Build With Becky: Smart Strategies To Grow Your Community-Driven Business
Aug 13, 2026 · 6 min · 3 segments
I'm breaking down why adding more value is rarely the answer when members stop logging in, stop engaging, or start canceling. At Affinity Collective, we review a lot of exit surveys for our clients…
When I talk to membership founders that are like, "Hey, my community's not engaged, they're not, they're not logging in, they're not doing the work, they're canceling, they're leaving," whatever.
A lot of the times they're thinking like, "What else do I need to add?" We're always thinking like, "I need to add more value.
We are not hurting for content when we can have it at our fingertips with AI, with scrolling any platform, finding a ton of resources for free on YouTube.
Probably if you have a community, you even have a lot of free content that people could go through.
They're paying for access, they're paying for connection, they're paying for a lot of other things, right? Content creates an overwhelm problem, which is the number one reason that people leave communities.
So in our business at Affinity, we review a lot of exit surveys and why did you cancel feedback for our clients, and a very common answer we see is, "There's so much here, I just can't utilize everything.
I don't know whether or not I should watch this video or that video, or go to this event or go to that event.
Like, I'm totally overwhelmed, and so I just can't be bothered." Right? So this is a very, very common problem, especially for long-term existing memberships where there's so much content to go through.
I recently, uh, was doing a strategy for the Design Better podcast, and they have so, so much content, but they also have these incredible micro tools that they give their members that helps them with deciding like, or like basically helps them f- create a curated list of content that they should check out.
It's like, "Here's the five things that you should dive into based on what you shared with us." And they built this, you know, using AI.
It's like a sort of like micro product that's very customized based on all of their content data.
Super impactful for any long-standing communities that have a ton of content and a huge backlog.
Okay, so what else can you do about this besides create this like custom product? [chuckles] Which we can totally help you with if you want help doing something like that.
You can, first of all, make it really clear that they don't have to use everything to be successful.
If I were you, I would just start with X, Y, and Z." You can show them actual examples of members and how they engage in the membership and show that they're not using everything to set the expectation that they're not expected to use everything.
You can build a roadmap for your members, and even better, you can build more than one roadmap and really personalize it.
Give your members content in a specific order based on their goals, and that is so much more helpful than overwhelming libraries of 10 plus courses to sift through.
Like, we want to really get them access to the thing that's gonna make the most impact for them in that moment.
One of the things that we do, especially on our migration projects, but also when we're reviewing content or auditing, uh, an existing community experience, is we look at where are the opportunities to simplify? What resources are your members barely touching? I remember when I was studying user experience design, there's this, uh, strategy called information architecture design, where you have all of the different content.
Like let's say you're designing the architecture for a content library, so you have all of the stuff and you start to like put it into categories.
Think about like a deck of cards on the table where each card is a piece of your content and you start to group, put it in different groups.
And there's this strategy where you can actually have, let's say your, 10 of your members do this exercise and like organize content in a way that makes sense to them, and so it's not just...
Then you start to look at the patterns like, well, how did everybody organize this? What did, what were some of the themes that came up? And you might notice that the way your members think about your content is totally different than the way you think about your content.
And so understanding their brains, understanding how they wanna consume information can really help you with how you might start to categorize things differently.
Right now, when it comes to content, the name of the game is personalization and curation and really getting people to the right stuff at the right time.
Custom roadmaps, personalizing it, okay? But what's also working the best right now is just creating experiences.
Creating experiences that people go through together to figure out things together, live, uh, virtual events, live in person events.
And so if you have one of those because you've been around the block [chuckles] and you've been building your community for a long time, it might be time to revisit how you can look at simplifying things.
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When I talk to membership founders that are like, "Hey, my community's not engaged, they're not, they're not logging in, they're not doing the work, they're canceling, they're leaving," whatever.
A lot of the times they're thinking like, "What else do I need to add?" We're always thinking like, "I need to add more value.
We are not hurting for content when we can have it at our fingertips with AI, with scrolling any platform, finding a ton of resources for free on YouTube.
Probably if you have a community, you even have a lot of free content that people could go through.
They're paying for access, they're paying for connection, they're paying for a lot of other things, right? Content creates an overwhelm problem, which is the number one reason that people leave communities.
So in our business at Affinity, we review a lot of exit surveys and why did you cancel feedback for our clients, and a very common answer we see is, "There's so much here, I just can't utilize everything.
I don't know whether or not I should watch this video or that video, or go to this event or go to that event.
Like, I'm totally overwhelmed, and so I just can't be bothered." Right? So this is a very, very common problem, especially for long-term existing memberships where there's so much content to go through.
I recently, uh, was doing a strategy for the Design Better podcast, and they have so, so much content, but they also have these incredible micro tools that they give their members that helps them with deciding like, or like basically helps them f- create a curated list of content that they should check out.
It's like, "Here's the five things that you should dive into based on what you shared with us." And they built this, you know, using AI.
It's like a sort of like micro product that's very customized based on all of their content data.
Super impactful for any long-standing communities that have a ton of content and a huge backlog.
Okay, so what else can you do about this besides create this like custom product? [chuckles] Which we can totally help you with if you want help doing something like that.
You can, first of all, make it really clear that they don't have to use everything to be successful.
If I were you, I would just start with X, Y, and Z." You can show them actual examples of members and how they engage in the membership and show that they're not using everything to set the expectation that they're not expected to use everything.
You can build a roadmap for your members, and even better, you can build more than one roadmap and really personalize it.
Give your members content in a specific order based on their goals, and that is so much more helpful than overwhelming libraries of 10 plus courses to sift through.
Like, we want to really get them access to the thing that's gonna make the most impact for them in that moment.
One of the things that we do, especially on our migration projects, but also when we're reviewing content or auditing, uh, an existing community experience, is we look at where are the opportunities to simplify? What resources are your members barely touching? I remember when I was studying user experience design, there's this, uh, strategy called information architecture design, where you have all of the different content.
Like let's say you're designing the architecture for a content library, so you have all of the stuff and you start to like put it into categories.
Think about like a deck of cards on the table where each card is a piece of your content and you start to group, put it in different groups.
And there's this strategy where you can actually have, let's say your, 10 of your members do this exercise and like organize content in a way that makes sense to them, and so it's not just...
Then you start to look at the patterns like, well, how did everybody organize this? What did, what were some of the themes that came up? And you might notice that the way your members think about your content is totally different than the way you think about your content.
And so understanding their brains, understanding how they wanna consume information can really help you with how you might start to categorize things differently.
Right now, when it comes to content, the name of the game is personalization and curation and really getting people to the right stuff at the right time.
Custom roadmaps, personalizing it, okay? But what's also working the best right now is just creating experiences.
Creating experiences that people go through together to figure out things together, live, uh, virtual events, live in person events.
And so if you have one of those because you've been around the block [chuckles] and you've been building your community for a long time, it might be time to revisit how you can look at simplifying things.
