We find, foster, and manage the conversations that build community and convert them into business value.
Outsourced community management that lets you scale. Perfect for forums, Discord, and Reddit.
Human, expert, and built to create connection at scale. Community magic for social channels.
Design, launch, or relaunch a community your business can rely on, with expert consultancy.
The skills, confidence and expert guidance community teams need to thrive.
Design and run programs that turn engaged members into advocates, creators and local leaders.
Turn your community into an always-on, human powered focus group.
Select and setup the best community platform for your business with our expert help.
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Design, launch, or relaunch a community that your business can rely on.
Whether you’re starting from scratch, migrating platforms, or trying to rescue a tired forum, a clear community strategy gives you:
This service is built for organisations who:
Led by specialist community consultants, your strategy engagement will help you:
Your strategy is built around the 5 Elements System, a simple but powerful framework for community success.
Who your community is for, what they’ll do together, and why it matters both for members and for your business.
What you’ll contribute (access, content, people, incentives) and what you’ll invite members to contribute (support, ideas, reviews, advocacy).
How the community is owned internally, how it connects to other teams, and how it runs day to day.
The engagement strategy, tone of voice, guidelines, and escalation paths that shape everyday conversations.
The right platform for the purpose (forum, Discord, social, in-app etc.) and the KPIs, dashboards and data integrations you’ll use to track success.
Launch/Relaunch
A community strategy is a plan that defines who your online community is for, what they’ll do together, and how that activity will drive business outcomes such as retention, referrals, support deflection and/or insight. Without a clear strategy, forums, Discord servers and social groups tend to drift, become hard to justify, or die off. With a strategy, you get a community with a clear purpose, clear success metrics, and a roadmap stakeholders can back.
A typical launch project starts with Discovery (stakeholder interviews and workshops), builds a strategy using our 5 Elements framework, and then turns that into a practical 90-day launch / relaunch plan. That plan covers seeding, member recruitment, content, events, community structure, comms and measurement, so you’re not guessing what to do once the platform is switched on.
Yes. We can audit your current community against clear goals, diagnose what’s working and what isn’t, and recommend changes to purpose, structure, engagement and governance. If you’re migrating platform (or adding additional spaces like Discord alongside a forum), we design a plan that includes migration mapping, comms, and a relaunch programme to re-engage your core members.
Timelines depend on scope, but most strategy and launch planning projects run at 3-6 months to launch. The idea is to move fast enough to keep momentum, while allowing time to involve stakeholders, test ideas, and secure business buy-in.
AI and automation can help with things like content ideas, tagging themes, flagging risky posts, and basic FAQs, and we factor these tools into your platform and measurement choices. But the core of your community strategy is still human: defining purpose, setting norms, building trust, and making nuanced decisions in real conversations. We design your strategy so AI supports your human community managers and members, rather than replacing them.
Standing on Giants has spent more than a decade designing and running community strategies for well-known brands across multiple sectors. The team behind the original giffgaff community has since supported organisations such as Airbnb, Google, Sonos, Lenovo, Fiverr, Utilita and Yerba Madre with community strategy, launch planning and optimisation. As a certified B Corp, the focus is always on combining commercial outcomes with healthier, more human online conversations.
