure, it's a normal distribution. Most professional communities run on 1-3% active. The actual mistake was letting Slack siphon questions off the newsletter instead of routing them back. Worth separating those two problems before you scrap anything. Pull the numbers for who asked what, and where they then got an answer. My suspicion is the drop in replies is about the newsletter, not about Slack.
