About
Stephen Maddison is a community automation specialist and the founder of Automate Community. He saves busy community builders time by optimizing their workflows and automating their processes, giving them that well-needed moment to breathe.
Every community has its distinct rhythm, and Stephen takes the time to listen and understand yours. His approach is always to craft solutions tailored to your needs, ensuring they align seamlessly with your vision. And should you run into any hiccups down the line, he's always ready to assist.
Services offered
Service packages
This is a 1:1 call with you to dive deep into your community to help you uncover the automations that you should prioritize building at this stage of your community growth. By looking at your community offer, structure, and pricing model, we can plan out the automations that will maximize your community member experience and save you the most time on community admin work.
Who I work with
Stephen supports a range of community builders across a wide variety of community types. From memberships to freemium models to cohorts, he can help with any Circle community. His 1:1 work is more suitable for those who are looking for extra guidance on what to set up inside their communities or want to implement a tailored solution quickly. Hiring Stephen for projects is typically recommended for those that are limited on time and want to have their automations set up with little stress.
Team and Experience
These services involve working directly with Stephen. From monetizing communities to coaching membership community launches, to running a community and content team, Stephen has been building and optimizing communities for over 5 years.
Case Studies
Building A Milestone System For Conscious Mommy
Community Problems:
The client was moving from Thinkific to Circle. They wanted to move all of the courses from Thinkific to Circle and give specific access to the same members for another year. These members would have the option to upgrade to the community membership or lose their access at the end of a year.
In addition, they wanted to launch a membership community with two tiers - a base tier and an upgradable tier. They were unsure on what automations they should add to to the community to help with managing members.
Solutions Implemented:
A system to add current members from Thinkific to the new Circle community.
A system to remove any non-upgraded members at the end of 1 year, using Circle scheduled workflows.
An onboarding flow that could handle onboarding three different membership types - Subscription members, 1 year course access members and trial members migrated from Thinkific.
A reward system to assign tags to members based on the level of community engagement they achieved, using the number of comments and posts.
A zap to automatically create and update events with Zoom links, when a Circle event was created.
An offboarding system that would remove members who had access to a standalone course after 1 year of being in the community.
An offboarding system that would remove members who’s monthly subscriptions had ended.
How I Created Automated Introduction Posts For My Community
Community Problems:
I was looking for a way to make it easier for my members to introduce themselves in my community. Getting comfortable with posting is an important step for members to familiarise themselves with a new community platform. After filling in new member forms and profile fields, it can also be quite tiring to then create an introduction post as well.
Solutions Implemented:
I developed a system that allowed members to have a post automatically created for them and posted into the community.
It would contain information about them that they submitted through a new member form and structure a simple post sharing what they hope to gain from the community.
The members simply press a button on a post and an automation in the background using Make would create the post. They would then be automatically redirected to that post.
Members could then edit the post if they wanted to share more information about themselves, while not needing to add information they had previously shared through the form.
Testimonials
Bryana
Working with Stephen was exactly what I was looking for. He took my vision and expanded upon it, and dreamed up an automation schedule that runs smoothly and effortlessly. He even planned for a variety of hiccups and troubles that I couldn't see, and adjusted the automations to ensure things went smoothly. He was extremely communicative, kind, and patient throughout the entire process. He took an enormous load off of my shoulders by making the on-boarding and off-boarding process for my community incredibly easy and streamlined. Highly recommend that you work with Stephen for all of your automation needs.
Tom Ross
I'm incredibly selective with who I recommend to my network and who I vouch for, but honestly, working with Stephen has been one of the most profound things for my business and my community.
Cheryl Hills
Stephen is evidently knowledgeable and passionate about the value of automation as a key part of building scalable communities. I've joined Stephen's community because we're about to launch our community as a core element of how we work with clients. Over time, I want to automate everything that can be automated in order to spend my limited time on personal interactions with members, not wasting time in routine admin that should have been automated. I joined the Automate Community because setting up automation can be complicated and overwhelming. Since I am just starting off with building my community and have limited funding to hire a team, I have to do most of the work myself. Fortunately, I met Stephen through another community I was in. I found him to be an expert in automation, and he has been extremely helpful in providing guidance and advice to members. I was excited to learn that he started his own community, so I immediately joined. I am grateful that he created his learning platform!
Peter Button
I've already received great support from Stephen as I've connected our newsletter platform with a Google sheet database via Make.com. Without Stephen's encouragement, I would simply have defaulted to Zapier and remained unaware of the terrific capabilities of Make.com. I now have greater confidence that I will have the support and encouragement I'll need to automate more and more of the routine aspects of our new community in the months ahead. I have found being a part of this community to be a great relief. Stephen has been extremely helpful in answering any of my questions and providing guidance with any automation requests I have. He also provides a custom guide to next steps for each person who joins the community, which has been a great starting point for me. If you are considering automation, I highly recommend joining this community!