Creating an online Community

Founders in your Accelerator need a place to chat, communicate and share ideas
Univation Platform will be the place to let Founders watch Courses, report Progress, create Teams, and complete the Acceleration or Incubation program.
To devleop Personal releations and foster feedback and idea sharing, in an Online program, you need to Intergrate a community platform, like Slack or Discord.

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Slack: Best for Professional, more formal Programs

Slack, has been used by many Accelerators to keep members updated, enable Chat Sessions with Mentors and allow founders to showcase their idea and receive feedback.

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  • #Channels: Slack organizes your community in channels you create based on #topic. For example, they can be #Announcements, #Mentors, #Feedback, #FindCofounder etc.
  • Integrations and Slack Bots: Add more functionalities to the community, like an automated greeting message to new founders or a weekly progress check-in dialog.
  • Zoom integration for Video-Calling: Slack supports video calls with up-to 15 users, so to run a webinar or all-founders call, Zoom & Google Meet will tackle this problem.
  • Audiocalls: Supports audio calls with up to 250 users.
With any Univation Platform Plan of value $1,000 or greater, we provide a Slack Pro Workplace for up to 250 members, for freeπŸŽ‰

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Discord: Best for seamless video-callings, Cooler than Slack

Discord has been largely adopted by web3 teams and communities, university student groups and online hackathons or Startup Weekends. And is free!

  • Tables for Video calling: In real life, we sit in tables to chat with our fellows. Likewise, in discord, you can join tables with founders and discuss ideas seamlessly with just one 1 click. You can also create as many tables as you need and set a limit of "chairs" per table.
  • Events & Webinars: Can run events, webinars and big audio calls, inside the platform - ideal for founders dinners and mentors workshops
  • Gamification and Roles: Bots in Discord can make the community more fun, play music to calls and give points to daily check-ins. Also, users can be assigned to roles with different permissions to join, or post in channels. For an Acceleration program, roles could be Founders, Mentors, Investors and Mods.

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Other tools

  • Tribe is a branded and customizable platform - better for uploading content - lacks calling and chat features
  • Lu.ma is a minimalistic tool for communities, with chat, event list, and a simple feed
  • Facebook Messenger can also work for up to 20 members - to post program updates and do Webinars in Messenger Rooms
  • Avoid Facebook Groups - not only it's low engagement rate, but also when your members open Facebook's site to see program's updates, are distracted and set off their ways

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Minas Marios Kontis
May 7, 2022