Building your tribe – regular and efficient updates

To create a great and successful company, marking and communicating your progress to yourself, your team and your supporters is critical. Here are a few things that have worked well for me;

– communicate every 2 weeks – this allows you to make meaningful progress, is a good frequency for your supporters to digest and sets you in a rythym towards monthly board meetings– send your updates on Sunday afternoon – gives you an opportunity to finish out the week, have some time to put your thoughts down and will give your supporters a chance to read and comment before their busy week starts– develop a specific format – I like to use the following:

• Important info – this includes items about your industry, competition, key press mentions, upcoming events… likely a max of 10 items, but provides a good context for people less familiar with your area
• Did – what you accomplished over the last 2 weeks. could be broken down to specific areas like product, team, investors… depending on how much you have going on
• Doing – what is planned for the next 2 weeks
• Need help – make this as specific as possible. In the event that your supporters are really busy, they can scan to this section and take action on your behalf. If you need help making a decision and need to provide context or back-up info, do that in an attachment or link to online doc.

Here is an example of one of my status reports to the team;

I have been using www.thinkfuse.com to accomplish this and it works really well for teams as well. If you want to get into the private beta of this awesome product, use the code “FriendOfTA“. You will find that over time, that you can get lots of engagement and action from your supporters using this format and therefore make faster progress.