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Steve Kamb – Nerd Fitness Rebellion HQ
Steve is the genius behind NerdFitness.com, a fitness website and community dedicated to helping nerds and average Joes “level up their lives.”
Nerd Fitness also has a huge forum of about 20k members and a ton of daily activity, so I was extremely interested in hearing Steve’s advice for how to keep a forum active engaged, especially for one that’s so large. Here’s what he said:
A few years back we started forums on Nerd Fitness with just a handful of people. I asked people who wanted to test out the software to apply to help me out for a month, trying things out, reorganizing the subforums, troubleshooting etc. Because they knew they were testing it out, they didn’t mind there wasn’t much happening in there. After a month, we officially launched the forums with a big 4-week contest where people had to post their goals for the month and journal their efforts along the way, and I’d pick a winner to receive a free NF t-shirt.
I kind of equate it to a party. If you have 10 people come to a party 30 minutes apart, they’ll see that nobody is there and then leave. However, if you can get five people to show up at the same time, then the next people showing up individually will see how much fun everybody else is having and stick around (reinforcing the decision for the next person to show up to stay, etc.)
Since then, we’ve had new challenges every 6 weeks, with constantly adapting rules and goals to make the experience better. Once the boards got too big for me to manage myself, I invited a few of our most active and popular members to become moderators and help me run the show. I relinquished a lot of control, and let the mods know “this is your home. let me know what I can do to make it better, what resources, upgrades, software you need, what kind of things we need to be doing, and we’ll make it happen.”
What started as me and 30 NF message board posters has since evolved into a 20,000 person message board community with 30 volunteer moderators. Heck I name like half a dozen relationships that have started as a result of these boards!
I love the idea of a challenge or forum-wide event every X weeks or so – something for the entire community to look forward to and participate in. That’s something I definitely have to consider, and the idea of getting special people within the forum to become moderators – that almost seems like a win-win situation all around.
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