18+ AI prompts every community manager should bookmark
Building a community may look effortless from the outside. Bringing people together around a shared passion — and turning that into a business — sounds like a dream job. But community builders like you know the truth: behind that dream is real work, long hours, and a to-do list that never ends.
And while it may be a full-time job — you don’t have to do it alone.
Imagine having an assistant who never runs out of energy (or coffee). One who drafts your welcome flow, sparks fresh discussion topics, and even helps predict churn. That’s the promise of AI — but what’s the reality?
AI isn’t replacing community builders. It’s transforming how you work. From automating repetitive tasks to surfacing insights you might miss, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and Circle’s AI Copilot and AI Agents are becoming part of modern community workflows.
But here’s the key: getting great results from AI isn’t just about using the right tool — it’s about knowing what to ask and how to ask it. That’s where AI prompts come in.
Most prompt lists stop at a few quick examples. This one goes deeper — with 18 prompts you can use in your daily workflow, from engagement and onboarding to events and moderation.
Let’s dig in.
Why prompts matter for community builders
AI can seem like the perfect solution to managing your community builder to-do list. But businesses around the world are learning that AI isn’t a “set-it and forget it” tool. A report from Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that 95% of enterprise AI projects fail to meet their objectives.
Why? Because for AI to work for you, it has to be done with intention. You have to think through:
- What problem are you trying to solve?
- What does success look like for you and your members?
- How can you get AI to help you solve that problem successfully?
Answering the first two questions should be easy. But the third one might have you scratching your head. That’s what we’re here for. Imagine you’re a contestant on “Jeopardy!”, but instead of answering in the form of a question, you’re answering in the form of a prompt.
What’s a prompt, exactly?
A prompt is how you tell an AI what you want it to do. It can be a question, a short instruction, or even a detailed scenario like “Write a welcome message for new members who just finished our onboarding challenge.”
Think of prompts as your side of the conversation. The clearer and more specific you are, the better your AI assistant can respond. A good prompt gives context (who it’s for), direction (what you need), and tone (how it should sound).
👉🏼 Writing a great prompt is how you collaborate with an AI tool to get useful, human results.
How can AI help you?
With the right prompts, you can unlock hours of time, scale your impact, and see your community from fresh angles:
⏰ Save time: Writing welcome messages, event descriptions, or discussion prompts can eat up hours each week. With well-crafted AI prompts, you can generate solid first drafts in seconds, freeing up time for high-value work like connecting with members and shaping your community strategy.
💬 Scale personalization: Personalization doesn’t have to mean doing everything manually. AI prompts can help you tailor messages to different member segments—like new joiners, power users, or lurkers—without losing your authentic voice. A few smart prompt tweaks can turn one idea into dozens of variations.
🔍 Uncover blind spots: AI can surface ideas or insights you might miss when you’re deep in day-to-day operations. Whether it’s spotting trends in member feedback, suggesting content themes, or predicting potential churn, AI help you see your community from new angles and make smarter short- and long-term decisions.
How to write community AI prompts that work
The good news is there’s a proven formula behind every great community prompt: role, task, and context. Think of it as giving your AI a job description, an assignment, and a peek behind the curtain before it gets to work.
- The role tells the AI who it’s acting as, shaping its tone and perspective.
- The task describes exactly what you want it to do.
- The context gives background details about your community, audience, goals, and challenges to help the AI tailor its response to your world.
The next step is learning how to layer in techniques that turn good prompts into great ones by helping them ‘think’ like a community builder.
💡 Many tools now let you create knowledge-bases: a collection of information or context that the LLM will pull from automatically when you prompt within a specific space. For ChatGPT and Claude, that’s Projects, but it could be different in different tools.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re running a community for podcasters and you want to write a new welcome post for your onboarding workflow:
Start with the role: “You’re a community strategist helping me improve engagement in a 500-member Circle community for independent podcasters.”
Next, add in the task: “Write a welcome post that encourages new members to introduce themselves within 48 hours of joining.”
Finally, give it some context: “Our tone is supportive but realistic. Members often struggle with audience growth and confidence when posting.”
