Richard Millington

Richard Millington is the founder of FeverBee. 

FeverBee uses proven social science to develop successful online and offline communities for organizations around the world. Over the past 13 years, Richard has helped to develop over 310 successful communities, including those for Apple, Facebook, Google, The World Bank, SAP, Oracle, Amazon, Autodesk, Lego, The United Nations, Novartis, and many more. 

FeverBee helps organizations use powerful psychology to build valuable communities. These communities are designed to foster greater loyalty, resolve customer problems, generate ideas, drive search traffic, and develop the best possible member experience. 

Richard is the author of both Buzzing Communities, The Indispensable Community, and Build Your Community (Pearson, 2021). Buzzing Communities has been widely cited as introducing best practices into developing successful online communities. Richard has delivered keynote talks in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Switzerland, Romania, Lithuania, and several others. 

Richard has also trained over 1,250 community professionals through FeverBee’s community management academy.

Founder & Managing Director

Richard Millington is the founder of FeverBee, author of Buzzing Communities, and a regular speaker on building successful communities at events around the world. 

FeverBee uses proven social science to develop successful online and offline communities of customers, fans, and members. 

Richard is the sole author of the world's most popular online communities blog and the highly rated book, Buzzing Communities, widely cited as introducing best practice into developing successful online communities.

Richard's unique focus in on cracking the 'social code' behind successful social groups. FeverBee's approaches combines cutting edge social psychology with advanced data insights and a library of repeatable case studies. 

Over the past 13 years, Richard has helped to develop over 150+ successful communities, including those for Google, The World Bank, Oracle, Amazon, Autodesk, Lego, The United Nations, Novartis, and many more.

Richard has delivered keynote talks in the USA, Canada, UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Australia, Turkey, Switzerland, Romania, Lithuania, and several others. 

To all the organisations laying off/not replacing their community team...
...it's not smart. 

No matter how mature your community, these things really don't drive themselves. 

Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a platform and then laying off the team to manage it is...frankly, nuts.

Founder of FeverBee Community Consultancy | Author: Build Your Community (Pearson, 2021) | Join 20k+ subscribers to my newsletter.

If engagement in your community is declining, you're not alone.

When we studied this a few months ago, we observed that most communities experienced a 20% to 40% drop in engagement, with the largest impact in larger, more mature communities.

The key point here is: don't pretend this is reversible. 

A decline in engagement is no longer inherently good or bad, as a decline in customer support tickets might be. 

People are still getting value from the community - they just don't need to visit the community anymore to do it. 

Today, answers are extracted (or, technically, LLMs being trained on answers) from your community and combined with other data to provide an answer within the search experience. 

This shifts priorities, though. A greater focus needs to be placed on:

1. Having superusers help validate previous answers as much as provide new ones. 
2. Investing in experiential community activities (groups/events) to motivate and support 1 ^ 
3. Making 'Community Everywhere' part of your process to deliver maximum value from your community (community programs > community platforms).

Before you add AI to your community, stop the rot.

It's easy to get excited about AI features (Assistants. Bots. Search. Automation etc...)

But the first step to all of this is to stop the rot. 

Community rots when:
 
 → Old answers increase and stay visible
 → Conflicting advice accumulates
→ No one decides what’s official
→ Nothing ever gets retired

When you layer AI on top of decaying content, you're going to do more harm than good. 

Before you start adding AI tools this year, you need to do a few things:

→ Decide what counts as verified.
→ Mark what’s outdated.
→ Consolidate what’s fragmented.
etc...

I'd suggest making community hygiene a critical step for this year.

People focus on the sexy things to improve community retention rather than on the core principles that really work.

We've consistently improved community retention by applying pretty much the same techniques each time. 

So, a couple of simple principles.

1. Remove the vast majority of onboarding activities. 
Most onboarding activities add steps between the member and their time to value - you want to do the opposite. Remove as many things as you dare - and then remove a few more (aside - no member should need to be asked to complete their profile before engaging.)

2. In smaller communities genuinely personalised messages from someone have a big impact (but most organisations get lazy and send out generic messages pretending they're personalised).

