VIP meets IRL in the Community World
My humble prediction for 2025: more VIP and exclusive IRL experiences to counter-balance community ubiquity.
Over the past couple of years, we have seen an explosion in the number and size of online communities. The pandemic brought everyone online and since then, the science and art of community building has become a well-documented business playbook.
On the flip-side, this means community has become somewhat commodified, which is resulting in plateauing or even falling engagement rates. Community builders need to get creative in how they position and differentiate their communities in the face of a crowded landscape and growing member fatigue.
This leads me to believe we will see more communities differentiate themselves by leveraging the magic of IRL (‘In Real Life’), while also offering members carefully curated, perhaps more exclusive and intimate, VIP experiences.
Scale presents obvious advantages, but from a member experience standpoint, there’s a case to be made that smaller, exclusive, hyper-tailored groups lead to better member buy-in, more meaningful interactions and generally higher perceived value.
Communities (Finally) Align with Customer Experience
In 2025, I predict that we’ll see Community and Customer Marketing teams work closer than ever, especially in tech. Whether you’re building a community for customers or practitioners, identifying and highlighting stories from your community members is key. That’s where Customer Marketing ties in.
Expect more Marketing teams to reach out to spotlight community members and their successes for their customer marketing initiatives. This may come as customer testimonials, case studies, and even ambassador or referral programs.
Take advantage of this partnership! Instead of simply spotlighting awesome members in your community space, collaborate with your marketing peers to celebrate community members’ achievements everywhere, from customer stories in out-of-home ads to powerful testimonials on the homepage of your company website.
People are tired of hearing the same value props over and over again. Every product promises that they’ll help you achieve your goal faster or easier. But when you’ve heard it hundreds of times, you get a little wary.
In 2025, we’ll see more Marketing and Sales teams focus on highlighting real customer stories. Community naturally hears about these authentic narratives, and 2025 presents it’s the perfect opportunity to leverage these relationships and showcase how real people find real success with your company’s product or service.
Paid Private Communities over Free Public Content
I'm expecting private, paid membership spaces to continue to grow in popularity, as they have for the past couple of years. Notable moves in this direction over the past year include Patreon’s enhanced community tools, and the ongoing exodus to newsletters with a tiered subscription model.
Digital creators are waking up to the knowledge that their labour provides the true value of traditional "free" social media platforms while Google, Meta, and TikTok gather the bulk of the ad revenue. 2024 has further expedited this shift by revealing how little profit from shiny AI tools actually reaches the creators whose content has populated the models.
When people invest in their communities financially, they show up differently. This isn't just about paying for access - it's about creating a new digital economy where everyone's contribution has inherent value, not just resale value as part of an advertising package.
Scientific Research Communities Rise to Tackle the Biggest Issues
Do you think that, like in the films, scientific breakthroughs are achieved by a couple of scientists in a lab? It takes a village, and nowhere more so than in scientific research!
Science is naturally collaborative, with scientific research communities having risen on each others’ shoulders for ages. While this collaboration is not new, 2025 will see these communities adopt professional community building in droves. The Pandemic has shown that when scientific research communities come together, they can find an expedient solution even to a raging global problem, also thanks to today’s communication and computing technologies making collaboration across the World as easy as talking to someone else in the same room.
These communities have also discovered that effective coordination of their efforts - and the contribution of interdisciplinary stakeholders - speeds their progress up massively, and so we’re seeing more and more community professionals at the helm. And, with 2025 poised to be the year of major breakthroughs in challenges such as disease treatment and Quantum technologies, it’s not difficult to predict that we’ll see much more of community management in scientific research.
Communities Shift from Education to Connection
(From Teachers to Facilitators)
A huge trend of 2024 continuing into 2025 is solopreneurs shifting away from their identity as teacher and course creator to facilitator and community creator. We've already seen course creators move from hosting siloed educational programs to prioritizing community-centered group experiences. But now, these creators are also realizing how difficult it is to maintain and grow a business model entirely dependent on them constantly creating and marketing educational content.
They are eager to shift into a connection-centric membership model (which also happens to be a powerful recurring revenue stream).
Rather than the value of the experience being entirely dependent on the creator and their content, they are eager to introduce a connection-centric environment where the value of the membership comes from the interactions between members. In 2025 we will see them continue to shift into this new role, designing spaces that prompt their members to provide value rather than feeding the content engine.
Talent Communities Redefine the Employment Experience
Tired of “talent” pipelines that feel like plumbing, hiring processes that resemble medieval torture, and bleeding talent faster than you can replace it? Enter talent communities—a 2025 must-have for companies finally ready to become places where people actually want to work. For organizations fed up with sky-high hiring costs, lost productivity, and mismatched employees who were doomed from the start, talent communities offer a better way.
Unlike traditional communities of practice—designed for sharing skills and knowledge—talent communities go further. They combine the best of collaboration, upskilling, and tacit knowledge-sharing with something more powerful: direct access to real opportunities for work and professional growth. Communities like Pollen, Fractionals United, and the Community Consultants Collective are redefining the playbook by actively connecting members to projects, roles, and networks that build careers.
Why now? Because in a fast-moving economy, humanizing work is essential. Talent communities reduce turnover, boost engagement, and turn talent management into a strategic advantage. In 2025, they’re redefining broken employment experiences—and making work work again.
Scenius Communities Embracing Co-creation
2025 marks the rise of 'scenius communities'. Until now, communities have focused mostly on education and networking. The most vibrant groups this year will cultivate scenius: the communal form of genius that emerges when members actively create together to make sense of their world.
This shift goes beyond facilitated discussion and embraces emergent design where community professionals craft environments that transform individual knowledge into shared brilliance. Think: working groups developing innovative tools, member-authored publications synthesizing insights, or creative member-led challenges that deepen understanding through practice.
Why 2025? As AI commoditizes solo creation and contributes to an abundance of content, spaces that enable scenius will provide the deeper meaning people seek. The most successful communities will transform from spaces of consumption and connection into laboratories of shared discovery.
Associations are Going Back to a Community Mindset
Professional and trade associations are the original professional community builders. It is what they do: to facilitate networking and peer-to-peer learning.
Traditionally, this is primarily done by organising conferences. During the pandemic, there was a hype towards virtual events and online communities. But these seemed to be quickly forgotten during the in-person events revival in the aftermath of the pandemic. We now see at Yunits that associations are realising the right, sustainable mix between online and offline channels for their long-term member engagement strategy includes offering their own online communication and community platforms.
These platforms allow associations to jointly build a reliable knowledge bank with their members, by efficiently facilitating connection (based on specific topics), collaboration and knowledge sharing between members, often matching supply and demand in their sector. Platform data allows personalised, efficient and relevant communication. A community mindset makes them more flexible to live up to the changing needs of their members with relevant services in co-creation with their members.
More and more associations realise a collective enterprise is far more powerful and likely to be more successful than an individual one. The circles of trust between members are more important than all the individual member-to-association relationships. Associations need to go back to their roots and start facilitating and extending trustworthy year-round connections, to win the fight for their member’s attention and stay relevant in turbulent times. This is crucial as it will increase the impact towards their mission and drive progress towards a better world.
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