Combining all three together creates a prompt that helps the AI create content that feels personalized, on-brand, and built for your community.
Look out for these prompt mistakes
Writing prompts is part art, part science, and sometimes, part trial and error. Save yourself a few headaches by watching for these easy-to-miss mistakes:
- Make your prompts as unique as your community: AI can’t capture your community’s personality on its own. When you layer in information about your ideal member, a great prospect, or real data, you get better output than generic descriptions.
- Automate doesn’t mean replace humans: AI should make your work easier, not invisible. Let it draft and brainstorm, but keep humans in the loop for warmth, judgement, and the personal touch your members expect.
- Avoid one-size-fits-all prompts: What works for 50 members won’t work for 5,000. Adjust your prompts based on your community’s size, stage, and goals to keep responses relevant and realistic.
18 AI prompts and examples that work
You’ve got the framework. You know the pitfalls. Now it’s time to see what great prompting can really do. These 18 tested-and-true AI prompts tackle the most common (and time-consuming) parts of community building.
✋🏼 Since each community is different, we’ve just included the role and task in these prompt examples. When you’re using these, remember to include your community’s context to personalize the results — usually found within the [ square brackets ].
Prompts to build a strong community foundation
Successful communities don’t thrive by accident—but there’s a lot of trial and error in new communities that you can avoid with the right research and framing. Whether you’re building a new community or looking to revamp an existing one, here are 3 prompts to help define your community strategy:
- Clarify your purpose and value prop: “You’re working with a community leader who needs to clearly explain their community’s core purpose and functional and emotional value to potential members. The community serves [specific audience] and provides [meaningful outcome], but the messaging needs to be clearer and more compelling. Write a purpose statement that explains (1) why people should join, (2) what transformation they’ll experience, and (3) how this community is unique.”
- Define your ideal member profile (IMP): “You’re a community strategist developing an Ideal Member Profile (IMP) for a community. Just as businesses use customer profiles to target customers, communities need to understand their ideal members to grow intentionally. Create a detailed IMP that includes motivations, values, communication preferences, and the contributions members are most likely to make based on [existing member/ type of community you’re building/ your community goals .”
- Scan the competition: “You’re a competitive intelligence analyst specializing in community-driven businesses. Research competitors for a community that helps [target audience] solve [problem] in [geographic region]. Identify five competitor communities and summarize their strengths, weaknesses, and how mine could stand out.”
Prompts to create an amazing onboarding experience
First impressions matter. These prompts help you design welcoming, human-first onboarding experiences.
- Rewrite your welcome email: “You’re an onboarding expert optimizing a welcome email series for a paid community that’s meant to get them excited and to the “a-ha” moment as quickly as possible. Rewrite it to sound more personal, highlight early wins, and encourage members to make their first post.”
- Create quick wins for new members: “You’re a community building expert helping a new community find early momentum. List three achievable actions new members can complete within 48 hours to feel connected and confident.”
- Check in with inactive contributors: “You’re a community lead reaching out to a contributor who’s gone quiet. Write a supportive check-in message that makes them feel valued and motivated to return without guilting them into it. Here’s [some information] about the member.”
💡 Hint: Turn onboarding into an automated agent that actively prevents churn.
Prompts to help drive engagement
Keep the conversation flowing with prompts that help you brainstorm discussions, challenges, and connection moments.
- Role-play as a disengaged member: “[Explanation of what your community is about, and where it’s been facing challenges, including engagement or member data if available.] Act as a member who joined three months ago but hasn’t posted. Explain what’s holding you back and what kind of content or events would motivate you to participate.”
- Design a monthly programming calendar: “You’re a community engagement specialist creating a programming calendar for [your community, focused on topic and transformation] for the next month. Mix events, challenges, and discussions that balance learning, connection, and fun while maintaining consistent momentum, and explain why you did each. Here’s an [example schedule and engagement numbers] we’ve been seeing.”
