Community Toolkit: A Practical Selection Guide for B2B SaaS
You decided to start a community for your company's customers. The big decision is made, and everyone is happy.
But the next day comes this question: "How do we actually do this? Where do we build the community, and how do we integrate it with our existing processes?"
My personal mantra is that simplicity is key.
This guide covers simple toolkits for different types of communities—because the best community technology is the technology that actually gets used.
Why Simplicity Matters
One reason I advocate for simplicity in community tools is successful integration with day-to-day operations. Community touches all aspects of company operations. Building a community is like adding another data source to your usual information flow.
The community platform can be perfect on paper, but if you can't easily integrate it with your daily processes, it creates more problems than solutions. In community surveys, lack of automation consistently ranks as a top frustration for community managers.
Community is impossible to isolate from the company's mission. Community teams work alongside Marketing, Customer Success, and Product teams to make sure member voices are heard. Whether you plan for it or not, community will result in more customer support cases, tasks for engineering, more thoughtful marketing campaigns, and changes in the product.
Your community home should be convenient for members, but it's equally important to consider the platform's ecosystem. Before selecting a community platform, look at how easily your team can work with it.
Are there built-in integrations with other platforms? Can you manage integrations through Zapier? Is there an API you can leverage for custom connections?
The selection of community tools can feel overwhelming. Look for the simplest solution that integrates into your processes. Here's the recipe: a platform that provides customizable space plus integrations with your current stack.
Toolkit for Mastermind Groups
Masterminds are a subcategory of communities I particularly appreciate. Usually, a mastermind group is an intense program focused on a very specific topic.
For example, you might have a broader community for sales executives. Within that community, you run a mastermind group: "30 Days of Enterprise Sales for Construction Industry." The mastermind is a focused cohort within the larger community.
Mastermind groups succeed when they have a clear vision and program. This means your platform needs to handle organizing expert talks and panels, resource sharing between members, collaborative note-making, dedicated discussion spaces, and spaces for networking and milestone celebrations.
How to Build It
Use a community platform to host the overall community, then create separate spaces for mastermind participants. Use permissions so only participants see the relevant spaces.
Create a separate discussion thread for each session in the mastermind program. This keeps conversations organized and creates a record participants can reference later.
Use video conferencing for live sessions and icebreaker events between members. Encourage group note-taking during sessions using collaborative tools.
Gather feedback after the mastermind ends to improve future cohorts.
The key is that the mastermind feels like a premium, focused experience within your larger community—not just another discussion space.
Toolkit for Event-First Communities
Events have become a core part of how we build communities. Creating a recurring routine for members to join, collaborate, and co-create is one of the strongest ways to build community.
A community happens when each member has strong one-to-one relationships with multiple members who share similar values, experiences, and interests. As members form more bonds, the entire network grows in strength. Events accelerate this bond formation.
The key to a successful event-first community is having a simple premise and staying in constant touch with members about what events excite them.
When starting an event-first community, make sure the event schedule is available to all members, members know how they can contribute topics and shape events, and everyone has access to recordings and resources after events end.
How to Build It
Survey community members regularly to find out what topics resonate with them. Use this input to shape your event calendar.
Create a shared calendar that community members can access and add to their own calendars. Embed this calendar in your community so it's always visible.
Use your preferred video platform for live events. After events, create a knowledge base to save and share recordings and resources.
The community becomes the persistent home that events feed into. Events drive new membership and engagement; the community sustains it between events.
Toolkit for Customer Support Communities
Communities around products are created naturally. Even if you don't want to create a community, customers will create one somewhere—on Reddit, in Facebook groups, or on third-party forums.
Better to own that conversation yourself.
Building a good customer support community is challenging because members create enormous amounts of content and knowledge. The role of the community platform and community manager becomes creating a perfect search experience—making it easy to find answers that already exist.
How to Build It
Build a tagging system that helps members easily find necessary information. Use tags consistently so content is discoverable through search.
Organize discussions and resources with contextual search that leverages your tag structure. When someone searches, they should find relevant answers quickly.
Create systems for saving, digesting, and repurposing knowledge created inside the community. Great answers shouldn't be buried in old threads—surface them where new members will find them.
Connect your community with your customer support application. This lets you track requests and connect them to existing knowledge base content. When a support ticket comes in, agents can check if the answer already exists in community.
The knowledge base also helps you identify top contributors and creators. By finding key contributors, you can create incentive programs and ambassador programs. These engaged members become force multipliers for your support capacity.
Finally, use community content to understand what's important to members now and what might be important in the future. This intelligence helps align community team efforts with actual member needs.
Choosing Your Stack
The right community toolkit makes it easy for different teams to collaborate effectively. But "right" depends on your specific situation.
For mastermind and cohort-based programs, prioritize permissions and private spaces, session-based content organization, and integration with video conferencing.
For event-first communities, prioritize calendar functionality, content libraries for recordings, and easy event promotion and RSVP.
For customer support communities, prioritize search and discoverability, tagging and organization, and integration with support tools.
In all cases, the community platform is the foundation. Everything else connects to it. Choose a platform that offers the core community features you need plus robust integration capabilities—either through native integrations, Zapier connectivity, or API access.
Bettermode offers this flexibility with spaces for different community types, permissions to control access, integrations with support and CRM tools, and embeddable components to add community touchpoints wherever they're needed.
The goal isn't the fanciest toolkit—it's the toolkit that your team will actually use and your members will actually benefit from.
Ready to build your community toolkit? Talk to sales for a demo.
FAQs
How many tools do we need for a community?
Start with the minimum: a community platform, a video tool for events, and integration with your existing CRM or support system. Add tools only when you have a clear need. Complexity creeps in fast—resist it.
Should we build custom integrations or use Zapier?
Start with Zapier or native integrations. They're faster to set up and easier to maintain. Only build custom integrations when you have specific needs that off-the-shelf solutions can't meet.
How do we get internal teams to use community tools?
Make it easy by integrating community into tools they already use. Send community notifications to Slack. Sync community data with your CRM. The less context-switching required, the more likely teams will engage.
What if we're starting with a very small community?
Small communities need simple toolkits. A community platform and video conferencing might be all you need initially. Add tools as you grow and your needs become clearer. Don't over-engineer for a future that might not arrive.
