How Modern Fertility Built a Digital Campfire Based on All Things Fertility
Below, 5 key insights from the brand’s standout strategy.
Every brand wants to build a community.
Modern Fertility is actually doing it.
The healthcare company, which burst onto the scene in 2017 on the premise that fertility resources and care should be far more accessible to women than they were, has built a genuine community for women seeking information and support on topics that begin with fertility but extend far beyond it, such as single motherhood, miscarriage and infertility.
The Modern Fertility community, which lives primarily on Slack, is open to everyone, not just its customers. (The brand’s primary product is a direct-to-consumer mail-in hormone test that provides a wealth of personalized data to those who purchase it.)
Below, 5 insights from my conversation with Reina Pomeroy, Modern Fertility’s Head of Community, that define how the company is approaching building its community right now.
1. Use content to stoke the flames of community
For Reina, content and community go hand in hand. Members often arrive at Modern Fertility after wandering through the desert of the Internet searching for fertility information they can trust. For that reason, Reina sees it as part of her job to act as a kind of concierge, translating and streamlining the mass of often conflicting information out there and teasing out the scientific facts in helpful blog posts, webinars featuring medical professionals, and other types of “digestible” content. Her work is paying off. Often, she’ll hear that the content on the Modern Fertility Slack channel is much better than the resources available on Google, and that lack of trustworthy information on the subject drives a feedback loop of interest in the community and brand as a whole. Having a library of content also allows Reina to foster an experience she terms “scalably intimate”, meaning that instead of responding anew each time a community member asks a question, she and her team can share links to past content which often contains hyper-specific responses.
2. Use your Capital C Community to stoke the fires of your lowercase c community
The Modern Fertility community is open to everyone, not just paying customers. Why? The company, says Reina, is on a mission to help “people with ovaries get reproductive health information earlier in life right and break the taboo of fertility in general.” By definition, that mission encompasses a broad swath of people. To minimize overwhelm, Reina thinks of paying customers and community super-users (such as those who might attend Modern Fertility’s virtual meet-ups, for example) as belonging to Modern Fertility’s Capital C Community, while she views its lowercase c community as everyone else on its channels, and in a broader sense, everyone else who might be interested in the resources Modern Fertility has to offer. Her primary focus is thinking about ways to add value to the Capital C Community —delivering content its members ask for and responding to the questions that interest them most — in order to grow the lowercase c community. While the latter members might never become paying customers, says Reina, that’s just fine, because some will, and that’s why it’s a worthwhile exercise.
3. Empower your experts
One phenomenon Reina has observed on the Modern Fertility Slack channel is that its community members eventually become experts on the topics being discussed and begin sharing previously shared resources with newer community members, and answering their questions. Her team encourages this behavior. “I think people really appreciate that they get to be a steward of somebody else’s experience,” she says.
4. Choose a platform to host your community based on how you want your members to use it
Slack isn’t a perfect platform, but it works well for the Modern Fertility community in part because it allows for multiple channels, each devoted to a different topic. There’s a channel specifically for discussions among women trying to conceive, another for egg-freezing, and another to cover topics related to discussions about being a modern womxn. There’s a channel for fielding questions about the Modern Fertility hormone test, and another for sharing test results. Reina acknowledges that for someone who has never used Slack before, all these channels can be overwhelming, but they also have the effect of keeping conversations more focused on what community members actually care about, and because members feel they’re in a safe environment surrounded by their people, often spark deeply raw and vulnerable exchanges.
5. Build the community with a small group of core users who exist for the sole purpose of giving you #realtalk
For Reina, being a great community builder means being a better listener. That means creating avenues that enable the company to listen to its community right from the start, and, among other things, begin incorporating their feedback into the company’s product roadmap. To this end, Modern Fertility has a Community Advisory Board consisting of 10 women who are at different stages “of their fertility journey” and who represent a cross-section of customers and community members. The brand taps the group—who rotate out of the Advisory Board every 6 months—for feedback on many fronts, but particularly on new product features. Reina says the members of this group are highly vocal about what they want to see, and while the company doesn’t always incorporate their feedback, asking for it accomplishes two things: it makes this core group of MVPs feel heard, and it ensures the company is building with its core community instead of simply for them.
Want to hear more from Reina? Check out our full hour-long conversation from the May 28th episode of The Digital Campfire Download here.
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Additional reporting by Noah Cosson.
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Each month I’ll be putting a different BIPOC-run digital campfire in the spotlight and inviting you to donate, with the understanding that I will never ask you to donate if I have not already done so myself. This month, I’m spotlighting The Nap Minstry, an organization founded by Tricia Hersey that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations as well as a radical tool for community healing through performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing. If you’re in a position to donate, and would like to, please join me in directly supporting The Nap Ministry’s mission here or here.