Today I’m breaking down the trends Circle shared at the Future of Community Summit and what they signal for community-driven businesses in 2026. After listening to hours of presentations and digging through their new report, I pulled together the themes that matter most to your work: why member transformation is becoming the number one growth strategy, how retention-first communities are winning, what flexible participation models mean for your programming, and why emotional safety is emerging as a non-negotiable design choice. I also share small but powerful examples you can apply right away, from personalized onboarding to identity-based milestones and success pathways.

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All right, so today I've been attending the Future of Community Summit, which is put on by Circle app, and they announced their new trends report.

And so I decided to do a quick podcast just talking about what I think about all of their trends.

So, first of all, their trends report is based on 12 interviews with 12 industry experts.

They surveyed over 750 community builders, and then they overlay that with all of the data they have from 18,000 communities built on Circle.

And so they're really looking at trends in many areas, both qualitative and quantitative data, which we know that I love to really drive.

You have ever worked with me, then you know that I like to ask people, what is the transformation that you're serving?

How do you help people go from A to B?

What is A to B for you?

What goals are you helping them work towards?

What mindset shifts are you helping them with?

What kind of skills are you helping them grow?

How are you supporting their career growth or their lifestyle or whatever your.

Your focus is?

You have to have a really clear transformation.

And what's so interesting is that I ask people that question and they're like, well, I just want to grow my community.

And that's great, but you really need.

In order to grow your community, you really need to have a clear transformation and clear member journeys that take people on a path, because you grow your membership through, first of all, this whole premise and promise of your community being super clear, but also through the success and member accomplishments that they're having so that they stay retained, because retention is how you grow a membership.

So what's really important about this is that we want to celebrate how members are winning, like, working toward their goal.

We want to make these journeys and pathways super, super clear for them.

And we want to show, like, real members what's possible with their results by showing them other members and what they're accomplishing.

We're seeing this through a lot of community builders, really prioritizing member experience over member growth, which is another trend that was part of the Trends report.

So it was interesting.

They had Josh hall come on to speak, and he has a membership called Web Designers Pro, and so he's about 300 members, and they're his.

His community, super successful and has a very high retention rate.

And he talked about how he prioritizes retention over kind of new member growth because that is really what leads to.

It's.

It creates a flywheel.

Right.

A couple of things that he talked about that I thought were worth sharing here is that first impressions really matter.

So it kind of goes back to all of the onboarding lessons we're always talking about.

So sending one of the things he does is send a personal welcome video.

So if you have a community that's less than 300 people, huge opportunity here to send a personal loom introduction video.

Instead of a canned welcome video for everybody, you're sending some sort of personal introduction.

I also love a one on one onboarding call.

But if you can't make those work, like that's totally fine.

Automated DM with a personal follow up of course.

Like basically we really want to connect them to other people.

We want to give them a really clear path forward.

He talked a lot about success pathways and that really comes down to what I call member journeys, which is giving people direction and a path that they can follow, especially that is personalized.

And then he also talked about some just like fun flywheel stuff I wanted to share.

So he.

And I think identity is a big piece of this.

So he talks about swag that signals identity and so he actually has like on demand printing swag that he sends to his members.

He does it a lot as like for bonuses or for just when people achieve something or reach a goal, he'll send them swag.

So it's not like on.

On new membership you like get a swag sent to you swag box or something.

It's more like they've achieved this thing and now they get to unlock this piece of clothing.

And this has become like a thing that web designers are wearing at events when they're traveling.

And he told this story about how one member was wearing their web designer pro shirt to.

I think it was a vet, their vet and then got a job designing the vet's website.

They're like, oh, you're a web designer, we need a web designer.

And so it's just funny like.

And obviously identity has a lot to play into this.

And I always think about when I'm working with community builders, like what is the identity here and is there one and is there anything we can play with?

I think this can work really well with professional communities.

At Boss Babe, obviously Boss Babe was definitely an identity.

We had swag that said unapologetically ambitious that we, that we did do as a bonus one time.

So there's a lot of opportunity around what you can do with swag.

Other things that you can do that are less, you know, physical, product focused are badges, like journey badges.

If you're using circle, you can add like tags next to people's names.

There's other ways you can do that in different platforms.

You can offer certifications.

If you're a team teaching them anything, you can give them something like a website badge.

And one of my favorite things he showed was that he actually makes a graphic for renewals.

So like five year members get a graphic that they can share on social media when they've hit their five year membership, which is like a really exciting thing.

The other, the other point, kind of like circling back to what I shared around making sure that your sharing member wins is that he will highlight members to have them lead trainings or have them share like samples, successes and how they're successful using the tools that he's teaching.

So basically he'll say like, hey, your web design business is doing really well.

Let's do a session together where you, where we talk about what's doing well for you.

And so highlighting members is a huge way to show other members what's possible for them and really drive that early stage retention and growth through just prioritizing the member experience.

It all comes down to that if you want to grow your membership, a membership is a people product.

And so you need to pour into your people in order for them to keep showing up and to engage and to grow the community for you because they're just going to be sharing it and talking about it and retention is truly the way to unlock that growth.

All right, I've got a couple more trends I wanted to speak about that they shared.

So another one is that forward thinking communities are piloting flexible participation models.

So 50% of people are prioritizing lighter engagement this year.

So, so I think that that's really, really interesting because I've been having all these conversations where I'm talking to community builders and they're like, I think I need to increase my engagement.

There's not a lot of posting, but what we're learning here is that, you know, doom scrolling, endless feeds, they've really left people feeling stretched thin.

