What is a monthly theme?

A monthly theme is exactly as it sounds — a theme for every month of the year for your community. Monthly themes help members build skills, gain knowledge, and navigate topics that don’t have easy or obvious answers. Each monthly theme should tackle a different part of your Big Purpose. As a reminder, your Big Purpose is the motivation for your community. It’s why your community exists — for bringing together the members who share the goals of your community.

Part of Community Design™ involves taking your members on a transformative journey that’s mapped out for a year (a Year in the Life — which helps creators plan where members are today and where they’ll be in one year). Monthly themes help break down this journey and provide concrete topics for members. Think of it like a roadmap to transformation.

How to create monthly themes

Your monthly themes should be independent yet related, meaning they shouldn’t be sequential. That’s because you want to have the option of members joining at any point over the course of a year.

Your monthly themes should also be fun yet informative, so they shouldn’t be something that you can quickly Google. When you strike this balance, you spark rich conversations between members where they want to share their stories, experiences, ideas, and challenges in pursuit of exploring the theme.

Here are some examples of monthly themes:

• Brand building


• Pricing your business


• Scaling your business


• Acquiring customers


• Defining success


• Conflict resolution for entrepreneurs

These monthly themes can be used for a variety of Big Purposes like becoming an entrepreneur, growing your business, building an online coaching practice, etc. As previously stated, these monthly themes are also independent, yet related, allowing members to hop in at any time!

Monthly themes can also be broken down even further into:

• Weekly calendars — planned activities members can do every week that will move them towards their goals.


• Daily actions — which help members stay on track and accountable.

Don’t be too rigid about your monthly themes either, because you could change them up during the process. Ask your members what they would like to see — listen and adapt your content accordingly. That’s why we also recommend not announcing your monthly themes too early (even one week ahead of time will do). Tease the content, build some hype around it and create some excitement!

Now Read: Your 5 Step Plan for Mastering Community Design in 2022