Automate community tasks + manage members on different platforms

The ultimate community managers dream...

Being able to manage all the different community platforms in one place – e.g the ability to manage your Slack, Circle, Discord groups all via one central dashboard/operating platform…
Send members automated welcome messages but make it feel personalised with the ability to truly encourage deeper conversations and better understand the members in the community
Categorise members into different groups such as by their interest, location, or timezone…
Compare the engagement of these members in the different groups and immediately be able to message groups of people (in a targeted yet meaningful way) to try and boost engagement
Automatically be able to see who are active members, who’s recently joined and who’s dropping off…
And have those metrics be actionable – you see something going on in the community and you can actually do something about it immediately within the platform
Schedule messages to members and heck why not be able to send a group of the same DM but to individual members??

Recently I’ve been hearing more about a platform called Burb that does all of the above!

I spoke with the team at Burb to find out more…

Let’s deep dive into community operations.

The reality for a lot of community managers is they are running so many different tools and platforms to manage their communities.

Do you manage your communities across several different platforms, like Slack, Circle and Discord?

It can become an operational nightmare.

Posting on different platforms – you’ve probably become really good at using the copy paste shortcuts. Or maybe you’ve attempted to automate tasks such as welcoming new members, and then you’ve got stuck trying to figure out how to use Zapier to manage your community.

I remember the first time I tried to use Zapier, it was super overwhelming and I just ended up clicking a whole bunch of buttons trying to get something to work.

What if Zapier knew what you actually wanted to do as a community manager and provided you with all the operational needs you had ?

Sounds like the dream, doesn’t it!

Burb is a platform that focuses on the operational aspects of community management and helps community managers with that they actually need to DO behind the scenes.

Let’s take a look at who should consider using Burb, the main features, some pros and cons and pricing.

Who should use Burb?

Burb is a platform that focuses on creator communities, as they have integrations with teaching platforms such as Thinkific and Teachable.

When someone signs up to the course, you can use the Burb platform to automate the onboarding process of having them join your community platforms and start engaging with the community.

Burb is best for those who manage a community across several different platforms – where those platforms serve different needs for their community. Burb recognises that community is not a single platform and offers automations across various different community platforms (more about that further on in this post).

Burb offers community managers the ability to manage across these different platforms, and automate processes behind the scenes.

The typical community who currently uses Burb are creators and smallish brands who have 1500-2000 members in their community and are looking to scale up their community management efforts.

I do think Burb can be used by other types of communities – especially those who use Slack, Circle and/or Discord and need assistance with managing multi-platform communities. And in future Burb plans to build out more integrations such as events platforms.

Currently they support integrations with Slack, Circle, Discord, ConvertKit and Google workspace. So if you’re using those platforms and want a better way of managing it all, especially automating processes, you could consider Burb.

Features

Supports multiple platforms: here you can see they are showing Slack and Circle but it also supports Discord, it integrates with learning management systems Thinkific and Teachable plus they are building integrations with email too via Google workspace.

Send welcome messages across different platforms and it formats according to the platform: You can select the channel in each platform. Now you can do this manually OR they have the really awesome feature of creating customised automations for your needs.

You can automate the welcome message in a way the best suits YOUR needs. So you can message the member individually and you can choose which platform to message them on, you can post a message to a channel at the beginning of a week that mentions that member to welcome them in the general channel, you can add certain tags to that member or add them to a specific group.

Schedule posts and sequences of post and messages to community members through Burb: A great example would be if a community member joins the community but doesn’t hop on the platform for a week, you can actually automate sending an email to them to remind them of the community platform and to hop back in. And the email will look like it comes from you.

Member profiles can be managed: think of this as your CRM for your community. Data is pulled in from Circle in this case, you can take notes, add tags, view course progress and see all their activity across different platforms. Really great tip: tag members by their TIMEZONE. You can easily send members a message and choose the platform right through Burb.

Organising Events: Say you want to schedule an event to all your members in the pacific time zone, you can schedule direct messages to all those in the PST tag and send them a message! Tuesday morning is the best time to contact people!

Future feature being built: Events that are in the platforms like circle etc will be integrated where you can add your zoom meeting links, choose the tags, set time, date etc and invite people but all within Burb.

Pros & cons

Pros
What I like about Burb is how they have truly simplified everything behind the scenes, it is like community management 101.

It’s simpler to use then Zapier and they really do make life easier. They’re creating a lot of templating using best practices from community management, and you can customise those templates for your needs.

Cons
Burb is still new and integrations are still being built out. We only have 3 community platforms available to us, hopefully they add more soon.

I’d also like a better testing site, when I was provided a demo it was great to see behind the scenes, but I couldn’t truly test the platform without setting up test Slack groups or test Discord groups myself. It would be great to have them provide access to a playground to test this properly, perhaps some dummy accounts as community members so I didn’t need to do this all myself and I could really see the full experience as a community member. You’d have to test this with friends or colleagues too as you wouldn’t want to test automations with actual members.

Pricing

Final Thoughts

Overall I think Burb is a great option for those who are

new to community management
are managing a small community across different platforms for their needs
lacking resources to manage their community but could utilise the automations to really scale up their efforts