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Principles Of Packaging
There are three main aspects of your community’s packaging:
Let’s discuss how you can set up each of them (without wasting hours by focusing on unimportant details)…
#1: Name
You would’ve already created a name during your initial signup, but you can change it at any point (including now). When choosing a name for your community, there are two main criteria to keep in mind:
First, your name should be easy to remember — this way, it’s simpler for people to tell others about your community, helping your audience compound over time.
To achieve this, make your name short, simple, and easy to spell.
Secondly, your name should clearly communicate value.
Imagine you’re helping dentists design better websites for their clinics. A vague name like “Jack’s Web Design Community” won’t be clear enough — your avatar should be able to glance at your community, and instantly become interested.
Don’t spend too long on this step. You can always change the name later, so once you’ve got something that meets the criteria above, you’re ready to move on:
#2: Description
There are three fundamental purposes of your community’s description. Let’s go through each of them:
A) Grab the attention of your avatar
First, you want to call out the specific kind of person you’re looking for. This could be based on their identity (e.g. “Calling all aspiring painters…”), a specific problem (e.g. “struggling to land video editing clients?…”), or anything else you think is relevant.
The aim is that, when your avatar reads the first sentence, they feel as though they’re being directly spoken to. The more specifically you can describe their situation in this callout, the better.
B) Outline why they should join your group
In the callout sentence, you framed a specific problem/situation that your avatar is facing.
Now, we briefly describe how your community will provide benefit in the context of that description.
In the beginning, you won’t have any members, so it’s important to use whatever unique advantages you have. Think back to when you first chose your avatar… Why did you choose them? What about your skills makes you qualified to help? Outline those reasons here.
C) Provide a call to action (CTA) to drive signups
Okay. We’ve grabbed our avatar’s attention, and we’ve explained how your community will help solve their specific problem.
All that’s left to do now is ask them to join. Literally.
Quick tip: conditional/”if” statements often make great CTAs (e.g. “If that sounds interesting, click the button below to claim your free membership!”) By tying the avatar’s decision to an outside factor (that we control), we increase the effectiveness of our requests.
Once you’ve finished filling out your description, let’s move on to the final step in the packaging process:
#3: Icon/Cover
In the beginning, this doesn’t have to be elaborate. To avoid decision fatigue, I’ve simplified the process for you below:
Next, in the top right corner of the home page, click “Create a design” then “Custom size”. Enter a width of 1084px, and a height of 576px, then click “Create new design”.
This will open a blank document, with the exact dimensions of a Skool Community cover image.
If you have an image ready to use, or have experience with design, feel free to create your design here. But otherwise, this could be as simple as rewriting your community name in a cool font/colour.
Once you’re happy with your work, click “Share” in the top right of Canva’s interface, and select “Download” to save a copy of the image.
To create your icon image, repeat the same process, this time creating a design with dimensions of 128 x 128px.
Like I said at the beginning, don’t spend too much time trying to get these images perfect. All that matters is that you have the fundamental elements in place - you can always come back and make tweaks later on.
You’re almost there! Only one step left to fully set up your community, and it won’t take long:
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