---

A community can be enormous and still be fragile.

Seventy thousand members sounds unassailable, until you look at how they behave and realize the whole thing is running on a series of sugar highs, spiking every time a new campaign launches and crashing just as fast when it ends. That’s not a community, but a crowd that keeps reassembling and dispersing, and it will exhaust the team running it long before it ever stabilizes.

This is the story of the nine months I spent managing FaithGateway’s membership, a 73,000-member community under the HarperCollins umbrella, and what it takes to turn a big, volatile, campaign-driven space into one that actually holds up without burning out the team supporting it.

---

A community running on spikes

FaithGateway is a publishing brand that runs recurring study campaigns, and it had built its community around them. Every new campaign spins up its own dedicated space, draws a wave of sign-ups, generates a burst of activity, and then goes quiet as the campaign winds down and the next one spins up somewhere else. You can see it in the community’s own history.

Before I came on, active members whipsawed month to month, from 3,500 up to nearly 6,000, back down to 3,700, then spiking to almost 8,000 in a single month. Contributions swung just as violently, from 14,000 to 40,000 and back again.

Each new campaign flooded the community with brand-new members, and the data shows exactly what happened to them: in one of those peak-influx months, more than half of all active members had joined less than 30 days earlier. A community made mostly of newcomers is a community with almost no memory, no established culture, and no one to catch the next wave of arrivals and make them want to stay.

This is the trap of a campaign-driven community. Every launch looks like a win, because the numbers spike, but if each spike is mostly strangers who leave when the campaign ends, the community isn’t compounding.

The goal was never to make the spikes bigger. It was to make the community underneath them durable, so that when a wave of new members arrived, more of them stayed, launch success increased, and the space between campaigns stopped feeling like a party, winding down.

---

What we did: manage for the core, not the spike

Managing a community at this scale is a discipline of triage and consistency.

With a membership this large, you cannot manufacture belonging, you have to build the conditions for it and steward them relentlessly. My role was daily, behind-the-scenes management: reading the data every week and month, keeping members responded to, running the programming rhythm, and correcting the structure so each new campaign cohort landed somewhere designed to keep them rather than somewhere designed only to greet them.

Instead of chasing the size of each campaign spike, we managed for the health of the core– for the members who stay past the campaign that brought them and form the culture every future member inherits. That meant treating the quiet stretches between campaigns as the real work, because the space between launches is exactly where a durable community is either built, or lost.

One lever that mattered more here than in most communities was live programming. Over the engagement we ran dozens of livestreams drawing thousands of participants, which gave members a reason to show up that wasn’t tied to a single campaign’s launch window. Live gatherings became a recurring heartbeat the community could feel between campaigns, the kind of rhythm that turns a one-time sign-up into a habit of returning.

---

---

The proof: a community that got more durable

Here’s what nine months of managing for durability actually produced: 

• The loyal core nearly doubled its share. When I began, members who’d been active for a year or more made up around 29% of the active community. By late in the engagement, that long-tenured core had climbed to 43%. At the same time, the share of active members who’d joined in just the last 30 days fell from its chaotic highs into a much healthier range. In plain terms, the community stopped being dominated by churning newcomers and started being anchored by committed regulars.
  
• Membership kept climbing, steadily. Total members grew from roughly 67,700 to over 73,400, and not in violent spikes, but on a smooth, consistent upward line that held through every campaign cycle. Growth stopped being feast-or-famine and became something the community could sustain.
  
• Retention held where it counts. By the end of the window, existing-member retention sat in the healthy range against platform benchmarks. The people who were staying were the people who’d been there longest, exactly the pattern you want. A community where your most-tenured members are also your most-active members is a community with a real center of gravity.

---

The number that proves it worked

Over the same nine-month engagement, the revenue generated through the community channel grew by 172.8%. Transactions rose 146.3%, and email and form submissions, the leading indicator of members actually engaging with what the community offered, climbed 48.8%.

Fewer manufactured spikes, and yet substantially more money, more purchases, and more genuine engagement.

That combination is the entire thesis of good community management, stated in dollars. A smaller, more committed, more recognized core will out-earn a larger, churning crowd every time, because devotion converts and attention doesn’t. The community didn’t get louder. It got more valuable, because the people in it were staying long enough to belong, and belonging is what people pay to keep.

---

Why it worked

None of this came from a new campaign or a growth hack. It came from a shift in what the community was managed for.

A campaign-driven community will always have a rhythm of arrival and departure; that’s the nature of running launches. The work isn’t to stop the spikes, but to build a structure underneath them strong enough that each campaign leaves more engaged people behind than the last.

That’s the Renewal stage of the Architecture of Digital Belonging Blueprint© doing its job at scale: the members who stay, the culture they hold, and the natural way a durable core absorbs each new cohort instead of being diluted by it. It’s also the Engine underneath, the weekly and monthly reporting read and acted on, the programming rhythm held steady between campaigns, that let a 73,000-member community be managed for durability instead of just kept alive.

Diagnose from the data, correct the structure, steward it quietly.

---

What this means for a community running on launches

If your community lives and dies by your campaign calendar, spiking on every launch and going silent between them, that pattern is a structural problem.

The mistake is reading each spike as success and each lull as inevitable. A community that only comes alive when you’re launching something is telling you the members came for the campaign, not the community. The fix is building a community platform underneath the launches worth staying in, then managing relentlessly for the core that stays.

Do that, and the size of your community stops being a vanity number and starts being what it should have been all along: an asset that compounds.

---

Frequently asked questions

What was this engagement? Nine months of Community & Membership Management for FaithGateway, a HarperCollins-owned publisher, whose 73,000-member community runs on recurring study campaigns, each in its own dedicated space, on Mighty Networks.

What was the core challenge? Volatility. The community spiked with new members on every campaign launch and went quiet between them, with a large share of activity coming from members who’d joined in the last 30 days; a pattern that looks like growth but doesn’t compound into a durable community.

What changed over the engagement? The long-tenured core (members active for a year or more) grew from around 29% to 43% of active members, total membership rose steadily from roughly 67,700 to over 73,400, and revenue through the community channel grew 172.8% with transactions up 146.3% (evidence that a more committed core is a more valuable one).

Why did some surface metrics decline? In a campaign-driven community, raw activity naturally peaks during big launches and settles afterward. The meaningful story isn’t the size of any single spike; it’s the composition of who stays. Over the engagement, the community shifted from churn-heavy newcomers toward a committed, long-tenured core, with a healthier and more durable foundation, confirmed by rising revenue and retention.

How do you manage a community with tens of thousands of members? By managing for the core rather than the spike: reading the data continuously, holding a steady programming rhythm between campaigns (including recurring live gatherings), and correcting the structure so each new cohort lands somewhere built to keep them. At scale, consistency and diagnosis matter more than any single campaign.