Their conduct didn’t hold up their end of the contract. That part wasn’t complicated. But what made the conversation more than just a breached contract and let me sit across from them and say “you agreed to this, and this isn’t that,” was something we’d done on the first day of that retreat. We had set and shared out loud our “community agreements.” We asked every one in the room to acknowledge them by raising their hand and saying yes. When it came time to end things, I wasn’t just enforcing a contract they had signed. I was pointing back to something they’d also said yes to, in their own voice, in a room with everyone else.

What we expect people to just know

Think about how differently we behave in a conference room versus a dinner party versus a group text with old friends. Nobody has to explain the shift. We feel it, and we adjust, mostly without thinking twice. That instinct is real. It’s also not something you can hold anyone accountable to, because nobody ever actually said it out loud.

Most communities we build on purpose, brand communities especially, run on that same unspoken instinct and never correct for it. We invite people in and just expect them to intuit how to show up, contribute, fit in. Then we’re surprised when they don’t. The problem was never that people lack good instincts, it’s that we likely never told them which room they walked into.

Enter community agreements

I first heard this term at lululemon, while leading brand and community across stores. Before any intimate community moment, meaning the kind where people are actually spending real time and real energy with each other, not just passing through, we’d say the agreements out loud. Every person in the room heard them and knew exactly what they were opting into.

I say intimate on purpose. A day-long immersion, a brand retreat, a multi-day conference: that’s where agreements belong. Standing up at the start of a dinner, a dance party, or a pilates class to lay out ground rules would be, frankly, weird. But in the rooms where you’re asking people to share energy, story, time, proximity, this is not a nice-to-have. Being an architect of community means designing every touchpoint on purpose, right down to whether there’s a chair waiting for everyone who walks in. And working with humans doesn’t make that less necessary. If anything, it makes it more necessary. People are messy. Plan for it.

Language matters here

Community rules implies that you follow the list someone made for you. But agreements, those are mutual. Those require active participation. It’s not a passive set of expectations, it’s an active agreement that when you come here, you agree to this way of being and you can hold me and the brand accountable to the same thing. This is not a one way street, so as a leader of that community, holding yourself to those same agreements matters.

So how do you actually set them

A few things worth sitting with before you write anything down:

• What matters most to the community you’ve already built, and to the brand behind it?

• Who are you actually gathering, and what do you think matters to them?

• How sensitive is the information, the proximity, the trust being asked for here?

• What kind of interactions do you actually want in this room, and are you designing for them on purpose?

• What happens if someone agrees to this and doesn't follow through?

From there, it’s just naming it plainly. Something like:

By being part of this community (or experience), I agree to:

• Act in good faith and have integrity. If I say I’ll do something, I do it. If I can’t anymore, I say so.

• What’s shared here stays here.

• Have fun, be my full self, and check my ego at the door.

• Show up even when it’s hard. Ask for help when I need it.

You get the idea, and you get to write your own version. If your community is meant to be light, easy, a place to exhale, then make the agreements match that. Something as simple as “check your drama at the door” protects the sense of ease everyone else came there for.

Set the table before you invite anyone to sit

Building a community is a lot like setting a table before people arrive for dinner. You don’t seat everyone and then say, “sorry, we assumed you knew there wouldn’t be chairs for everyone. We don’t really do that here.”

The clarity isn’t a formality. It’s what makes people feel safe enough to settle in. And it’s what protects everyone else already sitting at the table too.

_{TLDR; asses and write out your community agreements, share them with your community, get acknowledgement, and set the container for everyone involved.}

Hi, I’m Tillie Frank, founder and principal strategist at Frankie Brand, a community and brand marketing strategy studio. I’ve spent 14 years building the kind of relationships that make brands matter to the people they are trying to reach. Hit subscribe for your weekly tea.

ai transparency note: I use Claude to spell check, edit and trim some of my writing to make it more digestible. All writing, ideas, stories, pictures and takes are my own.

