Welcome to our annual global trends in community building.

These are our predictions for the community building and community management industry, using a combination of horizon scanning, community data and discussions with community experts around the globe.

In summary: “What a year!”

The one thing we’ve learned this decade is that there is only one constant - and that is constant disruption.

2023 has been a year of climate chaos, conflict, recession and fears of another pandemic (see expert predictions for community in 2023). But in troubling times, communities, connections and belonging become even more important if things feel existentially ‘out of control’.

Kudos to the community builders and their members who are reversing harms that we are doing to the planet. To those managing communities supporting those most impacted by conflict, layoffs, the cost of living crisis and health/mental wellbeing challenges, we salute you.

So, let’s look forward and share the trends that will shape the community industry and community building in 2024.


Community as a core Go-to-Market strategy accelerates

Community Everywhere = community roles will adapt

The impact of an unravelling Twitter > X

Community Tech - the big vendors need to adapt

Nano, micro and small trusted community spaces flourish

Community delivers against broader organisational goals - but progress (and investment) could still be slow

AI will be fully embedded into the community journey

More hyper-personalised community experiences

A tighter focus on trust and safety in community moderation

Workplace and talent communities set to flourish

The global community industry professionalizes


Community as a core Go-To-Market strategy accelerates

For a few years now, community has evolved beyond being purely customer support focused.

In 2024, community will become an integral part of B2B marketing strategies. Those who haven’t harnessed the power of communities to support their marketing and growth objectives will take steps in the right direction in 2024. Those who don’t risk being left behind.

Our recent webinar Unlocking Growth: Online Communities for Demand Generation / Lead Generation (watch on-demand here) looked at one important aspect of marketing + community -  how to generate demand and leads to power growth.  

But…marketers take note! Remember, community is about people and not platforms, dialogue not dominance, it takes time to build reputation and trusted spaces.

"Community is about people and not platforms, dialogue not dominance."You must successfully navigate potential pitfalls in delicate community ecosystems and, like brand building, community is hugely valuable, but takes effort and resource. Skill up in 2024 and get ready for the ride!

“Community will accelerate as a Go-to-Market strategic pillar in 2024. Smart marketers understand that community creates an irresistible flywheel.

Community is moving beyond merely building a social media presence, to being active participants in connected communities AND building engaged prospect and customer communities that deliver deep audience intelligence, market insight and ‘pains’.

These insights can power highly relevant campaigns, content and events - the content that resonates best with customers and prospects uses words they’ve said out loud.

They can also drive product / service development and innovation, which in turn drives customer acquisition and loyalty.

Community members and happy customers become ambassadors. They pull others into your communities, and recommend and advocate for you through other channels.

I’m surprised the Community Based Marketing penny hasn’t dropped with many more B2B businesses.  I predict that we’ll see more of this happen in 2024 and I’m here for it.”
Michelle Goodall - CEO & Founder - Michelle Goodall Ltd


"Now, more than ever, is the time for brands to invest in community-building as a form of advocacy. It's a two-way street: the brand supports the community, and the community supports the brand.

This is not just marketing; this is building a sustainable, value-driven ecosystem."
Katy Howell - CEO - immediate future


Community Everywhere = community roles will adapt

“Community Everywhere” is a term we should credit to Richard Millington.

In this article, he explains what Community Everywhere means: fans of a brand or business as well as detractors, prospects, and members will choose many digital and physical spaces to cluster and engage as groups.

Perhaps the brand or business only offers and manages a few official or owned community spaces, and the customer journey or community journey today is fragmented and messy.

In the webinar mentioned above, Derek Weeks talked about the ‘3 orbits of community’ - Product, Brand and Existing Communities -  as a similar concept.

Community Everywhere (personally, I prefer the term ‘Community Ecosystems’) in comms and PR is a familiar, understood and well-practised concept and is classified under ‘stakeholder mapping’.

This is the process of identifying the channels, creators/influencers, communities, groups or networks where your industry, organisation, brand or product is being discussed - whether that’s owned and managed by you or not - and then creating a listening and engagement strategy around these ecosystems.

