Kajabi is an all-in-one platform for building and running a knowledge business. It supports multiple product types, including online courses, and Kajabi Communities is its dedicated feature for creating online communities.
But should you use it to host your community? What features does it offer? How to create a community using it?
To help you decide, we’ve taken a deep dive into it. In this article, we’ll give you an overview of the tool and a tutorial on how to get started with it.
Are you ready? Let’s start.
What Is Kajabi Communities?
Kajabi Communities is a dedicated tool for building and managing an online community on your Kajabi website.
It lets you host your online community on the same website so that it’s tightly integrated with other aspects of your business.
While Kajabi always had a community builder, after its recent acquisition and integration with Vibely—a standalone community platform—its community features have improved significantly.
In fact, it’s now comparable to specialized online community platforms in most aspects.
For instance, it lets you organize your community into circles, create engaging posts, create challenges and events, live stream, host group chats, create access levels, and offers free mobile apps through which your members can access the community.
Now that this brief overview is out of the way, let’s take a detailed look.
A Closer Look at Kajabi Communities
There are several aspects of building and managing an online community, and in this section, we’ll take a look at all of them.
Community Organization
Each Kajabi site gets a community. However, there are several tools that help you organize your community and break it down into multiple sections.
At the community level, you can create Access Groups, which are different levels of access based on criteria like membership type or purchase history.
For example, you can have a free access level that anyone can join and a premium one that only your paying members can join.
Within an access group, you can have multiple Circles. You can think of a circle as a separate space inside your community.
Now, circles can be private or public and feed- or chat-based. If you choose a feed-based circle, you’ll have a discussion area where you and your members can create posts with videos and images.
The chat-based type, on the other hand, lets you create a group chat area for your members.
Additionally, you can host exclusive meetup events and challenges inside your community. Here’s an excellent graphic from Kajabi explaining the structure of a Kajabi community.
Overall, Kajabi provides enough tools to let you organize your community into multiple sections and levels, and it can serve almost all potential use cases that online creators have.
Content and Engagement
There are a few Kajabi community features related to content and engagement.
First, it supports creating quick discussion posts with images and videos. These are the most fundamental content types and serve as your community’s content foundation.
Apart from discussion posts, you can also use chat-based circles to host group chats inside your community.
However, content types are limited. In fact, it currently doesn’t support full articles, questions, or polls inside the discussion feeds.
Apart from content, Kajabi has a community feature called Challenges that lets you create activity-based tasks, assignments, or a check-in that your members can do together.
You can create a one-off challenge or a series of challenges and set a completion deadline for your members.
For example, you can create a 30-day yoga challenge in which your members have to do yoga for ten minutes every day for the next 30 days.
Your members will see the challenges inside the community and mark them as complete after they’re done. They can also upload an image/video and describe their accomplishment.
For example, you can ask your members to upload a picture of them doing yoga.
For these reasons, Challenges is a very useful tool for creating an engaged community and making sure that your members stay active.
Another useful Kajabi Communities feature is Meetups (or events). These events can be online or offline, and you can use the RSVP feature and send reminders to ensure that members actually show up.
What’s even better is that you have built-in live streaming capabilities, so your online events can happen without any third-party solutions. Additionally, you can record your live sessions and even chat with them in real-time.
Apart from these, there are two more powerful engagement tools that Kajabi Communities supports:
- Leaderboard: a monthly or all-time leaderboard based on points earned by community members who complete challenges and engage with content
- Badges: a feature that allows you to award your members badges after task completion. The badges will be visible on their profiles, allowing them to share their accomplishments with the community.
However, there’s no way to customize badges or the criteria for earning them, which some creators might find unhelpful.
Overall, Kajabi does a good job at providing content and engagement tools to help you grow your community effectively, and its capabilities are fairly advanced.
Messaging and Notifications
Kajabi Communities offers a selection of tools to help you communicate with your members and keep them engaged through notifications.
For starters, Kajabi can send email and push notifications to your members, and they can control the notifications they receive and how they receive them.
Apart from the default notification system, Kajabi also lets you create and broadcast announcements to your community.
You can create announcements on the community or circle level, and you can also pin them to ensure that all members will see the important updates.
Last but not least, you can direct-message your members to keep in touch with them without leaving the community space, and the feature is also available to other members.
Community Management
When it comes to community management, Kajabi allows you to add members to your community easily.