3. The vast majority of members can't be more engaged than they are - so much retention efforts are wasted. Focus on the points (immediately after first contribution) where someone can be better engaged.

4. Suggested questions helps.

5. Cohort groups for people new to the product within the community are a lot better than cohort groups for people who just joined the community. 

6. Making people feel they can make a unique, useful, contribution is a big win.

7. The hero banner is surprisingly important - especially when combined with a simple check-list process.

8. STOP TEACHING NEWCOMERS HOW TO USE THE COMMUNITY!! Instead, teach newcomers the best value they can get right now FROM the community. You need to INCREASE motivation at this stage. Give them the top resources to consume, questions to follow, people to follow etc...A list of community-curated resources works wonders here.

9. In the beginning, use the display latest posts. If the community is mature, display top posts. 

10. Cut out almost all the automated message series - they have pretty much no impact.

Generally good, clean, simple community hygiene. 

→ Every post is correctly tagged.
→ Clear use of authority signals (accepted solutions - on every(?)).
→ Freshness is clear (old vs. archived).
→ Subject titles are clear and efficient.

Before you layer AI onto a community, clean the community.

The contours of how we're using AI in communities are finally becoming clear..
...and it all begins with the low-hanging fruit.

If you're thinking about your strategy in the year ahead, I'd think about how you're going to get the maximum value from these features.

1. Moderation and Safety. Using AI filters to stop spam, flag toxicity, auto-tag content, reduce moderator load, and mitigate risk.

2. Search and Discovery. Using AI for Semantic + generative search to surface best answers across the community, docs, and KB. Related topics are a discovery asset. Increasingly, this is achieved by generating an answer to the question based on the information above. 

3. Content Summarization and Translation. Using AI to create summaries of discussions/content, TL;DRs, FAQs, digests, and auto-translating posts into multiple languages.

4. Workflow Automation. Using AI to automate campaigns, session creation, content tagging, and playbooks. This saves admin time and helps scale program management. 

5. Member Contribution Support. This is where AI helps members draft questions/answers or brainstorm ideas.

6. AI Agents. These are semi-autonomous assistants that operate across systems capable of taking multi-step actions (onboarding, routing complex issues, providing answers, compiling feedback, etc).

7. Signals and Cross-Domain Data Integration. Using AI to combine community + CRM + CS + LMS + support data to detect churn risk, product friction, or growth opportunities. Connects community engagement directly to retention/expansion outcomes.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of all possible AI use cases in enterprise communities; instead, it focuses on the most common ones currently deployed or planned.

You should be doing most of these already...but just in case you're not:
Six steps to take to prepare your community for AI

Step One: Stop the Rot
AI cannot distinguish truth from popularity, so you must prevent it from learning from outdated, incorrect, or ambiguous content.

→ Define which content types count as verified or official
→ Introduce clear authority labels (Verified Answer, Official Response)
→ Enforce resolution states on priority Q&A content
→ Empower staff and moderators to verify answers
 
Step Two: Fix the Structure
AI performs best when information is predictable and consistently organised.

→ Standardise categories and tags in high-impact areas
→ Remove duplicate or vague tags
→ Separate Q&A, discussion, and resource content by intent
→ Enforce tagging and resolution on new content
 
Step Three: Reduce Ambiguity
Conflicting answers and inconsistent terminology cause AI to hallucinate or hedge.

→ Create a controlled vocabulary for products and features
→ Consolidate repeated or conflicting answers into canonical threads
→ Annotate or deprecate outdated guidance
→ Align community terminology with docs, support, and CS teams
 
Step Four: Improve Community Hygiene
You don’t need to clean everything – only what AI and users actually rely on. 

→ Identify the top 10–20% of discussions by traffic, search, and reuse
→ Verify, correct, or annotate inaccurate answers in those threads
→ Remove or clearly flag incorrect or misleading content
→ Assign clear ownership for high-value topic areas
 
Step Five: Introduce Freshness Signals
AI needs explicit cues to understand what is current versus historical. 