I’ve had conversations with community professionals this year, who are uncomfortable with the concept that their owned communities may not necessarily be the only place where they need to operate: “we’re already massively over-stretched” or “our focus is on our community platform” et cetera.

I totally get this viewpoint.

But there are others who, like me, feel there is an opportunity for community professionals to do what we do well, and that 2024 will be a year where we’ll see community remits, roles and approaches broaden and adapt to ‘Community Everywhere’ / ‘Community Ecosystems’.


“Community Ecosystems: or platform-agnostic communities, or “Community Everywhere” as some say. Communities used to be a forum or controlled space (usually by an admin or a brand) that was called community.

We’ve since outgrown these spaces, and people want to engage in different ways and places. Communities have become ecosystems, and companies are starting to realize that now.

The rise of platform-agnostic communities is a trend I find exhilarating. We already juggle between places, and I start a conversation with a friend on WhatsApp, move to Instagram DM and suddenly find myself commenting in a specific tool or forum as if we were having a pub crawl online.

Tech is enabling more seamless conversations to happen. New generations are not on forums anymore but use TikTok, Lemon8 and other tools as their search engine, community, shopping, telephone, dating and everything else.

Companies that optimize for cross-platform will win.”
Edu Giansante - Head of Community - Persona

A quote from Laura Zug reading "As we stand on the threshold of 2024, the dichotomy between social media and distinct online communities is becoming more pronounced."
Laura Zug - Community Strategist



The impact of an unravelling Twitter > X


The big story in social media in 2023 was the impact of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. Commenting about the current situation risks being out of date virtually the minute you publish.

There is a fresh set of weekly headlines from X Towers. But the impact is very real. Not least around what happens when a key technology platform lays off employees, loses advertisers and reorganises trust and safety councils.

X wasn’t the only social media platform hitting the headlines in 2023. Reddit faced a backlash from community and subreddit owners in the wake of its pricing and policy changes.

And Meta continues to battle lawsuits across the globe. One of the latest in 2023 from Spain, cites that a "massive" and "systematic" use of personal data of its Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp users constitutes unfair competition for media owners.

Community builders are having to make constant decisions about whether they leave social media platforms like X and Facebook and find new platforms, or stick it out. Expect to see more of the same disruption in 2024.

“I think one big issue that 2023 has exposed is that in the wake of a couple of major big tech upsets (Twitter/X, Reddit drama, etc), nothing has really come along to “replace” some of the larger online hangouts in their entirety

Instead, what we’ve seen through 2023 is people discovering new platforms, and a fracturing of where they spend time online. This is an opportunity for 2024 - there’s potential for a lot more either hyperlocal, or hyper-specialised, communities to crop up.”
Andy Piper - Open Source consultant



“People are tired of aggressive ad formats that prioritize engagement for profit. They’re seeking alternatives that prioritize their well-being – and we have every indication they are willing to invest in spaces that offer curated knowledge in an environment free from the toxicity and polarization of social media.

As we stand on the threshold of 2024, the dichotomy between social media and distinct online communities is becoming more pronounced.

People yearn for spaces that promote understanding, empathy, and genuine connections, free from algorithmic manipulation and commodified attention.

The clamor for online communities that foster a thoughtful exchange of information and prioritize psychological safety marks a significant turning point in the Internet’s evolution. By embracing the ethos of genuine community and curated belonging, we pave the way for a more humane and intentional digital world.

This won’t be the death knell of social media by any stretch of the imagination, but more and more people will be willing to bid farewell to the hatred and noise of social media and willing to pay to spend more of their digital time and attention elsewhere.”
Laura Zug - Community Strategist


Community Tech - the big vendors need to adapt

And what about non social media community platforms in 2024?

Some experts said that they felt older community platforms have been slow to evolve, and risk being replaced with newer tools that integrate much better into evolving techstacks.

With hundreds of community tech options available, including Guild, it’s set to be a year where community professionals will be testing, evolving and potentially migrating their communities, as well as adding specialist community tools to optimise performance.


