A Thinkific Community is a feature that lets you create a space for members to chat, discuss topics, and engage in conversation.
The platform has numerous tools that allow you to customize your community, sell courses, and scale your business.
Key Takeaways:
- You can create a community using its free plan
- You can have an unlimited number of students
- You can sell courses and other products in your community
What Is a Thinkific Community?
A Thinkific Community is a space for your members to engage and collaborate on a specific subject.
Typically, businesses create a community as a place for members to talk, help each other, build connections, and support and raise awareness about their brand.
Communities can be focused on literally any topic – the work of a specific artist, a sports team, DIY, a clothing brand, car restoration, cooking, a film franchise – you name it and a community can be built around it with people that share the same interest.
Why Create a Thinkific Community?
Now that you understand what a community is, here are four reasons why you may want to create one:
- Monetization Strategy – If you’re selling a course or other products, you can use access to the community as a sales strategy to increase the value to the buyer.
- A Place to Share Knowledge – Instead of answering individual members’ questions, it can act as a library of information for them to find help.Â
- Fun Learning Environment – For course providers, having a community going through the same lessons and learning together enhances the experience and may help customer satisfaction.
- Build Trust – As you’re able to give members access to your community for free, you can establish yourself as an authority on a topic and sell products or services to them later on.
What Are the Benefits of a Thinkific Community?
Here are some of the benefits of creating a Thinkific community:
- Create a Custom Experience for Each Product – You can segment customers’ community access by which product they’ve purchased or give them complete site-wide access.
- Access Via Mobile Devices – The mobile responsive design allows members to access your community via their devices on the go.
- Organized Discussion – You can keep interaction focused on specific topics by using features such as Groups and Community Spaces.
Thinkific Community Features
As a community platform, Thinkific has many features:
- Custom Branding – Includes custom domains, colors, and an ad-free experience.
- Unlimited Members – No limits on the number of students you can have.
- Community Spaces – You can create areas for your members to discuss specific courses and topics within a subject.
- Groups – Use the feature to organize your community by any attribution, such as cohort, interest, or product, to tailor discussion and communication.
- Course Integration – You can create an all-in-one experience for your students to learn and connect in one place.
- Reaction and Threads – Members can respond and comment on posts to keep discussions organized.
- Live Events – Community leaders can host live sessions, take questions, go over specific topics, and coach from inside the community.
- Profiles – Each member can create their own profile, making it easier to create community connections.
- Notifications – You can send notifications directly to members so they can keep up to date with what is happening inside the community.
Considerations Before Making a Community
Before you begin making a community, here are a few things to consider:
What Plan Do I Need?
Thinkific offers four core plans, each of which gives you access to the Community features. However, the number of communities you can create is limited: the Free and Start plans allow you to create one, the Grow plan allows three, and the Expand plan allows you to create 10.
How Many Members Can I Have?
All four subscription plans allow you to have unlimited members in your community.
If you opt for the Free plan, the limited features may make it hard to manage a large membership.
Continue reading to find out each plan’s capabilities.
Which Features Do I Need?
The Free plan allows you to create one community with unlimited members, but its lack of features means that it is difficult to organize your members effectively within the community and there is no custom branding.
The Start plan includes all of the Free plan’s features, a custom domain, 1:1 emailing, and the ability to add 50 members to each Group.Â
The Grow plan allows you to have five Community Spaces and Bulk Emailing, in addition to the Start plan’s features.
The company’s Expand plan gives you unlimited Community spaces and all of the previously mentioned features included in the Growth plan.
| Plan Name | Number of Group Users Available |
|---|---|
| Free plan | 0 (feature not available) |
| Start plan | 50 |
| Grow plan | 100 |
| Expand plan | Unlimited |
Thinkific Community Examples
If you’re interested in seeing all of the features in action, then you’ll love the two Thinkific Community examples below.
Balanced Runner
Balanced Runner is a company that offers online courses and coaching to improve people’s running performance.
In addition to the courses they offer, the company also includes a community for members to access.
Inside the community, they host regular live Q&A calls and have other members answer any questions customers may have.
For a sport such as running, which is often done solo, a community can help support, encourage, and motivate those involved.
Earth Activist Training
Earth Activist Training’s mission is to bring knowledge and resources of ecological design to communities. They do this by providing courses, workshops, and through their community.
Its community is free to join and is accessible through its website.
Inside they discuss methods for Earth activism and methods for producing crops and as Thinkific stores all the discussion in the community, it can also act as a library for information.
New members can search for previous answers to questions they may have before starting a new discussion. This feature is invaluable for a community that helps people learn about permaculture, which can be technical and confusing.
SupplyGem
As a company that seeks to empower entrepreneurs by recommending the best methods to turn their knowledge into a profitable online business, we also created a Thinkific community.
We used and tested features on the Thinkific platform such as Post, Event Creation, Spaces, and Introductions.
Here’s the image of our SupplyGem draft community below.
How To Create a Thinkific Community
A community is a great place to provide a custom-branded experience for your members (and advocates!) to communicate and collaborate.Â
To create a community once subscribing to Thinkific, here are the steps:
- Navigate to Manage Learning Products
- Once there, click Communities
- Then select + New Community
- You’ll then be prompted to select a name for your Community
- After naming, you’ll be redirected to your homepage
Now that your community is created, here’s how to customize it:
- After you’ve named it, you can edit it from the homepage
- Select Customize Community on the top right-hand side of your screen
- Customize the features to create the perfect community for you. Features that you can change:
- Name, image, description
- Appearance
- Banner Image
- Access Permissions
- Visibility
- SEO Settings
- Page Code
- Membership Pricing Structure
- When you’re ready, you can publish your site and start inviting members to join.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Thinkific Have A Community Feature?
Yes, the platform has a community feature. It allows you to have unlimited members, organize your members into groups, and create community spaces for specific topics or discussions.
How Do You Create a Community on Thinkific?
To create a community, you must sign up and create an account before navigating to the Manage Learning Products section. Next, you’ll select Communities > + New Community, and then be prompted to select a name. After naming, your community is created and ready for customization.
What Are Thinkific Groups?
A group is a feature that lets you organize your members. Examples of ways to organize members into a group include the course they brought, their cohort, and their interests.
Bottom Line
A Thinkific community is a great way to let your customers interact. Members can learn more about a subject by asking questions, raise a topic for discussion, or assist others with advice. Beyond social interaction, when run well, a community will help to spread the word about your products, brand, and build support for your online business.
Hopefully, you’ve gained the inspiration and knowledge to set up your own community!
