Hey, hey, welcome to the Summit Host Hangout Podcast, where you'll learn how to host a high converting virtual summit that leads to your biggest signature offer launch yet. I'm your host, Krista from Summit in a Box, and I'm very excited for today's topic. You can probably already tell I'm a little bit croaky, not feeling the greatest, so just bear with me. I hope it's not too distracting. The good news is that our guest gets to do most of the talking today. She has so much good stuff to share. We've talked before on this podcast about creating an engaging summit community, but it's been a while. Like it's back in our probably first 100 episodes where we last talked about this, and the online community landscape has changed so much since then, like, it is absolutely harder now than it used to be for most niches to, like, throw together a community for a summit and see it actually take off, see it have any kind of engagement. So today, I'm excited to bring on a special guest who can absolutely school me on this topic. She's created one of the most engaging summit communities that I have had the pleasure of being a part of, and she has created resources to help us all. I definitely need them. I hope they're helpful for you too. But to give you some background information, first, she helps entrepreneurs transform their expertise into thriving membership businesses that generate predictable monthly revenue. With over two decades of experience in digital marketing and online business strategy, she guides her clients through the entire process from crafting their membership model to launching and scaling their communities, and her ability to create an engaging membership community absolutely has transferred to her ability to create an engaging summit community. So without further ado, let's dive in and talk with Sandra De Freitas of De Freitas Consulting. Welcome, Sandra!
Hello. It's so good to be here. I I've been fangirling your podcast for a year now. I went back to the very first one and started listening from there. So oh my gosh, if you saw your stats go up that from the very beginning.
Oh, I'm I'm honored. I am honored. I am honored, and I think this is going to be episode 299 so how did we go that long without... How did I go 299 episodes without having you on here? I will never know, but better late than never. So I'm excited to have you here before we dive into our topic of building a vibrant, engaged community. Can you just tell us a little bit more about you and your business.
Yeah, so I started over two decades ago, and what I just wanted was a business where I could be my own boss, and I dove into internet marketing, which I loved. I started doing marketing agency stuff. So building memberships was one of the very first thing that I started to do. Everyone wanted a membership. Everyone wanted recurring revenue, and so I started building it on very archaic membership platform software back in the day, and ever since then, I've been helping people with their memberships, their launches or their communities. We closed down the digital marketing agency few years ago now and just focus on training and consulting, on memberships launches and communities, which kind of they all overlap with each other.
So yeah, that's where we're at. We have a membership called Engaging Profitable Memberships, where I help entrepreneurs with their memberships and retention and engagement and having fun and playing games in their communities or in their groups to like, get people to implement the content and see the content we talk about launching and SOPs and all the pretty stuff and not so pretty stuff when it comes to memberships.
I love that, and like you, have fairly recently, started transferring all of that over to summits. And I'm excited for this conversation, because you were not always a fan of summits, to say the least. I need to hear. I need the people to hear how we got here. Someone who was like, Absolutely not is now teaching about a piece of summits.
Yeah. So when we had our digital agency, we had a couple people ask us to be like the tech part of behind the scenes of their summits. So I will remember one where they started off with 15 speakers, and then the host just kept including more people and more people. More people ended up being 35 speakers, and that was overwhelming, to say the least. A lot of work, a lot of late nights. I just I because I was behind the scenes, I saw how much work went into that, but a lot of it was because it was so last minute. Now looking back, it was so last minute and it wasn't... A lot of these people had never spoken summits, so it made it harder and harder to get the content from them, get their presentations, get all this stuff. There's Content Snare and all those tools weren't around back then, so you were manually, lovingly nagging people for their things. Now Content Snare does that for me.
Anyways, that's what I love and and they do that for me. And so because we saw all the work, and because there was no strategy to then take those people into the next level and make money on the offer. And I didn't think about, you know, what you teach about, an all-access pass. I didn't think about, you know, opening a membership or a course at the end. We were just so over our heads with work to get these, this whole summit going, that we didn't, we weren't even thinking that. We were just like, let's get out of this.