“For many years now we've seen intentional communities migrating away from populist social media spaces to smaller, community-orientated platforms. 2024 will see this trend seep into large community platforms that have previously dominated the market.

These players have become bloated and inflexible, and are increasingly unable to serve communities competitively. Smaller, DIY and stacked tech tools will grow their market share as community owners look to craft customised, affordable, 'community everywhere' experiences for their people.

The next generation of community managers are weaving together tech stacks of smaller, bespoke tools, and view larger platforms as unnecessarily unwieldy and costly.”
Venessa Paech - Director & Founder - Australian Community Managers


“10 years ago and I could name the only 3 tools we had available to build communities. 5 years ago and the list became 10. 2023 and I lost count of the sheer number of options to build, enhance and track communities.

Tools that focus solely on tracking users, enhancing their data with social network crawling, track in-product events and add them to user profiles.

No-code tools to get community off the ground. Slack-like tools, in-app tools, SaaS tools, AI tools, community-event tools, you name it.

It’s getting intensely more complex. That’s great but also makes the community manager’s job broader as the tools can be helpful but also a new burden to learn, optimize, monitor and have budgets allocated for.

There are so many tools that I foresee community managers becoming more 'operators', helping with RfPs, implementation and operation of the tech stack and resources available.

This is game-changing for the industry, but just like other more mature areas like marketing and software development, we will see more specialized tools and tools coming with professional services as an add-on. We just need to see more maturity around budget, and P&L so that what used to be 1 line for the CFO to approve (”community tool”) is now a whole spreadsheet!
Ed Giansante - Head of Community - Persona

A quote from Blaise Grimes-Viort reading “We will see a rise in internet users seeking smaller community groups to join and participate in, collaborating around content creation and seeking direct validation from their peers.”
Blaise Grimes-Viort - Chief Executive - Is The Answer


Nano, micro and small trusted community spaces flourish in 2024

Whatever happens at X in 2024, it increasingly feels that there is no single social media platform that offers a natural home for communities, and the trend towards smaller, specialised, trusted groups across multiple platforms will continue into 2024 and beyond.

A trend both Ed Giansante and I have witnessed first-hand is in-person, small, niche, ‘concierge’ type communities of senior decision-makers, convened in small, private communities, either as a part of a membership offering, or as a smart customer retention or business development tactic.

Evoking the thrill of secret societies and hidden speakeasy doors can be intoxicating if you’re lucky enough to be invited to join. Shhhh…just don’t tell anyone that you’re in the club, or the mystery has gone!

In 2024, there will be 70 elections and more than half of the global population (4.2 billion people) will be able to vote in them.

In larger communities,  expect a rise in bad actors, misinformation, polarisation and potential trust and safety issues. Another reason why we’ll likely see a flight to smaller, hyperlocal and trusted communities.

Community professionals need to be prepared for heightened emotions and an onslaught of generative AI content in 2024. They will need to work hard to ensure their community spaces are safe and free of misinformation.

It’s going to be a ‘perfect storm’ and a very busy year. We must make sure we protect our community members and consider a potential need for smaller community spaces that feel more connected and trusted.



“There’s a challenge of staying relevant as you grow. That’s because new members will need a different level of attention than veterans, but that’s not scalable unless you break down into smaller groups. That’s when niches start. Niche communities can be extremely powerful in driving ROI as they can curate the right membership, dialogue and outcome.

Private or ‘secret’ communities are getting bigger now, but they’re still secret or private! That’s the key to making them so fascinating. I had the experience of having lunch at a secret place that’s hidden in plain sight. A small door, you walk through a small corridor and are greeted by a host. The host asks you for your code. You call out your code, they’ll match to your face and have all your usual requests ready for you: your preferred meal, drink, table, etc.

They don’t bother you with asks or bills. It’s all settled as part of your membership.

Everyone there has a very interesting profile, and you can sit at the bar and talk to someone and it will be extremely valuable.

Guess what? You can’t apply for membership. Members who have been there for a while can nominate new members but there’s a cap per year, so not even nominations get through. No one talks about it, and I still don’t know the name of the place I was in.

