Build strong, scalable communities

The Orbit Model is a framework for building high-gravity communities that excel at attracting and retaining members. The model was created in 2014 as a tool to help community and developer relations teams multiply their impact and communicate business results. Since then it has been used by thousands of organizations to be more intentional in how they plan, organize, and scale their communities.

The Orbit Model is a complement to the sales and marketing funnel. It is a different metaphor that works better for the more intricate challenges of community building. While the funnel has a single goal and tries to push everyone toward it, the Orbit Model recognizes multiple goals and allows members to pull themselves toward the level of involvement that's right for them.

What is a community? The Orbit Model defines a community as both:

A group of people working voluntarily toward a shared mission
The network of relationships that emerges as members collaborate

Or for short, a network with a mission. By looking at the intersection between the community as both a mission and a network, the Orbit Model unlocks powerful insights that make community leaders more effective.

Gravity = Love x Reach

Gravity is everything that pulls your members toward the center of the community and keeps them in orbit. In the Orbit Model, gravity is a function of the love and reach of members.

Love represents the member's level of involvement and responsibility. Are they leading the charge or just curiously exploring?

Reach represents a member's degree of connectedness and influence within the community. How essential is the member to the community's flow of information?

Cultivating both love and reach is necessary to build a community. A member with high love and high reach creates a lot of gravity: their excitement and contribution to the community pulls others in and catalyzes action. On the other hand, a member with low love (or even dislike) will push members away in accordance with their reach — in other words, the greater their reach, the more people they potentially push away.

At the community level, love and reach are like the yin and yang - neither is complete without the other. Without love, reach stagnates at the networking level and quickly gets old. Without leveraging the collaborative powers of high reach, love remains an isolated phenomenon, and can quickly grow weak.

To increase gravity, a community must design loops where purposeful action leads to deeper relationships, which lead to more energy and excitement, and more activity. "Purposeful" here means activity that's consistent with the community's mission and enhances the wellbeing and connectedness of members.

These actions should always create value for the member in the process, otherwise they will eventually stop being receptive and their love and reach will decrease.

Gravity, love, and reach provide a community builder with a set of heuristics for describing their community and a model for determining the right times and ways to invest in each member.

Center of Gravity

In the Orbit Model, the mission is the community's center of gravity. The mission is what attracts new members and facilitates the development of love and reach. The mission is what members gravitate around. The deeper the tie to the mission, the closer the member will orbit.

The clearer that a community is about it's mission, the easier it will be for members to align themselves around it and develop love and reach. A community's mission can be as light as "enjoying our shared interest in old movies" or as ambitious as "giving everyone on planet earth access to clean drinking water".

Love

When we speak of a member's love, we are referring to their level of alignment and activity toward the community's mission. Love is synonymous with:

Leadership
Responsibility
Involvement
Commitment

Love is a journey, and it can be a straight shot or a winding road. Members typically start out with a passive, curious interest in the community without any commitment or responsibility.

As some members transform passive curiosity into active involvement, their love goes up and they're likely to start participating, contributing, and advocating more. Member love can also decrease over time if their activity decreases or their patterns shift to those associated with outer orbit levels.

Reach

Reach is a measure of a member's sphere of influence, their degree of visibility, and their connectedness. High-reach members maintain a wide network of active relationships and help move information throughout the community. Whereas love is based on what a member does and how often, reach is concerned with who the member does activities with. Reach is synonymous with:

Connectedness
Visibility
Influence
Network

Reach keeps the community bonded as it goes through experiences and transformations. The more active, healthy relationships in the community, the better able the community is to align and stay motivated.

Reach accumulates naturally from people working toward shared interests, but that doesn't mean community builders can just sit back and assume it will happen. Especially in the online world, the development of reach can't be taken for granted because it's very easy for people to work together without forming a true connection. Community builders should think intentionally about how to develop the networks of their members, and not only the activities they're expected to do.

Internal vs. External Reach

The Orbit Model makes the distinction between a member's internal reach and external reach. Internal reach is reach within the community. External reach is reach in general, including in other communities. If a member has a high external reach and a low internal reach, it implies they have a strong network of connections and influence generally, but have only started to create connections and influence within the community itself.