So rewind, a year ago, I went to an in-person mastermind, and you know, many of those people are your clients, and one of them kept saying, I said, like, I'm so sick and tired of my email list not growing and I'm tired of being the best kept secret, and I'm tired of like this and that. I'm tired of putting, you know, stuff out and, like, people buy, but not the numbers that I'm looking for. And then, you know, it'd be like, one person like, you need to do a summit, like, No, I'm not doing a summit. And then the other person, you need to do this summit. No, I'm not doing a summit. It's just too much work. I don't want to do a summit. And then someone said, the work that I did to put my summit together, I got paid back easily by my all access past sales and the list that I grew. And then someone else said, Do you know that my list is that, like 40,000 people or something crazy? And I know that she does summits like twice a year. Okay, fine, you've got my attention. I already had something planned. I did a three day paid event A few months later. So that was already planned. And then before that even kicked off, I'm like, That's it. We're doing a summit. And so we started planning the summit that we hosted late last year.
Oh my gosh. I love it. You just like pressured into it lovingly.
I like social pressure, that I need it. But like, you have to know that I'm very I could be very stubborn when I make up my mind about something, I can be very stubborn. So I need to hear the numbers. I needed to hear the results. I need to hear that it's not like I was overwhelmed by the tech. I will not be overwhelmed by the tech. I was not overwhelmed by, like all the other things, it was just like, is this gonna pay off after the three months? And it totally paid off. And I'm so glad I did it.
I love it, and I had the pleasure of being a sponsor and speaker at that summit, and I am so glad I was, because I remember just being absolutely floored by the community you created. Where I was going into your group, and I was like, Oh my gosh, people in here are pumped up and commenting and engaging and talking with each other and with Sandra and with the speakers, and we don't see this anymore, especially in the B2B space. And then as a part of my sponsorship package, I had, I believe it was a live Q&A session or something like that. I got off that call and I was so lit up. I went to my team, I was like, you guys, that was the best, like, live session of any kind I have ever done at a summit. This audience was so engaged. They asked the best questions. They were so encouraging. I felt like I was on fire.
But I think it was just because of the energy, you know, your people were putting off. I was like, this, this doesn't happen anymore. And that's why we're here, you know, that's why I was like, Sandra has to come on to teach this. And since then, I think maybe since hearing me rave about it, you're like, all right, I guess I can, you know, kind of transfer my knowledge into teaching people and helping people with these things. So yeah, that's why we're here.
And like, something I'm seeing people do, start to do now, I think because of the drop in online engagement, or how, how the strategy has changed, and we're not adjusting to meet that, I'm seeing people start to skip communities completely, and they will just - she just had heart attack, in case you didn't hear that - but, like, I think they're like, well, it's not gonna work anyway. I'm just gonna do it via e mail. Can you tell us what summit hosts miss out on when they don't have a community or can't figure out how to get it engaged?
Well, when a when you don't have in a community, you are relying on email and maybe social other social platforms to get people's attention. Sometimes people sign up for summits and forget about it. So how do you keep that energy going? How do you get them excited? To me, the community got people excited, got the speakers excited, got the sponsors excited, started connecting beforehand and then during the event, it was like a big entrepreneurial party in there, like people were having a great time connecting, speaking, coming to all the lives, making up their own posts and memes and things like that. In the community, it was so much fun. Like when my summit ended... first of all, don't do this. I did my summit, and I didn't have my son's hockey schedule when I scheduled it, and we had a tournament, so I had to leave, like, Thursday, right after my closing call. We left, like, an hour and a half on the road, and I was so sad. I'm like, it's over, and I don't want to be.
So there we are on the car ride, and I'm still engaging in the group, because it was so fun, even for me, I wasn't even exhausted by it. I was having a blast, and people were buying and people were doing things, and it was just like, so great. I actually was invited to speak at a summit, and I was like, and I'm not sure something's off here, and I sent it to my OBM, and she's like, they don't even have a community. Oh, then we can't, we can't do it. I need to have that community. I think people miss out when they don't have the community.