High-quality ‘environment’, high-quality interactions and people. And IRL. Astonishing.”
Ed Giansante - Head of Community - Persona


“We've seen a significant rise of misinformation, led by bad actors and powered by quick AI content. Online community members want to be able to trust who and what they are interacting with in their chosen digital spaces.

Platform providers who want to head this growing challenge off will develop new and improved trust & safety capabilities to help community leaders and members identify content source and veracity, as well as report anything that could harm authentic engagement.

As a direct counter to this, I believe we will see a rise in internet users seeking smaller community groups to join and participate in, collaborating around content creation and seeking direct validation from their peers. Evidencing member backgrounds through verification badges, earned and not paid for, will help in developing new safe spaces to engage in.”
Blaise Grimes-Viort - Chief Executive - Is The Answer


"In a world that's more fractured than ever, a sense of belonging isn't a luxury; it's a necessity."

With increasing social and political divides, online communities are becoming refuges where people find a sense of belonging. When 72% say that these communities are important to their sense of belonging, we're talking about a lifeline, not just a leisure activity.

Brands can't afford to overlook this. Creating a space where people feel they belong is the ultimate brand loyalty strategy. It's not just about your product or service; it's about the community you're building around it."
Katy Howell - CEO - immediate future

A quote from Michael Shillingford reading "“Community teams; our skills, our technologies, our passion for people, can (and will) become the delivery methodology for brand, and I can’t wait to see it.”"
Michael Shillingford – Senior Community Strategy Manager - SS&C Blue Prism



Community delivers against broader organisational goals - but progress (and investment) could still be slow


A downturn in the global economy meant that there were many community layoffs in 2022 and 2023. The industry was quick to support those affected. Many have found new jobs or ways of using their community superpowers in connected roles.

In 2023, community professionals had to work out innovative ways to do more with less, break down silos and prove the value of community.

Other departments experienced a similar transformation, and many began working much more closely with those responsible for community in their organisation.

Our experts had different views about how quickly community is being embedded into the organisation and whether it is getting the support, focus and budgets it deserves from business leaders.

Michael Shillingford believes that it will be increasingly recognised as a method for organisations to prove their values and in 2024 and highlights just how close community is to reputational value and the delivery of brand purpose and promises.

Kevin Sutherland feels that the commercial logic of investing in community will only be realised if things improve economically in 2024.

Personally, I’m hopeful, even if the economy doesn’t improve in 2024. I’m working with clients who can see evidence how community can positively impact growth and support a number of departments and organisational goals.

However, community professionals and organisations do need to be willing to share the impact of their community efforts on their bottom line with others, to accelerate investment in community building across all industries. That’s my wish for 2024!


“As 2023 draws to a close, the dust has begun to settle after a marked 'cull' of community projects, teams and budgets, fuelled by the decline of online/community products/platforms and loss of commercial confidence in an uncertain World.

The concept of community is maturing in various industries and companies have resumed efforts, albeit slowly and carefully.

This can be seen as an opportunity a la 'dot-com boom and bust' of the 2000s - a restart with a better, deeper understanding of community buy-in, and a great precursor to deeper executive buy-in and community projects.

Hold on a little longer if you've been under the weather for some time - time to put your ear firmly to the ground.”
Ilker Akansel - Community Strategy Consultant - ilkerakansel.com


“We have captured the attention of department heads who would otherwise ask everything for the community without contributing themselves. Now they see themselves as community resources - not just benefactors.

That's great for us because it means a lot of inter-departmental and cross-disciplinary eyes are on our industry now.

We are going to need to spend a lot more time thinking about how we have our meetings. What were siloed conversations focused on who's important in an organization, will now be deliberative meetings focused on activating the voices of everyone who wants to be in the room. We will need to get feedback more frequently and work more diligently to deliver that feedback.

