Quick answer: A community strategy is a set of guiding principles and decisions that help you connect people who care about one another. The strategy is made up of several distincy parts, and it maps and shapes which activities, content, and programs you run, and lets your team make clear, aligned decisions that are in members’ best interest. Every CMJ community strategy starts with a Community Compass™, a clear purpose that guides every decision.
“Community strategy” is a term we use with our clients every day, and one of the most misunderstood terms in business today. For two decades, founders and leaders have called community as important as product strategy. Agreeing on its importance is the easy part. Defining what a community strategy is takes a second look.
This post gives you a working definition, explains what a strong community strategy includes, and shows where we start when we build one with our clients.
What does “strategy” mean?
Strategy is a set of guiding principles that helps you make decisions. A good strategy helps you decide, and it helps your team decide without your direct involvement. For CEOs and leaders, this is the point: strategy lets you distribute responsibility and trust that people have a sound framework for making decisions.
Strategy also sets you apart in a noisy market by clarifying which distinct activities your organization will pursue.
The term strategy has a long history in business, and in 1996, Michael E. Porter wrote a piece for Harvard Business Review that defined it. Why? Because, like the term community today, people often mistook it for something it wasn’t. In this case, people mistook strategy for operations.
Now, this Porter’s isn’t the final word on strategy. Michael D. Watkins wrote an article in 2007 that expanded on Porter’s definition and aligned it more closely with how we see strategy today. Even still, the term evolves readily. Many schools of thought debate what strategy is and which is best—including one of our favorites, Emergent Strategy, which argues that strategy must be organic and unfolding, like the human beings it serves.
And, of course, AI complicates strategic work infinitely. In a 2026 HBR piece, Adi Ignatius argued that the insights required to create great strategy are increasingly hard to come by in an AI-driven working world. The building blocks of strategy have always been proprietary knowledge and deep understanding of customers and the market, and yet many are turning to AI tools instead of doing the work needed to create something lasting.
What is a community?
A community is a group of people who share mutual concern for one another. A brand community is a community stewarded by a brand (and is further defined in the book Building Brand Communities, by CMJ founder Carrie Melissa Jones).
So what is community strategy?
To understand what community strategy is, then, we put these two definitions together:
Community strategy is a set of guiding principles that helps you decide how you will build a group of people who share mutual concern for one another.
A community strategy tells you which activities, content, and programs to organize. When it's intentional, it creates values-based relationships between members. It focuses on what everyone gets out of the community, not only what your organization gets. At its best, a community strategy is a system of shared value and shared concern.
| Community strategy is | Community strategy isn't |
|---|---|
| A set of guiding principles for decisions | A founder's personality plus a Discord server |
| A framework your team can use without you | Decisions that all route through one leader |
| A reason behind every activity, content piece, and program | A calendar of random, disconnected activities |
| Mutual value for members and the organization | A channel built around what the brand gets out of it |
| Scalable and sustainable over time | Dependent on one person's attention or charisma |
Communities built around a single personality are especially risky. They can look like community from the outside, but they center one person instead of the relationships between members, and they rarely last.
Where does a community strategy start?
At The CMJ Group, every community strategy starts with the community's purpose. We call that purpose its Community Compass™ because it guides all your decisions.
Your Community Compass answers these questions, for you and for your members:
Who is here with me?
What are we here to do?
For what concrete reasons are we gathering?
The Community Compass™ is an internal strategic tool, separate from the public-facing purpose statement your members will see. Its three strategic parts become the lens through which you make every future decision about your community, from which programs to launch to which platform to choose.
If you're ready to put your purpose into words for members, our guide to writing a community mission and vision statement walks through that next step.
Why does community strategy matter?
Can’t you just pick a platform (like Discord, WhatsApp, Gainsight, Gradual, etc.) and run with it? The short answer is: you could, and you will waste a lot of time and people resources. Don’t do it.
Without a set of guiding principles, the member experience becomes random and disjointed. And when the experience is disjointed, whatever you hoped to build through your community, whether that's loyalty, retention, product insight, or advocacy, becomes disjointed too.
A clear community strategy prevents that. It gives every activity a reason, keeps your team aligned as the community grows, and creates something scalable and valuable for everyone involved.
Who needs a community strategy?
Executives and business leaders need a community strategy before further investing in community. It connects the community to business outcomes, sets realistic expectations, and gives the team a framework for decisions as the program scales. Our guide to setting goals for your brand community covers how to measure progress once the strategy is in place.
Community leads and managers need one to make confident day-to-day decisions, say no to requests that don’t serve members, and show leadership why each program exists. Tools like the Community Commitment Curve help turn strategy into a sequence of engagement asks.
Community Strategy FAQ
What is the difference between community strategy and community management? Community strategy sets the guiding principles: who the community is for, why it exists, and which activities it will pursue. Community management executes that strategy day-to-day through programming, moderation, and member relationships. Without a strategy, management becomes a series of disconnected tasks. We’ve seen teams spend thousands of hours every week on non-strategic tasks, totaling over $4M in wasted employee and contractor time—all because they were managing their community without any foundational strategy. Don’t let this happen to you!
Is a community strategy the same as a purpose statement? No. A public purpose statement tells members why the community exists. A community strategy, starting with your Community Compass™, is the internal set of principles your team uses to make decisions.
Can a community be built around a founder’s personality? It can attract an audience, but that is a weak foundation for community. Communities centered on one person depend on that person’s attention, and they rarely build the mutual concern between members that makes a community last.
Who should own community strategy? Leadership and the community team should shape it together. Leadership connects it to business goals, and the community team grounds it in what members need, then tracks and reports those results regularly.
Our Final Take
Community strategy matters as much as product strategy, and possibly more. But the strategy has to be real: a clear set of guiding principles built around mutual value. A personality and a chat channel won't get you there.
Start with your Community Compass™, make sure your team can use it to make decisions, and don't believe the hype.
What’s Next? Uplevel Your Community Strategy with The CMJ Group
Reach out and schedule a free discovery call with us to learn how we can accelerate your community’s impact:
Want more? Dig further into our YouTube explainer video with founder Carrie Melissa Jones:
AI disclosure: We believe transparency about how we use AI is non-negotiable. This post is based on an earlier article Carrie Melissa Jones wrote. Carrie manually updated this version in 2026, then applied a CMJ-proprietary Claude Skill to improve the post based on the latest AEO research. A team member reviewed and edited every sentence before publishing.