Because to me, your community, whether it's your free Facebook group or your paid Facebook group or your summit Facebook group, you have to think of those as like dinner parties, you know, and you have to give people a topic of discussion, and you have to celebrate people and have fun if you are the host of your own dinner party and you don't start interacting with people and saying, hey, you need to meet this person and you need to talk about this and hey, how about you know, whatever is going on in in the fun part of the news, not the drastic part, but The fun part of the news, like sports or something, you will get people to connect.
But if your energy is low, people are going to walk away from your dinner party. Like, Hmm, why did we go to this again? Like, why do we do this? I think if you don't have a summit popup group, you're missing out on the fun, all the fun ways to have games to help engage people. You are missing out on opportunities to sell. You are missing out on really highlighting your speakers and giving your sponsors the best experience they can get, like I created in mine kind of late, like, as we were going, I was like, creating these games and fun things. And I created this one kind of late, and it was show our sponsors love, because I was like, I was like, terrified that my sponsors weren't going to have a great result, terrified. And it's just because I care so much. And so I created this game called show our sponsors love. And I, I think I thought of it like day mid of day two, and you know, we're at all my summits, will do that a lot earlier.
But that game alone got people excited, and it made our sponsors feel great too, because I'm specifically highlighting you, and part of our sponsorship package was we're going to give you a post dedicated to you in the Facebook group. We're going to give you like your own event. We're going to give you like there was so much that we got to include because we had the pop up group. And then there are people who, yes, they have a pop up group, but they don't know how to make it pop in, like it's just existing.
And there are times where I'm a speaker and I want to go into the group, but there's really nothing going on, nothing for me to post or do. So I will go and create my own posts and have my own fun. You know, I think just being funny, putting out your own post, doing your own thing in the community. As a speaker, I know that when I run a summit and I see my speakers going above and beyond, I'm like noted, I will pick you again and again and again, but as the host, if I'm doing all these things to highlight you as a speaker or you as a sponsor, you're probably thinking, I want to come back here again. I will choose Sandra's summit over someone else's summit, because the experience has been so so fruitful and fun and engaging. I think people are missing out by not doing it.
And I know like Facebook groups, the engagement has been like... but like you said, that community, that Facebook group, was so engaging, so engaging, we just opened up our Facebook group for our summit, and that group is has been engaging. I have to, I know there's more stuff coming up for them. It's early too, like we don't even start our summit for a while, but we have them playing some games. We have them interacting. We have them asking questions, and that's just part of the fun. You know, I had a friend who did in person events, and I remember the first in person event she did the very first day, it was like an awkward library, like nobody talked to each other, nobody knew each other. Everyone was just awkward. Didn't like they didn't know anything like it. And she was like, Is this how it's supposed to be?
Well, the second year she opened up. I think this is really aging it, but she opened up like, sorry, this That year she opened up a Ning group. So there's no one on that. Do you remember Ning like it was way back. It was before Facebook. It was basically an online forum. If you didn't remember to log in, you wouldn't have gone back in. But she then opened up a Facebook group for the event. And in that Facebook group, people are like, Where can I get, like, organic juice, and where can I stay, and how can I park and and then all that started conversations the first day of her event was a party. Like, there if the room was just buzzing before we even started. That is the kind of energy I want to have in your community before your summit even begins. So when you open doors on that first day and you open up the very first presentations, it's not like you're trying to gradually get engagement going. The engagement is going. People are excited. They're pumped. They're in there. They're watching presentations, and that's what we want. I think people miss out by not having A), not having a pop up group, and B), not knowing what to do in them to get them engaged ahead of time.