- Run an engagement audit: “You're conducting a comprehensive engagement audit for digital spaces, posts, or discussion threads to assess their "magnetic factor" - the ability to attract, retain, and actively engage audiences. Conduct an engagement audit based on [the attached data] assessing hook strength, clarity, timing, and participation patterns. Recommend three ways to improve their ‘magnetic factor.’”
Prompts for content and event ideas
Running a little low on inspiration (or coffee)? Use these prompts to plan engaging content, events, and challenges that align with your community’s goals.
- Write compelling event descriptions: “You’re an event copywriter crafting descriptions that convert. Write a search-optimized event blurb for [event type/name/purpose] that clearly outlines value, highlights speakers, and creates a sense of anticipation.”
- Turn wins into stories: “You're working within an online community where member success stories and transformational journeys are crucial for building engagement, inspiring others, and demonstrating the value of community participation. You’re using the Pixar storytelling framework to write a member success story. . Structure it using: Once upon a time → Every day → Until one day → Because of that → Since then.” [Attach transcript/story, etc.]
- Craft engaging posts: “You're a skilled community manager responsible for maintaining an active, engaging [online community for…]. You need to create a variety of post templates that will spark meaningful interaction, celebrate achievements, and gather insights from community members. Create a comprehensive set of community post templates including discussion starters, poll questions, achievement/win shares, and other engagement formats. Each template should be ready to use with minimal editing required.”
🔁 Check out expert community strategist, Candice Grobler’s, content repurposing playbook for turning 1 event into 10x as many community and social assets.
Prompts to help with moderation and support
Keep your spaces positive and on-track with prompts that help you handle community management moments gracefully.
- Remind members of community guidelines: “You’re a moderator writing a friendly reminder about community guidelines. Keep the tone supportive and focused on shared values [attached here], not enforcement.”
- Respond to unanswered questions: “You’re a community manager noticing an unanswered thread. Write a reply that encourages others to jump in while keeping the conversation active.”
- Re-engage inactive contributors: “You’re sending a check-in to members who haven’t participated recently. Write a message that invites them back by highlighting what’s new since their last visit.” (Hint: Turn this one into a triggered email!)
✋You can use AI Workflows to help you moderate your community posts 24/7.
Prompts to help you and your community grow
For community builders ready to grow strategically, these prompts help you measure, analyze, and optimize what’s working.
- Analyze your community data: “Analyze this community data to identify engagement patterns, member segments, and growth opportunities. Provide overall health metrics, ideal persona profiles, anti-persona profiles, and surprising insights hidden in the data. Compare to industry benchmarks and give specific, actionable recommendations based on the patterns you find.”
- Conduct a member lifecycle analysis: “You're a community analytics expert tasked with analyzing the progression of members through different engagement stages within an online community. Create a comprehensive member lifecycle analysis that maps how members progress from Lurker → Engager → Contributor stages. Identify key transition points, barriers to progression, and potential opportunities to improve member advancement through these stages.”
- Run churn interviews: “You're a senior customer success analyst working for a membership-based organization that is experiencing member churn. You’re analyzing [feedback from members] who’ve left. Identify recurring themes, emotional triggers, and actionable insights to improve retention.”
💡Pro tip: To get your member and engagement data from Circle, follow the steps in the Help Centre article.
Striking the right balance of AI and human intuition
AI can help you work smarter, but your community still needs you.
🤖 Where AI shines:
Speed, scale, and pattern recognition. AI can analyze member behaviour, summarize discussions, and draft content in seconds—freeing you up to focus on strategy and connection.
🧍🏾 Where humans are irreplaceable:
Empathy, tone, and cultural nuance. No algorithm can replace the feeling of being seen, heard, and understood by another person. You bring the warmth that keeps members coming back.
🪄 The magic happens when technology handles the busywork, and you stay focused on the human moments that build trust and belonging.
Circle’s approach to AI keeps this balance built in. Features like AI Agents, Workflows, Copilot and the AI Inbox make it easy to automate the repetitive stuff—while giving you full control and transparency at every step. You decide when to step in, and your members always know when AI is helping.