And so now we're looking at like, how can we make things more calm and have more meaningful connection and drive more renewal that way.

And so it's not that there isn't that it's always crickets and there isn't exciting things going on, but it's that the things that are happening in the conversations that are Catching on.

They're really meaningful.

And if you haven't already listened to my podcast about a new way to drive engagement or a new way to think about engagement, where I talk about making meaningful engagement flywheels.

Because if we really sit down and think about what is the purpose of this community and what does meaningful engagement actually look like, then we might design something completely different.

Our programming might have a really different strategy.

We might do less content posting for the sake of content posting, in order to get people to engage with that.

So just to add a few examples from, from the trends report, they talk about like strategies that, that make participation feel lighter or more flexible.

So the top versions are 60% doing more async formats and activities, 50% doing bite sized content or micro learning.

And this again kind of like goes back to the podcast I dropped last week around less courses.

Like how can we make the content itself feel really bite sized?

Micro learning experiences.

Just what they need to actually implement the thing and see a result.

Like time to value has shrunk exponentially.

So we're not, we're a lot less interested in spending an hour on a call for something that could have been like a two minute loom video.

Right?

And this is like in the workplace and it's also in communities.

And then just like rotating the programming, seasonal programming, switching things up.

I think this is always a trend.

It's really about creating pattern interruptions because people will get bored if you do the same.

Ask me anything.

Q and A every single month after month.

Like we need to switch it up.

We need to have topics.

We need to really respond to the community's needs, goals and desires in order to design our programming and make that really something that people want to engage with.

So I think it's really fun that they're calling this flexible participation model because it really comes down to just giving people options and making it easy for them to choose what works best for them.

It could be videos, like quick hit videos, quizzes, mini challenges.

Just an opportunity for members to learn something new, try something different and engage in the way that feels good for them to engage.

So we're not like forcing anything and there's options available for them.

One of my team members was also on the summit and we were just like messaging about one of our clients during it because we were saying, you know, we have on demand content, we have live workshops, we have for the program itself, then we have broader community workshops and we have mastermind groups.

And so when somebody joins this eight week program, we're actually giving them a lot to do.

And so we always tell them, hey, like prioritize one thing and we give them.

We're very prescriptive about it.

But what if we, you know, gave them more of an option?

Like, hey, what, what's like your ideal way that you want to engage in this program and how can we make it less overwhelming?

Because again like overwhelm is the number one reason people leave communities and how can we make it really easy for them to say, hey, you know what?

I'm really excited about being part of a mastermind group.

That's the way that I'm going to really like dive in and participate here.

All right, I'm really at my time limit here because I know I like to say these are under 10 minutes.

So I'm going to wrap it up in a second.

I want to talk about one more.

Of course they talked about AI and I'm not going to dive into that in this podcast.

I think it's obvious like AI is necessary.

There's a lot of behind the scenes type AI stuff that we can do to improve.

But it really all comes down to the other trends which is improve member journeys, improve member experience and like really create that time to value uh, short.

Shorten that time to value opportunity.

And AI is going to support all of those things.

And of course that that's a trend.

We get that.

And that is trend number eight in their trend report.

Deep member connection starts with emotional safety.

And so how do you create this emotional safety and sense of belonging?

And what's really what I really loved is the statistic they have in here.

So 73% say emotional safety is a conscious design choice in their community strategy.

So you really have to think about this.

And I will say they have listed here like clear guidelines and code of conduct and active moderation as being the most important things and followed with thoughtful onboarding process.

And those three things are important.

But what matters the most is modeling the behavior.

Yes.

Being explicit about what the expectation is and how you can participate and how people interact here and how we can create a supportive environment where everybody is welcome.

But also modeling that behavior through how you treat people as the connector, as the community builder and how your ambassadors treat people and how your members treat each other.

Because their first day in the experience is going to shape the psychological safety they feel.

Do they feel welcome?

Do they feel belonging?

And we really need to curate that experience and that matters more than ever in the time that we're living in.

Because social media has just got this like blown up experience of opinions, opinions, opinions, overwhelming, doom scrolling.

It's very stressful, right?

And so community experiences, niche, small group communities, that is the future where people can find their people and have meaningful, vulnerable conversations and connect with others that get it, that are on the same path that they're on, that are a couple steps ahead of them.

Like that's where we need to create this psychological safety in these small groups because that's the shift that we're making.

And so just remember that when you're building community, remember what people are escaping and what they're, what they're turning to community for.

And that safety you can create is the most important thing.

A lot of people are scared right now.

Things are up in the air.

There's, you know, a lot changing.

Technology is changing so rapidly.

Careers are changing, the world is changing.

Lots happening in, in, in the world, politically as well.

And it's just, it's an overwhelming time.

It's overwhelming to be human.

And so, yeah, I guess I'll just leave you on a, on a sad note here.

No, it's overwhelming to be human and we get to, for that, we get to build community and make people feel like they belong.

And that starts with how you treat people and how you set expectations and how you model behavior to create those safe spaces.

So there's a lot of responsibility on our shoulders as community builders.

And I just want, if you take one thing away from that, this like, not so short voice note, it would be that, that there's a lot of responsibility on our shoulders.

But, but it's also such an honor to be able to create spaces where people feel safe and where they can be themselves and where they can be vulnerable and where they can grow and flourish.

And so I'll leave you with that.

I hope you enjoyed my spiel after listening to like three hours of an online summit today.

But it's important to me to stay ahead of trends and I wanted to pull you into my brain.

And yeah, if any of this really resonated with you, I would love to hear from you.

Message me, share this episode with a friend and I will talk to you soon.