Oh my gosh, absolutely. I was on Facebook yesterday. I don't remember what I was oh, I was gonna go post in my group, and one of your posts from your community popped up, and it was a game you were doing. I was like, Oh my gosh, this is so fun. And I went to do it, but one of my team members had already commented as me, so then I couldn't play the game. I was very mad. So anyways.
You can go back again and you can play. There's two, there's two going, two similar games going.
Okay, so we have established that you really should have a community. The solution to not having engaged communities isn't to remove them; it's to know how to engage it. So can you tell us your philosophy around creating an engaged community?
Yeah, so the philosophy is the dinner party thing. So you have to, you're the host. You can't rely on someone else to get your engagement going. You have to get the engagement going. How do you get engagement going? The best thing is to ask questions that are really easy for people to answer, and also playing games that make people look smart. People want to show that they are smart. This is just a psychology thing. They want to show how smart they are. So play games. So for instance, one of the games that we play is called the alphabet game. It is a game that I play with my son in the car or on walks, right? So it's like you have to go through the alphabet and you pick a category, and then you have to find a word that goes with that thing. So for my Summit, we're doing one go through the alphabet and you have to pick a word that starts with the next letter based on memberships. So we have people going through and picking things like, you know, I can't remember what the first few ones were, like...
...Affiliate was A, because that was my team member!
...right? Batching, content creation, all those things. And so it gets really interesting when you get to the U and the Q. It's amazing how smart people really are. Like, I'm impressed, or maybe they're just Googling it, but it's like, super smart. And so this is a really easy game to play, and if they don't have an answer for the next letter, they are waiting to get to that letter so that they can answer the one that they have in mind. So that's just like a fun, easy one. We're not even giving away prizes. We're just, let's get some engagement going.
And the fun thing about that is, you will have minimum 26 comments, because the 26 letters. But I go in there and I'm writing to people like, this is hysterical. Like, this is a good one. This is an awesome one. We had one that Facebook marked as spam, so now there's like a seven comment thread in there about that one that Facebook so now we're gonna be up to probably over 60 comments on this one post. Does Facebook like that? Oh yes, it does. And when you open up your Facebook group and you immediately have interaction like that, Facebook's gonna start promoting it more on people's feeds, in their notifications. It might even suggest it as a Facebook group, which is why I always put the link to my summit registration in the you're going to hear my Canadian accent now in the about section.
I heard it with something you said earlier.
I hate saying that word in front of I hate it, but I'm like, Oh, how else am I going to get around saying it? I don't even hear how I say it wrong. That's the funny part. That's how ingrained it is.
So what are the things that we want in the Facebook group? Okay, the other thing is communication. We are not just using it to engage with people. We're using it to communicate. So like, how do they get support? If they need support, how do they get an all access pass? How do they upgrade to an all-access pass? Where is the schedule? When does the event begin? How do they find out about your next offer? How do they get your fill in your feedback forms like, how do they do all this communication stuff that you want them to do? And maybe you just want to communicate, hey, we're going to be playing games. That post is not necessarily to get more engagement, but I definitely want to communicate that. So I use it to communicate, I use it to engage, and I use it to convert. And so the conversion comes with all access passes. It also comes with whatever it is that I'm offering at the end, usually my membership. I want people to go into. So those three all posts go into those three buckets, communication, engagement or conversion.
Oh my gosh. I've never heard someone break it down like that before. I love that, and I love your strategy for engagement where? So the way I used to do it, back in the day, when stuff just worked was I would just ask a simple question every day, and a lot of times they were related to, like, the exact topic, topic at the summit. Or I'd be like, what's your favorite coffee? You know, just getting people engaging that way, it's not working as well anymore, because everyone does it. And, you know, I don't know, maybe it's just not that fun anymore by itself, but your engagement strategies are so much more fun. It doesn't have to be related to be related to the summit. I think that's something that gets people caught up like at least to start, I would say unrelated is likely better.