Your step-by-step guide to writing prompts with confidence
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, remember this old joke: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
The same goes for learning how to prompt AI. You don’t need to master every feature or memorize dozens of formulas. Start small. Try one new prompt, see how it feels, and build from there. Each success builds confidence, context, and momentum.
Before long, you’ll look back and realize you’ve built your own rhythm with AI that feels natural, not overwhelming.
Ready to put it into practice? Try this quick 7-day challenge to build your prompting muscle without the pressure.
Try a 7-day prompt challenge.
Each day, test one new prompt:
- Day 1 – Write a new welcome email.
- Day 2 – Generate a weekly discussion starter.
- Day 3 – Map your member journey.
- Day 4 – Audit engagement on your top post.
- Day 5 – Create a quick re-engagement message.
- Day 6 – Draft an event description.
- Day 7 – Reflect on what worked (and what didn’t).
Once you find prompts that work, turn them into automations inside Circle AI:
- Use AI Agents for activities that require a knowledge base or live across your community, like coaching your students on your course material, or onboarding them into your community.
- Build AI Workflows to automate busywork like enforcing community guidelines, renaming post titles to make them easier to find, or answering quick welcome posts.
By starting small and iterating, you’ll build an AI-assisted rhythm that saves time without losing the personal touch that makes your community thrive.
How community experts actually use AI prompts
The best way to understand AI's impact isn't through hypothetical case studies—it's by seeing how experienced community builders use these prompts in their daily work. Here's how three community strategists leverage AI to solve their biggest challenges.
Sara's member journey diagnostic
Prompt: "Act as a membership specialist helping me map member touchpoints across five stages: Join, Engage, Contribute, Transform, and Refer. For each stage, identify what members need, what blocks their progress, and what support or nudges can help them advance. Create a framework that validates what's working and generates new ideas to improve retention, engagement, and referrals at each stage of the member journey."
Sara from Wunderled uses this when: New members join but don't stick around, or when retention numbers start slipping without obvious causes.
Her workflow:
- Start with the member journey framework prompt
- Feed in current engagement data and member feedback
- Focus specifically on the "what blocks them" question for each stage
- Use the output to identify which stage needs immediate attention
Why it works: The framework forces leaders to think about member progression systematically instead of just reacting to symptoms. When I see a drop in activity, you can pinpoint whether it's a Join problem, an Engage problem, or something else entirely.
Her secret sauce: Sara adds one extra question to each stage: "What would make this stage completely frictionless?" This pushes the AI to think beyond incremental improvements to transformational changes.
💡 Try this: If you're seeing retention issues but can't identify the root cause, run Sara's Member Journey Framework with your last 90 days of data. Focus on the "blocks" analysis—that's where the gold is hidden.
Candice's content multiplication system
Viral Reel Creation Prompt: "Analyze this [content piece] and identify the emotional hook that resonates with [audience]. Recommend 5-10 public domain movie clips that match this emotional tone, explaining why each clip would connect with how the audience feels about this topic. Include the movie title, year, specific scene, and emotional connection for each recommendation."
Candice Grobler uses this when: She needs to maintain consistent posting across multiple platforms without burning out, or when one piece of content needs to work harder.
"I don't use AI prompts in isolation," Candice says. "I chain them together to multiply the value of everything I create."
Her workflow:
- Start with a successful community post, event recording, or member win
- Use the viral reel creation prompt to identify the emotional hook
- Run the Pixar framework prompt (#11) to craft the narrative version
- Use craft community post templates (#12) to create platform-specific variations
- One source piece becomes 6-8 assets across different channels
Why it works: Most community builders create content once and move on. Candice uses AI to extract every possible angle from one good idea. A single member success story becomes a reel, a long-form post, a newsletter feature, and discussion starters.
Her secret sauce: Candice always starts with something that already worked. She never asks AI to create from scratch. She gives it proven content and asks it to find new angles or formats. The AI then amplifies what's already resonating.
💡 Try this: Take your best-performing post from last month. Run it through Candice's workflow and see how many platform-specific variations you can create in under 30 minutes.