Orbit Levels

Members orbit at different distances around your community's center of gravity. These distances correspond to the impact that the member has on the community, through their actions and relationships. Each member is assigned an orbit level based on their pattern of activity and influence.

Community builders use orbit levels to:

Calibrate member experiences based on give-and-take expectations for their level
Set goals for level sizes, create plans and strategy, and track progress
Map out the member journey as a function of moving between levels; find early indicators of future leaders and of stagnation & churn
Measure the balance of the community and find bottlenecks; balance is a function of the ratio of level sizes
Measure the gravity of the community and how it changes over time; gravity is a function of the aggregate movement between levels over time
Lots more!

The Orbit Model outlines 4 levels that work for most communities. Each level describes a broad class of members gravitating at the same level. Let's look at each level starting with those closest to the center of gravity.

Level 1 - Advocates

Advocates help the community mobilize and grow, building social proof and actively spreading the word. They create content and give talks, leveraging the reach that they have. In product communities, this level includes product ambassadors and champions.

Advocates have high love and reach relative to all members of the community. It is important to monitor changes to an advocate's love and to keep finding ways to increase their reach. One consequence of advocates having high reach is that their talents become widely visible and may attract other people or communities to compete for their time. By continuing to increase their reach in the context of your community, you will secure and expand the advocate relationship.

Level 2 - Contributors

Contributors invest time directly toward helping the community or product reach its goals, and not only for their own personal benefit. In product communities, this level includes contributors of code, templates, documentation, translation, and users who give product feedback and participate in beta groups.

Contributors tend to have lower reach than advocates. Helping a contributor become an advocate by increasing their reach is often a win-win situation.

Level 3 - Participants

Participants regularly engage in the community and build connections with other members. In product communities, this level includes the users of the product.

Participants tend to have small amounts of love and reach. In some cases, they have more love than reach, and a good strategy is to introduce them to some contributors and advocates and see if value can be exchanged. In other cases, the participant has a lot of reach but not much love yet (e.g. they are an influencer and most of their reach is outside the community). In that situation, taking time to meet 1:1 with the participant and talk through the mission of the community (or details of the product) can make them more willing to start using their reach to amplify the community's message.

Level 4 - Explorers

Explorers are newcomers and passive observers who are primarily interested in getting information and learning. They won't have much love yet or reach within the community.

If the explorer has a lot of reach outside the community, it may be worth getting in touch with them earlier than other explorers. You want them to form the correct impression of the community, and if it's a fit, to deepen their love and grow their reach inside the community by starting to participate.

Assigning Orbit Levels

To classify members into orbit levels, we can look at their patterns of activity. What kind of activities are they doing, how often, and who with? What signs of growing love and reach can we infer from the activity?

Members act through the love and reach they have in the moment. As love and reach change, so do the actions the member takes, and so do the patterns we can observe about them. Among other things, this allows us to place them into the right orbit level.

Here's an example of patterns that could be defined for a product or open source community:

Advocates. Publishes 2 blog posts or videos per quarter, helps organize 2 or more events per year, mentors 1 or more contributors
Contributors. Contributes 1 pull request per month, reviews multiple PRs and issues per month, attends quarterly product summit.
Participants. Active product user (WAU/MAU), attended at least 1 online or physical event in the last year, Discord member with 1 post in the last 90 days
Explorers. Newsletter subscribers, twitter followers, inactive users, one-time event attendees.

Use these prompts to help determine the patterns in your community.

To us, an Advocate is someone who _________
To us, a Contributor is someone who _________
To us, a Participant is someone who _________
To us, an Explorer is someone who _________

To fill in the blanks, think about:

The type of activities (attending events, creating content)
How frequently the activities happen (every day/week/month)
The role the member is playing (active vs. passive)
Who the activities are done with (few vs. many, same or different orbit levels)

Your answers may fall in-between what members are doing today and what you'd like them to be doing. If so, use that information to update your community strategy.

Resources

Learn more about the Orbit Model and how to put it into practice.