→ Label content as current, outdated, or deprecated
→ Add version and date markers to authoritative answers
→ Schedule periodic reviews of high-impact topics
→ Archive content that no longer applies

If you get these five steps right, you will outperform most organisations.

And if you want help and guidance, DM me.

You're invited to our upcoming webinar: The Evolution of Enterprise Communities: What to Focus on in 2026 and Beyond

https://lnkd.in/ewGuXvvn

Enterprise communities are entering a new phase.

The next 2–3 years won’t be defined by new platforms, features, or engagement tactics, but by how well communities adapt to structural shifts in technology, expectations, and decision-making.

AI is a major part of that shift. But it’s not the whole story.

In this webinar, FeverBee will walk through how enterprise communities are evolving, what’s changing beneath the surface, and what community, support, and customer leaders need to prioritise in 2026.

Rather than chasing trends, we’ll look at the underlying forces shaping modern communities, including:

→ How AI changes what communities are for — not just how they operate
→ Why content quality, structure, and trust matter more than participation volume
→ The shift from conversation-led communities to knowledge-led systems
→ What “AI readiness” really means in a community context (and what it doesn’t)
→ The emerging roadmap we’re seeing across mature enterprise communities

This session will introduce a clear evolution model for enterprise communities - from today’s engagement-focused approaches to the next generation of communities designed to support AI, scale knowledge, and deliver long-term business value.

Sign up -> https://lnkd.in/ewGuXvvn

This webinar is designed for:

→ Enterprise community, support, and customer success leaders
→ Organisations running established communities with years of legacy content
→ Teams planning for the next phase of their community strategy, not just the next feature

This is not a tactical session about AI tools or prompts.

It’s a strategic view of where communities are heading, and how to prepare yours for what comes next.

Sign up: https://lnkd.in/ewGuXvvn

Upcoming Webinar Alert🚨 
...The Evolution of Enterprise Communities

The next 2–3 years won’t be defined by new platforms, features, or engagement tactics. They’ll be defined by something deeper:

→ How communities adapt to AI changing what communities are for.
→ How well organisations move from conversation-heavy spaces to knowledge-led systems.
→ Whether content quality, structure, and trust are treated as strategic assets (or ignored).

The most effective communities we’re seeing aren't optimising for participation volume anymore; they're optimising for what's coming. 

In an upcoming FeverBee webinar, I’ll walk through:

→ How AI is reshaping the purpose of enterprise communities (not just their operations)
→ Why “AI readiness” is mostly misunderstood in community contexts
→ The structural shifts happening beneath the surface of mature communities
→ The emerging roadmap we’re seeing across enterprise organisations preparing for 2026 and beyond

This isn’t a tactical session about AI tools or prompts.

It’s a strategic view of where communities are heading - and what community, support, and customer leaders need to focus on now to stay relevant.

If you’re running an established community, sitting on years of legacy content, or planning the next phase of your community strategy, this will be relevant.

👉 Register here: 
https://lnkd.in/eWy9wxpf

For too long, the community journey has been: 'Get everyone to visit our community platform and stay there.'

Good for metrics, but increasingly terrible for the member experience. 

The future will see a shift from platform-centric approaches to member-centric approaches.

This means selecting which PROGRAMS you need to run first, and then which platforms best support those programs. 

Sometimes that might certainly be a hosted community platform. 

Increasingly often, it will mean 'Platform PLUS' strategy. Where you have a hosted platform and then use some independent channels to support that program. 

And other times it will be running community (peer-to-peer engagement) programs across entirely independent channels. 

Survival in the future will require a lot more flexibility than we've shown in the past.

The role of the community architect 👇
...organisations need this.

1. Create a common strategy for engaging members across the organisation (Goals, audiences, approaches, measurement etc..)

2. Create an approved governance structure for how communities are launched, managed, and engaged. 

3. Engage stakeholders and build internal awareness and support for engagement activities.

4. Create the approved technology framework for launching and managing communities (reducing duplication and waste.

5. Train staff to be really good at engaging with members and managing communities. 

6. Provide templates, resources, and best practices for building communities within the organization.

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