Here’s what I think gets missed constantly: community was never a channel you stand up. It’s not the Slack channel, the ambassador program, the dinner, though it can include all three. A community strategy, done honestly, is an audit. It’s looking at every place your business touches a person and asking whether that moment builds a sense of belonging or turns them back into a transaction. Most companies never run that audit. They pick a tactic instead, because a tactic has a launch date and a budget line, and an audit doesn’t often feel like a deliverable.

_{(There’s a lot of nuance to the origins of community, and for the sake of this piece, let’s say you have people already buying your product, but no community strategy yet. A great place to start is that audit. Here’s why…)}

Belonging is one of the oldest, most durable human needs there is. I once read a book by Dr. Chip Dodd on the eight needs of the human heart, and the first one is belonging, a sense of community. That's stuck with me across a career spent doing this work, because it's true more often than we give it credit for: the brands people choose, and the communities that form around them, are meeting a need that has little to do with the product. Often, that need is belonging.

And part of earning that emotional payoff is knowing exactly what you stand for as a brand. The brands that build real, lasting community tend to know their own character, not just their product benefits. Nike sells the belief that you're capable of more than you think. Lululemon sells a fuller, healthier version of the life you're already trying to live. Whatever your brand position, brands that make you feel something, while having incredible products, are the magnetic ones. And that's the real question people are asking without realizing it. It's not just where does this fit into my life, but what am I aligning myself with, what I believe about myself, or about the world, when I choose it.

The clarity around brand positioning by itself doesn’t build belonging. It just tells people what to look for. The actual building of community happens in much less glamorous ways. It’s in how you handle a customer service ticket. In whether you’re actually listening on social or just posting at people. It’s in the small (or big!) surprise-and-delight moments, especially when in response to what you hear on social. It’s in what onboarding feels like, and what it feels like when someone leaves. In whether product feedback loops back to something real. In how you treat agency partners, and most importantly, in how you treat your own employees, since that has a way of leaking into everything else. Community, at its best, isn’t a channel. It’s an undertone that runs through the whole business.

I saw this firsthand years ago at lululemon. Every employee was out in the community, sweating for free. Everyone wanted to work the in-store events, and we were constantly brainstorming where to show up next. We knew every regular guest by name. The company called being in store a “kitchen party,” because the kitchen is where the magic happens. In those early days, I thought the community strategy was the events, the partnerships with local studios. It took me a while to see that every business principle was actually community-led, the customer service, the product feedback loops, the in-store experience, even the merch and the store design. All of it was the strategy, not just the parts that had a launch date.

Some of that costs money: events, platforms, ambassador programs. Some of it costs attention and people’s time instead, and that’s not the free option. It’s funded by leadership’s willingness to prioritize, rather than a budget line, which is often the harder thing to get.

So next time someone says “we need a community strategy,” ask what they actually mean. A curated yoga class with free swag will connect you with people for an afternoon, but it won't last if the rest of your product and brand doesn't also consider your audience's humanity and ask what you are really building.

Take an honest look at every place you touch a person. Each is a signal of "I belong here" or "I don't." That is where belonging gets built.

_{TLDR; Audit & build your business around community, then layer the ambassador program, the IRL, the group chat on top.}

Hi, I’m Tillie Frank, founder and principal strategist at Frankie Brand, a community and brand marketing strategy studio. I’ve spent 14 years building the kind of relationships that make brands matter to the people they are trying to reach. Hit subscribe for your weekly tea!

ai transparency note: I use Claude to spell check, edit and trim some of my writing to make it more digestible. All writing, ideas, stories, pictures and takes are my own.

Watching it from the outside this year instead of from inside a campaign zoom room gave me something I didn’t expect: perspective. When you’re in it, you’re reacting. Deadlines, budgets, a brand team asking why a sorority TikTok has 40,000 views. You don’t get much room to step back and ask what’s actually working and what’s just noise.