In fact, you can simply share the invite link, and your members will be able to join the community.
When it comes to moderation, you can appoint your team members or existing community members as admins and moderators.
While moderators can manage circle spaces by banning users and removing their posts if needed, admins can also create circles and meetups.
Kajabi also allows members to report community posts and users, which can then be reviewed by the moderators.
End-User Experience
When it comes to the end-user experience, Kajabi Communities does a very good job.
In fact, the platform has a clean, modern design, and the design is pretty intuitive.
Your members can navigate between circles from the left sidebar, while other community options like challenges and meetups are available in the top menu.
Even inside a circle, it’s pretty straightforward to create new posts or engage with existing ones, and you can easily sort the posts in your community feed or just search through the old content.
One helpful feature that Kajabi offers is creating a custom page inside your community and embedding another webpage inside it.
For example, you can embed your Kajabi course library on the custom page, so your members can access the courses from inside the community.
Most importantly, Kajabi has free iOS and Android apps for your members to access your community. The mobile apps are also easy to use and support features like push notifications, which is great for user engagement.
The only downside is that the app is separate from Kajabi’s main app, and while members can still access your other products from inside the community, it would be great if the two were merged.
Overall, Kajabi has a powerful online community builder, which you can use to create a standalone or support community for your courses, coaching program, or membership site.
Now, let’s move on to the tutorial part of this article, where we’ll teach you how to create a Kajabi community.
Steps to Create a Kajabi Community
If you want to create a community in Kajabi, first, you need to create a Kajabi account and purchase a plan.
From there, you just need to follow the steps shared in this section to set up your community and start inviting people.
To start, go to the Products section in the admin dashboard and select Community. Then, click on Get Started to start setting up your community.
First, you’ll be asked to enter a community name and description, followed by a cover image for your community.
Next, you’ll need to create an access group, which is the main organizing unit in your Kajabi community.
As previously discussed, access groups can contain multiple circles, challenges, and events, and you can use them to create access levels inside your community.
Then, you’ll pick the pricing model for your access group, and you can either make it free or charge for it.
If you decide to go with the paid option, you’ll be able to choose between a one-time payment, multi-pay, or a subscription.
However, if you want to attach the access group to a Kajabi membership site or online course, you can just click on the Skip for now option.
After you’re done setting up your community, you can go to the existing product offer and include this access group there.
You’ll now be taken to your community, where you can set up circles, create posts, plan meetups, and take full advantage of Kajabi’s community tool.
Let’s start by understanding how to create a circle in your community.
On your community homepage, click on the + button in the top menu and select the Circle option.
This will open a popup where you can name your circle, select the access group, choose between the feed and chat type, and configure the privacy settings.
If you’ve created a feed-based circle, you’ll be able to create posts inside of it. To do this, access the circle from the sidebar and write your content in the post area.
You can then write your text content and add an image or video before publishing it.
Apart from publishing quick posts, you can also create meetups (events) in your community.
To create a meetup, click the + button again and select the Meetup option.
This will open a dialog where you can enter your event’s details. You can:
- Create a live room for the meetup
- Set a date and time
- Choose the access groups and circle
- Make it a one-time or recurring event
Once you’re done with setting up the structure and content of the meetup, you can fix the final settings.
For that, click on the profile pic in the top menu and select Settings from the dropdown.
Here you can modify your community details, add guidelines, and more. You can also enable or disable certain features like member directories.
Finally, you can access the custom page settings, add the page URL you want to embed inside your community (e.g., your course library), and even make it the primary page for your community.
Once you’re done, you can start sharing your community with your audience. If it’s free, you can simply copy and share the invite link with them.
On the other hand, if it’s a paid community or part of another paid product, the users will be automatically added to the community when they purchase the offer.
Final Thoughts
Kajabi Communities is a great tool to create your community and engage with your members, and you can also combine it with your courses or membership site to boost engagement.
It provides all the necessary features to create an engaging and interactive community experience and also has its own mobile app. This way, your members can keep in touch with your community even when they’re on the go.
While it could be improved in a few areas, it’s still a great addition to the platform, meaning one less third-party tool for you.
If you’re not on Kajabi yet, you can sign up for a free trial to start using Communities.
Do you have any questions regarding the Communities feature in Kajabi? Leave them down below. We’ll be happy to answer them.
