Fan Community Engagement Plan

Example output

Fan community plan — Cinder & Salt Discord launch

Why Discord, and why now: your 40,000 Instagram followers are an audience, not a community — most of them will never talk to each other. A Discord gives your most devoted heat-seekers a room of their own, and gives you a direct line to the 200-400 people who will actually shape your next launch. With one part-time community manager, the plan below is built to run on a few hours a week, not a full-time job.

Channel structure, kept small on purpose:
- #welcome — pinned rules, an intro prompt, a role picker for heat tolerance (mild to reckless).
- #general — the default room, kept loose and unmoderated beyond the basics.
- #recipe-trades — the actual utility: members post what they made with which bottle. This is the room most likely to run itself.
- #bottle-lab — early access to new flavors, sample requests, and feedback threads before public launch.
- #heat-check — the trash-talk room. Weekly heat-ranking debates live here.

First-30-days cadence:
Week 1: soft-launch to your top 200 most-engaged Instagram followers via DM invite, not a public post — a community that starts too big before it has a culture never builds one. Post the welcome sequence and run the first heat-ranking debate.
Week 2: open invite goes out on Instagram and email. Introduce the first recipe-trade prompt: "what's the wildest thing you've put Cinder & Salt on this week?"
Week 3: first bottle-lab drop — give members a taste of an unreleased flavor and ask for names.
Week 4: recap the month publicly (best recipes, a members' choice on the new flavor name) to prove the space is alive to anyone still on the fence.

Recurring rituals, the reason people come back:
- Heat Check Friday: a weekly ranking debate in #heat-check — five foods, rank them by how well Cinder & Salt would work on them. Low effort to run, high engagement by design.
- First Taste Fridays: whenever a new batch or flavor is ready, bottle-lab members get it before anyone else. This is your strongest recruitment hook — lead with it publicly.
- Monthly recipe roundup: pin the community's best recipe-trade posts at month end; credit the member by name.

Moderation approach:
Starter rules: be kind, keep it food-and-heat-related, no brand-bashing of competitors, no spam links. One moderator (you) plus two trusted early members promoted to helper roles by week 3 — do not try to moderate solo past 150 members. Escalation: anything involving harassment or a safety complaint gets logged and handled within 24 hours, never left for the weekly check-in.

Member onboarding, join to first post:
1. Join → auto-DM with the three-room map and one starter question.
2. Role picker → pick a heat-tolerance role, which unlocks #heat-check.
3. First prompt → "what's your go-to Cinder & Salt pairing?" answered ideally within their first session.
4. First week → a helper or you personally reacts to their first post; every new member should get acknowledged, not lost in scroll.

Health metrics to watch, not vanity ones:
- Percentage of new joiners who post within 7 days (onboarding is working if this climbs).
- Weekly active members as a share of total members, not total member count alone.
- Recipe-trade posts per week (your utility room's pulse).
- Bottle-lab feedback response rate on new flavor drops — the community earning its keep for innovation, not just for social.

Growth risk to flag: don't announce this publicly before the soft-launch cohort has posted at least twice each — an empty room kills momentum permanently, and refilling it is harder than delaying a launch by a week.

Want the full week-one welcome sequence written out message by message, ready to load into a Discord bot?