Oh yeah, one of the my top engagement posts for the summit was how many tabs you have open this year. I'm actually going to change it to how many tabs do you have open and how many tabs do you have open in your brain? Because those feel like two different things, like sometimes you have so much going on in your brain, but those are just like everyone knows. And if you're a tab hoarder, or I don't know how else to say this, I have so many tabs and so many windows open. I mean, I can't even count them. I'm just looking at all the small chrome windows on my computer. But yeah, so either you'll have people say, like, oh, I have like, three tabs open, or you have, like, someone else going, I have 9483 tabs open and a half. And then just that just makes it funny, and people want to talk some more about that. But what makes that so easy to respond to is it's just a number. They don't have to think, they don't have to research, they don't have to check their spelling, nothing. It's just a number. Makes it super easy.
Man, I love that. Okay, so you're going to engage, communicate and convert in your group. Gonna make it easy for them to get started, at least. Is there anything that you would, that you are, I guess, doing differently this time that didn't, I don't know, quite go the way you wanted last time.
I am definitely starting earlier. So I actually before, about an hour ago, I was putting together two other games that will, one will start next week, and once the week before. It's called two truths and a lie. So those are all set ready to go. I tested it out. I got 100% on one. I got 13 out of 14, but at least I got the I know everything. I just wanted to test to make sure everything was right. And that was cheating, because I knew all the answers. It was just a memory thing at that point. But I have that all going. People won prizes for that.
What would I do differently? I know last time, I didn't ask my speakers and sponsors to go in until very close to the summit. This time around, I asked them early on, before we even opened up the group, like, can you please go in, because I'm going to be tagging you. And it's a great place to communicate, and it's great place to be with your people. So, you know, make sure that you're in and so now everyone is in there and connecting already with people and having fun, and that was a big thing. There were some people last time where I really had to, like, up until the day that their summit was about to go in, I was like, Can you please go in, because I tagged you, and it's gonna be great if you don't go in. So that was one thing that I did differently.
Another thing is I'll be doing the sponsor love game a little earlier. I didn't do a scholarship last time. That's your strategy, though, but I'm doing that this time, and this time around, I'm actually changing my cover image a few more times. So there will be a countdown to when we begin. There'll be, you know, one for day one, one for day two, one for day three, one for Hey, the All-Access Pass, make sure you buy it before you know it, like goes away or whatever. So there's a little bit more like of that.
And, you know, I was putting together this, like, freebie that I have and this kit that I have for summit owners. And, you know, one part was very inspired by you, like, how you have that whole Excel sheet. And this impressed me, by the way, even though I was anti-summit, this impressed me hugely, because I had a client who was doing a summit. And she's like, you need to do a summit. I'm like, why? She goes, Listen, she makes it super easy for you. Got all the templates, all the things, and you just put your summit date in the Excel sheet, and you had me at Excel sheet. I love Excel or Google Sheet. I love Google better. So and then, like, it tells you what to do every day. Like, that's brilliant.
So I did the same thing here. I mean, if people are buying Summit in a Box, they're gonna feel right at home with this. And I'm using my own spreadsheet to make sure that everything is getting done on time, whereas last time, it was like I was building it as I was going I didn't, because it was my first summit, I had so much to prepare and do, and I didn't know what I didn't know, and I like to take the summer off, so that made it hard to have a summit at the end of September. So this time around, I'm really, really planning ahead, and I had everything kind of set up. There's scheduled posts, everything I'm hoping by mid next week, like absolutely all the graphics are very ready for me to, like, just do it. So if you can have everything scheduled ahead of time, I don't want to say you can sit back and relax, but you can sit back and relax a little bit more than you would have if you didn't have it scheduled, and you could just watch as the engagement goes.
Yeah, oh my gosh, I have not grabbed your kit for this yet because we were not in summit planning mode. But guess what, we are now, and I'm gonna be getting it like, oh my gosh, I need it. I need it. Is how I feel, and I'm very excited. I'm glad you're on here, reminding me of how amazing it is. Okay, one more question before we close out, and I'm gonna have you talk about these resources that you have a little bit more. First, though, do you think that all of these engagement strategies could carry over into communities outside of Facebook groups?
