Flare Community
Head of Community and Customer Experience, 2021 to 2022
Safety technology startup, acquired by Smart Holdings in 2023
April 2021 - April 2022
Flare made personal safety technology. I joined as employee number four to build the company's first customer community.
Built the company’s first community and the systems around it.
Funneled member insights into Product, Engineering, and Marketing.
Turned belonging into measurable product participation.
Building community into the product.
Overview60
community NPS
450%
growth in three months
20%
increase in activation
year-over-year
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This community had to hold conversations about assault, abuse, and fear, with people who had very different definitions of safety and very different experiences of it. Most brands avoid these subjects, and most communities aren't safe enough to host them. Trust had to come first, and it also had to do real work for the business without being extractive toward the people in it.
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I worked backwards from the metrics the business was measured on, then ran a 45-day BETA before building anything permanent.
Alignment: User interviews, surveys, and persona work to define what the community was for, then cross-functional projects with Marketing, Operations, Product, Fulfillment, and Customer Experience so it was built into the business rather than running alongside it.
Onboarding: A thoughtful, automated process introducing the community's ethos, guidelines, and features, with a landing page and in-app experience designed so the path in felt like part of the product.
Engagement: Spaces built on rituals people were already forming, with moderation guidelines that sustained participation while keeping members safe.
Measurement: Automated feedback collection, with what we learned fed back into community operations and product development.
The Nomination Program: Five bracelets a month donated to people nominated by the community. The clearest expression of what the space was for.
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A community built into the business, not beside it, so member behavior drove activation, NPS, retention, and ticket deflection instead of sitting on a separate dashboard.
450% membership growth and a community NPS of 60, earned by putting the community where people and product already were rather than asking anyone to engage more.
A direct line from members to product, with feedback and champion-led setup events lifting product NPS 40% and activation 20% year over year.
Support burden that shrank as trust grew, because members started answering each other's questions before anyone filed a ticket.
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You don't have to trade trust and empathy for growth. When they're built into each other, both get stronger. This is where my whole perspective on community started.