Now, as community professionals this is our specialty. We're very adept at doing this with our wider communities at scale, but in 2024, I suspect we'll have to turn our social listening tools a little more inward.”
Samantha ‘Venia’ Logan -  Founder and CEO - SociallyConstructed.Online

“As much as money makes our community teams sustainable, and measurable value is how we get that money, I think we’ll become better at the non-monetary value of community in the coming years. We’ll see more brands deploying community teams to prove that their mission statements, brand promises and purposes are real.

Every business tells prospects that their customer support is world class, but the ones who prove it with an open forum filled with collaboration on problems make the lives of their sales teams much easier. Your brand can sing to investors that you’re going to improve the creator economy, but until you actually unite creators together to fix the ways they’re exploited, it’s just words on paper.

Community teams; our skills, our technologies, our passion for people, can (and will) become the delivery methodology for brand, and I can’t wait to see it.”
Michael Shillingford – Senior Community Strategy Manager - SS&C Blue Prism



“Pausing community investment to focus on short-term, transactional marketing investment to feed the sales funnel or protect EBITDA may have a strong commercial logic, but all the data show that firms that continue to invest in building relationships should expect to see bigger benefits over the long term.

Right now though it seems that many are swapping the nourishment of community-building for the empty calories of funnel-filling. Even if we know that we should be getting our 5 a day, in tough times the dopamine hit of fast food is seductive.

But if we assume that Things Can Only Get Better in 2024 with an improving economic situation and a greater willingness by companies to invest then we would expect to see renewed interest, and investment - a slingshot for community-led growth in B2B.”
Kevin Sutherland - Strategy Partner - VOLUME


AI will be fully embedded into the community journey

In 2023, we highlighted AI as a key community trend.

Community experts Richard Millington and Vanessa Paech joined us in April to discuss the likely implications for community builders (do watch the excellent ‘Community and AI - opportunity or risk’ on-demand).

In 2024 community builders will need to work closer than ever within the organisation to think about the experience AI brings to all aspects of the customer journey and community.

Hopefully we all benefit, as more platforms integrate AI effectively to support moderation frameworks, flag up harmful content/conversations and personalise the experience for their community members.

“The companies that ignore what's coming will be left behind by their competition. Every community builder (actually anyone) needs to ask these three questions.

  • What are the manual things today that can be automated using AI?
  • What are the things AI could handle with suitable investment and experimentation?
  • What are the things that will continue to need human intervention, and can AI assist nonetheless?

Here is an example of how I can see such things playing out:

AI can help with such things as identifying members based on their profile who could benefit from connection to one another. AI could likely create the messaging, but the human community professional can make the space and actual connection in an intimate setting at a conference, but more likely a tiny local gathering in a city or smaller venue.”
Adrian Speyer - Vice President Marketing & Community – Community Leaders Institute




“AI is THE trend word of 2023. Full stop.

AGI - or AI 2.0 (just came up with the term) is where machines start to bring cognitive tasks to life. They learn, generalize and apply this knowledge to plan future actions. If we leave the details aside, AI is already playing a huge role in how we work everyday.

I can’t recall not opening an AI tool everyday to help me with some specific tasks:

  • Summarizing calls (webinars, 1:1 zoom calls with community members, presentations)
  • Helping generate ideas, titles, emails, newsletters, posts and whatnot.
  • Editing videos and podcasts
  • AI focused in SEO, onboarding etc.

This is not by any means removing the human element of communities. This is offloading repetitive, binary, boring, admin tasks to let community leaders flourish in what they’re best at.

This is not coming back and if leaders are not pairing with their favourite AI tools, they’ll be far behind in 2024.”
Ed Giansante - Head of Community - Persona

A quote from Katy Howell reading "2024 is the year where one-size-fits-all communities are as outdated as dial-up modems. Welcome to the era of hyper-personalization."
Katy Howell - CEO - immediate future 




Hyper-personalized community experiences


So, what will the impact of “more AI” mean in real terms for community members?

The 4 categories of AI that that support community building mentioned by Venessa Paech at the Guild Community Summit were:

- reducing harm
- automating burden
- organising meaning
- deepening insights

And deep insights, ordered in a meaningful way, automating experiences, connections or content that meet an individual's need within a community should be something we all welcome as a way to build more value in our communities.