Yeah, actually, I had that question in your summit host group in the in the free group, someone said was asking about Facebook groups, and then someone said, What about Slack? And you totally could, because you could have a channel in there for start here, and then what are the things that you need them to start with. And then you can have another channel in there for, you know, announcements, which is communication. And then you can have, like a general, you know, the lounge area for engagement. You can have, you know, all those things that could totally be possible in a Slack channel in Slack in any of these really, as long as you know how to organize things throughout and if I have a lot of like, requests for a certain platform, I will definitely put that in.
I love that. Oh my gosh, okay. Well, thank you. I know that's a that's a good answer for a lot of people. I hear more and more I don't want to be on Facebook and like we have seen an impact, at least on my side, for people who go outside of Facebook groups because their communities don't know how to use these other platforms, don't know what they are, don't know how to log in, but I think it's like, pick what's going to make sense for your people and teach them how to use it, and have a community that they want to go to right, which is like, what you're all about. So I want to hear more about the free resource and even the paid resource, you have to make this easier for people.
Yeah, so the Summit Engagement Starter Kit is our free kit. It gives you kind of a little sneak peek into a few things like the timeline generator to tell you what to do and how to plan ahead of time for your community, I give you some ideas for games, and we do like, I give you a little bit of like, how to manage your group properly, how to make it so it's not overwhelming for you. And then for the whole kit, which gives you, you know, absolutely everything.
So the Summit Engage + Experience Kit, you get, obviously, the whole timeline, like the everything that I'm using for my summit. You will have, I give you a whole introduction to the pop up groups. I show you how to set up your group so that you have maximum impact when people are coming in, and you can check that off your list. I give you a way to automate registered participants, so you don't have someone going in there and checking, did this person register? Okay, they're in, did that person? It is all automated. And that alone saved me, I don't know how many times, and I love tedious tasks like that, like I love it, but I thought there was no way I can manage that at the same time. And also, I like to be away from my computer, so for me to do this on my phone and make sure that this person registered to get them into the group. No, that wasn't going to happen.
Then I give you all kinds of games to play, to drive engagement ideas for prizes. We give you the template so you can play two truths and a lie with your people. How I do that is so you'll get the templates to use them so people fill out the two truths and a lie, and then you turn that into something else, and you get the templates for that so you don't have to worry about it. I just use the templates myself to set this up, save myself so much time. We have a game called the top engagers game, which is exactly what you want. You want people to be really motivated to engage. And so that was another thing that I started a lot earlier, too. This time I show you how to use do the alphabet game, and then like how to do things to help get people to convert within your group as well, so to convert them into more past sales, or into your your course, or your membership, whatever it is that you're offering. Yeah, and just like, all the time saver stuff I love, yeah.
Well, I mean, like, first of all the strategy, so it actually works, and then second, the stuff you need to save you a bunch of time. So, yeah, we're gonna include the links to all of this. In the show notes for everybody, because I just think this is a resource that it very, very easily pays itself back like what, one or two all access pass sales is all you need. And it is so worth it to have an engaged community, because you will see that community drive sales as long as the people are using it. So I will link to that in the show notes. Like I said, Sandra, where can everyone go to? You know, stay in touch with you, learn more about what you're up to.
Yeah, so you can go to sandradefreitas.com, so I'll spell De Freitas, because we all know, not everyone can spell it, D, E, F, r, e, i, t, A, S, so sandradefreitas.com. You could also head over to my group, and I created a shortcut for my group. Go to engagedgroups.com/group, and that will forward you over to my free group if you want to be in touch with me there.
Amazing. Thank you so much. We'll link to that in the show notes, and thank you so much everyone for tuning in. For like I said, For show notes, for resources, anything we mentioned in this episode, head to the link in the episode description. We'll have it for you there for now, go out and take action, to plan, strategize and launch your high converting virtual summit.