Tom's data-to-action pipeline
Community Health Score Buddy Prompt: "Analyze these engagement metrics where [metric A] is dropping while [metric B] is improving. Identify potential causes for these divergent trends considering user lifecycle stages, seasonal patterns, recent changes, and how different metrics interact. Recommend 3 specific, actionable tests I can implement within one week to improve overall engagement."
Community Retention Matrix Prompt: "Rank these programming ideas by three criteria: effort required, potential member delight, and alignment with community goals. Score each idea on these dimensions, then prioritize which initiatives should be tackled first based on high impact and low effort. Identify quick wins and initiatives to deprioritize."
Tom Ross uses this when: He has community data but no clear next steps, or when he needs to justify resource allocation decisions to stakeholders.
"Data without interpretation is just noise," Tom explains. "I use a specific sequence of prompts to turn raw numbers into strategic decisions."
His workflow:
- Export community data (engagement, retention, member activity)
- Run community data analysis prompt (#16) to identify patterns
- Use member lifecycle analysis (#17) to see where people get stuck
- Apply the community health score prompt (at the top of this section) when metrics seem contradictory
- End with Community Retention Matrix (at the top) to prioritize actions
Why it works: Each prompt builds on the previous one. Tom starts broad with data analysis, narrows down to lifecycle issues, gets specific with health scores, then prioritizes what to actually do about it. By the end, he has a roadmap that's backed by data, not hunches.
His secret sauce: Tom always includes time-based segmentation in his data. "I don't just look at overall numbers—I compare members who joined 0-30 days ago vs. 30-90 days vs. 90+ days. That's where you see the real patterns of what's working and what's not."
💡 Try this: If you've been collecting data but struggling to turn it into action, run Tom's full pipeline once. The first time takes 2-3 hours, but you'll have a clear strategic roadmap by the end.
The pattern across all three experts
Notice what Sara, Candice, and Tom have in common:
✅ They don't use prompts in isolation: Each has a workflow that chains multiple prompts together
✅ They feed AI their own data: Generic prompts get generic results; they customize with real community context
✅ They iterate based on results: The first output isn't final; they refine and adjust based on what works
✅ They maintain human judgment: AI handles the heavy lifting, but they make the final strategic calls
The most successful community builders treat AI prompts like power tools in a workshop. The tool doesn't build the furniture—but in skilled hands, it makes the work faster, more precise, and more creative.
Ready to start prompting
AI makes great community managers even better. When used with intention, AI can help you spend less time chasing tasks and more time connecting with the people who make your community what it is.
Don’t be afraid to experiment! Copy these prompts, tweak them, and make them your own. The more you adapt them to your community’s voice, the more powerful they become.
FAQs about community AI prompts and AI tools
What are the best AI prompts for engagement?
The best prompts are the ones that sound like you and serve your members. Start with prompts that encourage participation, reflection, and connection:
“Act as a member who joined three months ago but hasn’t posted. What would make you want to engage?”
“Write a discussion starter that connects this week’s theme to members’ real experiences.”
“Suggest three community challenges that spark conversation across time zones.”
Good engagement prompts are specific, contextual, and aligned with your community’s culture.
Can (or should) ChatGPT manage a community?
No. Tools like ChatGPT or Circle’s AI Agents can draft messages, summarize discussions, and surface insights, but they don’t replace human judgment. Think of them as an extension of your team that can handle repetitive or data-heavy tasks so you can focus on relationships, tone, and member experience. AI works best with you, not instead of you.
How do I balance AI with authenticity?
Intentionality is everything. Use AI to speed up the “what” and “how,” but keep the “why” and “who” human. Personalize prompts with your community’s values, language, and humour. Review AI-generated content before posting, and don’t be afraid to add warmth or imperfection. It reminds people there’s a real person behind the keyboard.
Will AI replace community managers?
No. AI can automate workflows, but it can’t replicate empathy, trust, or lived experience. The most successful builders use AI to free up time for what humans do best: listening, mentoring, and creating spaces where people feel they belong. As we like to say, AI makes your work more human, not less.