So here’s what I noticed once I had the room to ask that question. Since I started doing this work in 2021, the field has gotten a lot more crowded. More brands are chasing the same 18 to 22 year olds, on the same handful of platforms, with the same handful of tactics: sorority house takeovers, ambassador programs, campus activations, creator gifting. The competition for attention and cultural relevance is real, and it’s only intensified every year I’ve watched it. And that is not to say, the fundamentals that actually move the needle haven’t changed.

Co-creation isn’t optional, and it isn’t a focus group

The instinct in a lot of marketing rooms is to figure out the strategy first and then bring in students to validate it. That’s backwards, and it’s the single biggest mistake I’ve watched brands make in this space. You have to co-create from the start, not just at the execution stage. Lean on your ambassadors, your intern network, your friends of friends who are actually on campus, and let them tell you where to show up, what to produce, why it matters, what to gift, and even what language to use. I can bring strategic experience and pattern recognition from four seasons of this. What I cannot do, and what no marketer over the age of 23 can convincingly do, is know what’s actually cool on a given campus in a given month. That knowledge lives with the students. Go get it from them. And pay them for it. If a 19 year old is doing real creative and strategic labor for your brand, treat it like the labor it is.

Where you show up matters as much as what you do

Every brand wants national scale, and almost no brand has the budget to actually earn it well. The teams that get the best return aren’t the ones spreading a thin layer of effort across every state. They’re the ones who go deep in college towns, where the entire local economy and social calendar revolves around the campus. In a college town, your dollar and your reach compound in a way they simply don’t in a big city with a university tucked into one corner of it. The move is to pick schools with genuine cultural relevance in their region, not just the biggest enrollment numbers, and to diversify across different types of campuses and communities rather than clustering in the same five schools every brand already targets.

This audience treats everything as content, and they can tell when you’re only there for the content

The note card in a gift box. The specific item you chose to include. Whether you host an actual event or just mail a package and call it activation. All of it gets read, screenshotted, and judged by an audience that has grown up fluent in spotting a brand that’s performing generosity versus a brand that means it. The tell is usually timing. If the only time your brand shows up is during the highest-visibility, highest-content-value window of the year, students notice, even if they can’t always articulate why something feels off. Showing up at least once outside of the big season, even in a small way, is what makes the September touchpoint land as sincere instead of transactional.

Safety has to be a design principle, not a checkbox

The “red zone,” the early weeks of the fall semester when a disproportionate number of campus safety incidents occur, is a well-documented reality, and any brand creating spaces for students to gather has a responsibility to build with that reality in mind. Free rideshare credit, drink tickets that actually cap consumption instead of just tracking it, visible security, clear exits. Most brands I’ve worked alongside do check these boxes. The difference between good and great is whether the thinking behind them is genuine care for the people in the room or a liability memo from legal. Students can tell the difference, even when they can’t name what they’re sensing. Build the safeguards because you actually care what happens to the people you invited, and the rest follows.

Scale doesn’t have to cost you intimacy

Before campus ambassador programs were standard practice at nearly every consumer brand, I ran one with more than 500 students across 137 campuses, led by a team of three. Running something that size with that little headcount forced a level of intentionality that smaller programs sometimes skip, because at scale you can’t fake it. What made that program work wasn’t reach for its own sake. It was that peer relationships did the actual work of humanizing the brand, campus by campus, in a way a national ad campaign never could. If your organization has the resources to build a real college ambassador program and do it with care, I still think there’s room to make an impact here. The channel isn’t tapped out entirely. It just needs to make sense for your brand.

Willing to be wrong, but applying a performance marketing mindset to community marketing, does not translate in my experience. And the distinction matters.

I’ve been doing this work for 14 years, long enough to watch the language change several times over while the actual job stayed strange and specific. It seemed worth sitting down and being honest about what’s different now vs. what people are just rediscovering and calling new. Here’s where I’ve landed.