Our experts predict improved personalisation at scale as a key benefit of AI adoption in 2024.

"2024 is the year where one-size-fits-all communities are as outdated as dial-up modems. Welcome to the era of hyper-personalization.

With machine learning and AI technologies becoming increasingly sophisticated, brands can now offer highly personalized community experiences. This is crucial when 81% of consumers say they are more likely to do business with a company that shares their values.

Imagine a community platform that knows you're a vegan, a parent, and a tech enthusiast.

It curates content, conversations, and even product recommendations based on these multi-layered facets of your identity. Brands that get this right will see engagement rates go through the roof.”
Katy Howell - CEO - immediate future

A quote from Marjorie Anderson reading “...there will be a tighter focus on online trust and safety in community moderation. With the continued rampant spread of disinformation in online spaces, community professionals have a responsibility to their communities to ensure that the information they receive is credible...”
Marjorie Anderson - Founder and Principal Strategist - Community by Association L.L.C..




A tighter focus on trust and safety in community moderation

Another positive impact of AI in community building in 2024 will be supporting community moderation.

Many community platforms currently rely on member reporting and human moderators to catch harmful content and remove it, but we will see more community platforms integrate AI to support and speed up moderation processes in 2024.

And hopefully this will go some way to counter the torrent of misinformation on social media platforms.

“In 2024 there will be a tighter focus on online trust and safety in community moderation.

With the continued rampant spread of disinformation in online spaces, community professionals have a responsibility to their communities to ensure that the information they receive is credible and that the spaces that their community members inhabit allow them to engage in conversation/discourse without causing harm.”
Marjorie Anderson - Founder and Principal Strategist - Community by Association L.L.C..

“The big social media platforms will have their hands full with so many elections around the globe in 2024. We will definitely see an impact of the loss of the trust and safety council from X, but Meta, Reddit, TikTok will also feel the full force of bad actors and misinformation.

With generative AI, there is the opportunity to create fake and harmful imagery and video that can spread in minutes.

Community managers will need to operate in these ‘perfect storm’ conditions and do everything they can to maintain conditions for respectful debate whilst stopping the spread of misinformation.

Expect to see community platforms building in AI and machine learning models to prioritise content that is likely to be violating content policies, moving those items to the front of the queue for community moderators, or suppressing them in some way.

LinkedIn is adopting this to support its human moderation team to scale up and handle the large volume expected.”
Michelle Goodall - CEO & Founder - Michelle Goodall Ltd.

A quote from Venessa Paech reading "“In 2024 we'll see forward thinking orgs investing more in internal community managers and shared digital spaces for their people, adopting community management approaches to thrive in the new world.”"
Venessa Paech - Director & Founder - Australian Community Managers



Workplace and talent communities set to flourish

COVID changed work culture forever. A mixed model of home and office working has become the norm for many of us and research studies over the past 2 years have all made separate productivity cases for home, office and hybrid.

But most of us understand the importance and value of community at work. And increasingly, businesses are talking about developing workplace ‘communities’ to support, connect, reward, attract and retain employees.

Like ‘workplace culture’ before it, it will be interesting to see how businesses move from ‘talking about it’ to operationalising community in the workplace in 2024.


“Remote and distributed work, 4 day work weeks and other transformative shifts in our working lives are here to stay. With them comes the need for workplace online communities that can host asynchronous collaboration, and support organisational culture outside a built environment.

In 2024 we'll see forward thinking orgs investing more in internal community managers and shared digital spaces for their people, adopting community management approaches to thrive in the new world.”
Venessa Paech - Director & Founder - Australian Community Managers

“According to research published in HBR, “Rekindling a Sense of Community at Work” - when people have a sense of community they are 58% more likely to thrive, 55% become more engaged, and 66% are more likely to stay with their organization.

There’s a need for strategy and operational expertise to help businesses build communities that enable their people to thrive and achieve and as the fight for talent looks set to continue in 2024, we’d expect to see increased investment by businesses in this area.

It’s not just corporates that are investing in community, shared workspaces typically curate a programme of events, from L&D experiences to networking and showcases of their members’ businesses supported and enabled by a member community.

