Wellness Community Creation & Management | Nourishing Circle

Overview 🔎

I designed and currently run a community-guided experience called Nourishing Circle that supports women in business to stop stressing about food and their body through achievable weekly experiments to eat more plants, let go of the diet mentality, and be more confident in their bodies.



Origin story 📔

Back in 2018, I was in living in Canada and found myself meditating outside by -40C when a vision came to me to create a worldwide community for women centered around health and wellbeing. Since that day, I felt called to create this community and finally launched Nourishing Circle in June 2021.

I personally struggled with my weight, doing all the diets available on the face of the earth, having uncontrollable cravings, having low body confidence and eczema (a skin rash condition) spreading all over my body. Not getting the support I wanted and the answers I needed from doctors and being very passionate about addressing the root causes of my problems, I went on a self-exploration journey in order to heal my skin and my relationship with food and my body.

It took me a decade to finally feel at peace with food, my body, and get clear skin. What helped me the most was switching to eating predominantly plant-based foods and learning to become an intuitive eater.

Seeing how many women struggle with their eating patterns and confidence, I felt called to gather my knowledge on food, mindset, and habit creation to create Nourishing Circle.



Problem & Solution 🤝

After gathering a few thousand followers on Instagram around topics related to food, eating habits, and body image, it became clear that most women were struggling with the same issues I had: not being able to eat healthy consistently, uncontrollable binging on sweets or processed foods, low energy and low confidence. The bigger issue was that most women tried to get help through nutritionists but were put on a diet that they never could sustain and would always get all the weight back on.

This drove me to want to create a safe place where women could gather and go on a curious and fun exploration to break free from their unhealthy eating and thinking patterns without going on a diet! Joining a community was not only more exciting for them but they particularly appreciated the fact that there wouldn't be any food plans but rather simple experiments that they would be guided through week after week.



Community concept 🧪

🔄 A 13-Week Journey Nourishing Circle is an ongoing community-guided experience based on 13 weeks cycles called “Journeys”.

🤩 Nourishment Made Easy & Exciting Every Sunday, members are given a new nourishing experiment to try during the week. 📝 Everyone goes through the same experiment focus of the week (there are 12 in total). But everyone will be able to customize and choose a variation of the experiment that fits their personal needs and enables them to grow on their own terms.

👩‍🔬 No More Guesswork Figuring Out How To Nourish Yourself

Weekly experiments will fall within our 4 pillars of nourishment:

• Pillar #1: 🌱 Lifestyle Experiments To create more ease and space in the day
• Pillar #2: 😋 Eating Experiments To improve and maintain energy levels
• Pillar #3: 💫 Intuitive Experiment To nourish body, mind, and soul
• Pillar #4: 💖 Body and Mind Relationship Experiments To feel confident in their skin and abilities



Goals 🎯

Community goals during the first launch:

• Validate interest in the community: by getting 25 beta members
• Validate the community concept: by getting feedback and success stories from members

Current community goals:

• Increase member retention from 60% to 70%
• Community growth: get 100+ members
• 
  

Process 🛣

When I first launched the community, I spent one month, creating content on Instagram around the different pain points Nourishing Circle was solving and drove people to a landing page for them to sign-up to get access to the program outline of the community and a link to place a 30€ deposit to reserve their spot in the beta of the community.

I also made it clear to beta members that they were benefiting from a discounted price and that in exchange I would ask for their honest feedback midway through and at the end of their 13-week journey, to help me improve the community.

I gave myself a couple of weeks between the cart close and the kick-off of the community to build all the back-end platforms on my website, set the community chat on telegram, and create the first 2 weeks of content.

When the community launched I decided to dedicate the first week to onboarding so everyone would not feel rushed and stressed starting in the community. I laid out on the welcome page of the community website 11 simple steps for them to follow to be fully set-up.

The engagement was extremely high during the first 4-5 weeks, people really enjoyed the community concept, sharing their journey on our Telegram group, setting their weekly experiment and joining the live coaching calls on Friday.

Before launching the community I had come up with a few ideas on how to spike engagement mid-journey as this often happens when the excitement of the start fades off. I organize a contest with some gifts to prompt them to be more engaged in the chat, I also sent out physical surprises via mail and came up with different call formats and content to spice things up which really paid off.

As this is an International community I made sure to alternate between 2 different times every other week so everyone could have a chance to participate to our live calls.

Finally, every week I set time out to create content for the following weeks, and as I was consistently seeking feedback and logging in comments made by community members, I was able to tailor the content to their needs and really co-create the community with them to best serve them!





Results🎁

10% conversion rate from landing page visits to members.

15 beta members join the first journey (13 weeks) of Nourishing Circle and over 60% decided to continue to do a second journey. All members experienced improvements in the different areas Nourishing Circle was supporting them in: eating more intuitively, feeling more energized, reducing cravings, eating more plants, and being more confident!

After launching several times and running the community for a year now, I am getting consistent referrals from members sharing about the community with their friends.

Those results clearly validated the community concept and now the focus is set on growth as Nourishing Circle was built in a way that is scalable.

The best part is that now that the content around experiment is created, the community management only requires 2h of my time per week.



-Carmen

-Mathilde

-Varvara



Takeaways 📣

1. Setting clear community principles and reminding them throughout the journey enabled having a smooth community experience without any conflicts.
2. Making members feel safe and not judged when sharing their experiences and challenges was the number 1 priority. It definitely paid off as members were not afraid to be vulnerable and honest which led to deeper, more transformational conversations and connexions between members.
3. Sending personalized messages and gifts made community members feel extra special and really looked after.
4. Having 15 members during the first journey was actually a great community size to explore their unique challenges and feedback to improve the community.
5. Giving the opportunity to shape the community content and experience to members really got them more involved as they knew they were not only experiencing the community but co-creating it with me.