Launching your first cohort-based course online

Since March 2021, I’ve been running Soapbox Project’s membership community. People come to us, overwhelmed by the climate crisis, and we support each other so we can know how to take meaningful action. I’ve seen people transform into local leaders, forge deep connections with community groups, and be the go-to person in their networks when someone has a “what can I do?!” moment.

However, the journey to create these transformations hasn’t been easy, and it hasn’t been applicable to everyone who joins our community. Most times, people get involved based on their own willingness and motivation, and I’ve realized I can do a better job providing structure and guidance for members who join.

So, in April 2022, a year after starting the Soapbox community, we launched our first cohort based course!

(Note: from July to August, I ran our second cohort-based course, and the steps I laid out below really helped.)

This article will help you understand what a cohort-based course is and how to launch one. This will not include picking a platform, but I’ve written about

Today, we’ll go over:

This post has affiliate links. Well, just one, really, and it’s the link to Circle above. You should defs use it.

Here’s a definition of cohort-based course from Mighty Networks, an online community platform.

Below, I’m laying out the steps of launching an online cohort-based course. ⏭️ This icon is a flag for my takeaways and lessons learned from each step.

Let’s go to school!

To me, this is the hardest part. “Set the scope” basically means “figure out what the heck your curriculum will be” and if we haven’t figured this out in centuries of education, it means the good news is it’s always going to be a lifelong learning journey.

So how much of the lifelong learning can we condense into X?

Math lesson: the first step is to solve for X.

In my case, here was the scope of my first course. When you solve for X, you get:

⏭️ Now, our courses are going to feature 6 weeks of content with two hours a week of live lessons (over two days a week). It was too small of a scope to achieve anything meaningful; the reason participants did achieve a bunch of meaningful outcomes is because many of them stayed after the lessons were done and participated in the optional activities and discussions.

‼️Major takeaway: I procrastinated publishing this blog article and at the time of writing, I am now done with my second course. The two hours a week went GREAT and this is informing our community relaunch strategy, which I’m sure will be a separate article.

For my first course, I had this punny headline called “make your mark on sustainable fashion” and then got a bunch of feedback that people thought the purpose of the course was to launch your own brand.

So defining objectives is a key step before any sort of marketing can happen.

I’m learning that for the first few courses, you kinda make this up as you go along, but now that I’m almost done running my second course, the objectives truly come from the feedback participants are giving.

Here are some examples that have really resonated. I find out what “clicks” when I have 1:1 calls with potential/current course members. 3 is generally a magic number, so here:

Tatiana talks a lot about your objectives showcasing the transformation that participants will make when they join your community in her Build a Community Business course (you can see how she does this on her landing page).

I’m still figuring this out, as with all things but…

⏭️ In my next courses, I really want to drill into this whole transformation thing and get REALLY clear on the course objectives. I’ll go through course comments, reviews, testimonials, and perhaps even set up conversations with previous learners to understand the transformation that’s happened in their life. For example, one of the sustainable fashion participants says, “I’ll never look at a piece of clothing the same way”, and now it’s up to me to distill this life-changing info into a course objective.

Full disclosure. I am NOT the right person to ask about a launch plan. This is because I am ✨no goals just vibes✨ and end up just winging it.

Don’t do this!

Again, DON’T DO THIS!

(This is very much a message to my future self. Nivi, MAKE A LAUNCH PLAN!)

Coming up with a launch plan is very straightforward. It’s simple but it’s not easy. (Well, the plan is easy enough. Execution, on the other hand…)

⏭️ My next steps / learnings are to… make a launch plan and stick to it. One huge reason this is important is I haven’t been great about building momentum around a launch — I just start promoting / sharing and not really partnering with others who would be down to support me.

Update after launching my second course: the launch plan was a 💯 idea, and as I mentioned earlier, it’s inspiring a full-scale community relaunch. Stay tuned. Also, Tatiana just came out with this community launch guide and I am holding onto it for dear life.

Now it’s time to shift back to learner experience. What are all the steps in the process from learning about the course, to being interested (maybe signing up for a free webinar or attending an IG live), to actually signing up, to starting?

This step is a whole nother article so I’m not going into detail, but find a thoughtful onboarding example — a time when you really loved your experience starting a new program or joining a community — and emulate that in a way that’s authentic to the journey you’re creating.

I highly suggest 1:1 onboarding calls if your course size is <30.

⏭️ TEST YOUR ONBOARDING! I got lazy / winged it too much. Nothing terrible happened, but definitely be more rigorous especially when you’re trying to do fancy stuff with integrations etc.

In my second course on climate-friendly food, onboarding was much smoother and it was a lot more clear what the course is, what the overall community is, what’s going on, and what can happen afterwards.

I learned a LOT from running my first course. Facilitation is no joke.

Here are some things that stood out:

THE COOLEST thing that came out of our second course on climate-friendly food was more participant-led initiatives. During our discussion sections, I spat out a capstone idea on the fly that people could opt into. These “Soapstones” (since the community I lead is called Soapbox Project) led to some incredible follow-up projects, like this member-led study power hour session as an 8-week follow-up to our course!

So yes, the learnings above are working. We love to see it!

As Katy Perry said, 🎵 do it aaaaallllll again 🎵

…or don’t!

After wrapping up our second cohort-based course, I realized that there are aspects of courses I want to keep and things I want to ditch, and that community structures are far more important to me than “traditional” courses.

So, we’re planning a significant redesign of Soapbox Project for January 2023. Here are some rough thoughts:

Figuring out whether or not courses should be part of your business model is a big step (at least it was for me) and it took me 9 months of 2022 to understand what this should look like. This experimentation was SO worth it, and it was also an interesting journey into how much my own bandwidth can be stretched between writing the weekly newsletter, running day-to-day community operations, consulting on the side, and running a course while figuring out how to scale everything.

This is quite a difficult article to end since I feel like there’s SOOOO much more to go into about courses in the context of online communities, but I’ll stop here. My parting thoughts are:

Follow your instincts, experiment a lot, talk to participants, trust participants, and take care of yourself. That last one — take care of yourself — is so important. Courses are hectic. And fun! And a buttload of work!

I hope you take this as a sign to Do The Thing and launch whatever’s been hovering in your mind — whether that’s a course, a new onboarding strategy, or something else.