For instance Soho Works, the workspace brand of the Soho House Group, has successfully built an international community of creative entrepreneurs that join for the workspace and stay for the community. Members have access to a mobile app that enables them to share skills, experience, trade services and collaborate at events. One recent educational event ‘Raising Investment’ resulted in a community member raising £250k investment from another attendee - a great example of the power of a niche community where there is a common goal in sharing and helping each other.

With further growth forecast in the supply of flexible co-working space we would expect to see increased competition between brands looking to attract and retain their members, with community building a central part of their member retention and growth strategy.”
Kevin Sutherland - Strategy Partner - VOLUME


“After a year of brutal layoffs and cost reductions, particularly in the B2B SaaS space, will 2024 be a year when hiring returns and brands invest more in customer engagement and loyalty?

Last year I mentioned that I thought using community as a tool to drive employer brands, help attract new talent and help to develop existing talent across the company would be key. The economic situation didn't allow that to happen as much as I thought but I still think this is something to keep an eye on.

The potential of alumni communities across businesses could be the key to winning the talent war going forward especially with the different attitudes of Gen Z coming into the workplace.”
Laura Roth - Global SMB - AWS



The global community industry professionalizes


And finally, one of the best things to happen in 2023 has been the unwavering support that community professionals gave to one another in both free and subscription communities around the world, with examples including Guild Community Collective, Rosieland, CLI and Community Pros of L.A and London.

Personally, I hope that more people in 2024 chose to become community professionals. It’s a great career and I’m happy to provide support, training and coaching, as are many other community experts.

Global leaders in community are mindful to maintain a strong sense of community in the profession, to develop benchmarks, share best practice, define standards and continue supporting one another.

Whether that support and continued professionalism stems from self-organised, grassroots gatherings, or whether it’s supported by associations, community platforms or sponsors is something that we’ll find out.


“In 2024, we're going to get better at doing community for community people. There's been a rise in people doing the work to support our industry. No longer is it going to be dominated by companies. The people are rising and taking action through connections, writing, speaking, entrepreneurship, grassroot meetups and more authentic events.

This is exactly what our industry needs and it can only lead to a brighter community future.”
Rosie Sherry - Community Executive Officer - Rosieland & Ministry of Testing


“The traditional 'watering holes' of community professionals - umbrella communities, gatherings and organizations of community pros - have gone through a boom and a bust of their own; some changed hands, some waned and some others are suffering from the commotions of their sponsors.

What's left is a burning need for a new, all-encompassing industry body that is recognized across the industry. This conversation is held in every corner of the industry in every corner of the World - expect something really big to surface in 2024.”
Ilker Akansel - Community Strategy & Consultancy - ilkerakansel.com


Join Guild Community Collective and meet some of our contributors and 1000+ other community professionals. Discuss these trends and share your own insights and expectations for the world of community in the next 12 months.


Thank you to these expert contributors

The author and Guild would like to thank the following community experts for their help in producing these trends:

Ilker Akansel, Community Strategy & Consultancy, ilkerakansel.com

Marjorie Anderson - Founder and Principal Strategist - Community by Association L.L.C.

Ed Giansante - Head of Community - Persona

Michelle Goodall - CEO & Founder - Michelle Goodall Ltd.

Blaise Grimes-Viort - Chief Executive - Is The Answer

Katy Howell - CEO - immediate future

Venessa Paech - Director & Founder - Australian Community Managers

Andy Piper - Open Source consultant

Samantha ‘Venia’ Logan -  Founder and CEO - SociallyConstructed.Online

Laura Roth - Global SMB - AWS

Rosie Sherry - Community Executive Officer - Rosieland & Ministry of Testing

Michael Shillingford – Senior Community Strategy Manager - SS&C Blue Prism

Adrian Speyer - Vice President Marketing & Community – Community Leaders Institute

Kevin Sutherland - Strategy Partner - VOLUME

Derek Weeks - Author - Unfair Mindshare

Laura Zug - Community Strategist



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