January is always the strongest growth month for memberships, programs, and community-driven offers. People come in with fresh momentum, new goals, and a desire to recommit to the things they said they would do in the fall. The best thing you can do to capture that momentum is walk into the new year with a refreshed, data-backed plan. In this episode, I share the exact research process I use with my clients and how I applied it to the CreativeMornings Baltimore volunteer retreat. I break down how I structure year-end surveys, what metrics I review, and the “quick, scrappy” research sprint any community builder can run to design smarter programming and reengage members going into 2026.

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January is the best growth month of the year for memberships, programs, community products in general, because people are so excited to just jump into whatever momentum, right?

They're excited to work towards those goals that they just set and just really dive into things that they committed to also in the fall.

But they're like, okay, let me get back to this.

Right?

We're circling back.

But really what really helps with this is also she sharing that you just updated everything.

So let's say you already have members in order to reengage them, drive momentum in your own thing.

So they're not joining other new things is by saying like, hey, we're gonna switch things up this year.

And all of this, all of the changes that we're making are based on your feedback.

So I wanted to share some examples and walk you through my process in general so that you can do this too, because I want you to have that momentum that I've seen my seven figure clients have year after year after year.

It's always the biggest growth month.

You see it in your, you know, charts.

When you look at the end of the year, you're like, okay, January was it.

And so I want you to be ready for that.

So yesterday I facilitated the Creative Mornings volunteer retreat here in Baltimore for our Baltimore chapter.

If you're not familiar, Creative Mornings is a global nonprofit community in over 200 chapters across the world.

And so I've been a volunteer for the Baltimore chapter here for a few years now.

Um, but I, one of my main responsibilities is running our retreat at the end of the year for all of our volunteers.

So we had 15 people attend yesterday.

So before I ever do any planning for these retreats, I want to gather as much data as possible.

So whenever I'm designing a workshop experience, I want us to be able to make data driven decisions in that workshop.

And, and so I always say, hey, pull some of these metrics and let's review that at the top of your session.

And that's the same thing that I did for Creative Mornings as well.

So at the end of the year for Creative Mornings, we run a community survey.

So we always raffle off a prize for an incentive because that gets people to do the survey.

So I would recommend doing something like that.

And during our retreat day, we review all the themes and insights from the survey responses.

So that's something I'm analyzing before we all meet.

Plus the quantitative data we have from the year, so that's things like attendance, our attrition rate, email data, open rates, all of that kind of stuff.

I also love to ask a couple of questions year after year to see the improvement.

So for example, one of our goals in general is to increase the feeling of belonging for our local chapter of Creative Mornings.

Like we want to create a place people come back to because they feel like they belong here.

Everyone is creative is the ethos.

So that's really the idea we're going for.

So we ask them how much they agree with the statement I feel belonging with the Creative Mornings community.

This year we had a 10% jump from last year, which along with a bunch of other qualitative stuff like basically what people said in the survey really shows us that we're moving in the right direction and we're really reaching that goal and striving toward that goal that we set.

During the workshops we talk about what worked really well this year, what didn't work so well, and that helps us make decisions about what we're going to do next year.

So we take, you know, ideas and feedback from the community in general and then we also are analyzing from a volunteer team what do we think worked and what didn't.

And because we have all of that, then we get to make decisions about what next year looks like.

And we use that to design all of our programming.

So we look at the themes for the whole year and this is an in person event community for, for the most part.

And so we're really looking at like planning 11 events in, in the following year.

So we kind of do a lot of the high level planning ahead of time, but we think about activations which are, you know, unique programming experiences that we want to try.

And really what we learned from our survey is that our ATT love when we do like different little surprise activation stuff like that.

So we really did a lot of ideation around, around these types of things.

I call this like a quick, scrappy research effort.

So I want to encourage you to try it.

So here is the assignment that I've been giving a lot of the clients that have booked an end of year session with me.

So I tell them that I want them to send a note to all of their members.

So this could be an email where you're asking for replies or it could be a DM in whatever platform you use for community.

If you're on a certain tier of circle, you might send an automated DM to all of your members, which is really nice.

But I want you to send a DM to every single member.

And you could also do both approach, like a text message, a DM or and also an email.

What did you love that we did this year and what would you love to see next year?

Something like this.

Because we're essentially saying like, hey, we want to co create this community with you.

And a community product is a people product.

And so you want to create this thing together.

And so asking them like, hey, what did you love about the program this year?

We're making things better.

You can even run a more robust survey.

One of my clients, um, we've been working on a survey this week for her that she just sent out.

It's got maybe like 10 questions in it.

And most of them I always encourage people to send.

You know, if there's 10 questions, nine of them are multiple choice, easy to answer, and then there's one open forum question at the end, which is how we do our Creative morning survey as well.

This just makes it a lot easier for people to go through.

And if they're on the last question and it's the only one where they have to type a paragraph, they're more likely to complete it and submit it.

So I want you to, you know, ask your community for feedback, but then I also want you to look at what other data you have available to you.

What were your top attended events?

Which months did you bring in the most new members?

What did you do those months that was different?

Just like reflect on your own data for the year because that can have a huge impact on your growth.

You're able to notice like, oh, this thing really worked, let's do that again next year.

And then you start to be able to plan in a way that's like very data driven.

If you have a community forum, you can also go through that and look at what were the most popular posts?

What kind of posts did people engage on the most?

Again, looking at your events for who attended, like, what was your highest attendance and why you think that was?

And if you do anything like guest sessions, which guest sessions were the most popular?

What do those guests have in common?

All of this stuff really starts to paint a picture of what your members care about and participate in, and that's the kind of stuff that you want to do more of.

So we always want our programming to be designed based on the data that we've collected.

Okay, so if you're listening to all of this and you're like, wow, that sounds really great, and I need to do this, but I need help, then just book a discovery call with me.

I'll put the link in the chat.

I am booking into January, but this will be just as effective in early January.

But as I mentioned, January is the best growth month of the year for communities and programs, and so I really want you to be able to take advantage of that.

So, you know, start collecting your data, review things, send a survey, and let's meet, and I'll help you work through it if you would like.

If not, I hope this voice note was just what you needed and you can run with this, and I hope that you're having great holiday season and I'll talk to you soon.