What hasn’t changed

The need for connection. This is the one people keep acting surprised by, as if community marketing was invented sometime around 2020. It wasn’t. The desire to belong to something is not a trend, it’s a fundamental human need, and it existed long before any brand figured out how to monetize it. What’s changed is the volume, not the substance. Community work that actually holds up is still built the same way it always was: relationships first, everything else second. That ordering doesn’t get to flip just because the tools around it got more sophisticated.

Partnerships have to be mutually beneficial, or they’re not partnerships. I’ve watched a lot of brands confuse reach with alignment. A partner with a huge following who doesn’t actually share your values or care about your community will get you a spike and nothing else. The partnerships that build something real over time, that turn into something worth writing about a year later, are the ones where both sides are getting something real out of it, not just a mutual audience swap. Alignment beats reach basically every time.

Community is a slow burn, full stop. You cannot launch a community strategy in Q1 and report meaningful returns in Q2. I understand why that’s an unpopular thing to tell a leadership team asking for a growth curve, but it’s true, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with community programs that get killed right before they were about to work. This work requires long-term consistency and care in a way that most other marketing functions don’t, because you’re not buying attention, you’re earning trust, and trust doesn’t compress under a deadline.

Community isn’t a channel tactic, it’s a way of operating. This is the part that’s hardest to put in a deck because it doesn’t look like a deliverable. It’s remembering someone’s name. Checking in when something important happens in a member’s life, not because there’s a campaign attached to it, but because you actually paid attention. The magic in this work has never lived in the big activation. It lives in the small, human details that most organizations aren’t structured to reward, because they don’t show up cleanly in a report.

As I continue to share my take on Community Marketing, we will be diving deeper into some of these themes and more but for the sake of time, lets move into what has changed. Because in 2026 the need for output, social proof, content is alive and well, people!

What has changed

The expectation of amplification. Earlier in my career, the operating philosophy was simple: when the community wins, the brand wins, and that was enough. There were no content quotas attached to a community investment, no built-in deliverables you had to extract from a relationship to justify it. You invested in people because you believed in the community, and the value was the relationship itself.

That’s not how most organizations operate today, and honestly, I don’t think that’s automatically a bad thing. Community and content are intertwined now. How you translate genuine connection into a story, into social proof, into something scalable, is a real skill, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting a return you can point to. Where it goes wrong is when that expectation shows up without any intention behind it. There is nothing worse than a community event that starts to feel like a performance, where the actual purpose has quietly shifted to content being mined out of people who came expecting connection.

The brands getting this balance right tend to share a few habits. They elevate member and partner stories as the hero of the narrative instead of using those people as a backdrop for the brand’s own story. They co-create with ambassadors instead of writing the messaging and handing it to them to deliver. They design in-person moments with digital touch points built in from the start, rather than bolting content capture onto an event as an afterthought. They give creators inside the community real influence over brand voice instead of just distribution rights. And they build feedback loops that actually inform product decisions, not just the next marketing campaign. That last one is the clearest signal of whether a brand sees its community as a relationship or a resource.

The funnel matters more than it used to, because the alternative to your brand is one scroll away. Initial engagement was never the finish line, but it’s treated with more urgency now because attention is more contested than it’s ever been. What does follow-up actually look like after someone shows up for you once? How are you nurturing retention in a landscape with endless competing options for someone’s time and loyalty? And maybe the most revealing question: how does your brand treat people after a partnership ends? Onboarding gets a lot of design attention. Offboarding almost never does, and it says more about whether a brand actually valued the relationship or just the transaction. Check out the offboarding experience Bobbie (the formula company) creates because it is a best in class example.

Community marketing isn’t new, but the mechanics underneath it are and have been evolving. The brands that figure out how to hold authenticity and amplification at the same time, without letting one eat the other, are the ones that are going to win the next decade of this work. The rest will keep mistaking volume for connection, and wonder why it stopped working.

**Hi, I’m Tillie Frank is the founder and principal strategist at Frankie Brand, a community and brand marketing strategy studio. I’ve spent 14 years building the kind of relationships that make brands actually matter to the people they're trying to reach. Follow along for more!