Skool Went Down This Morning: Lessons for Every Community Owner

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Skool went down for a few hours this morning. Outages happen, sometimes because of the platform itself, sometimes because of the services it relies on. When Amazon's hosting goes down, hundreds of thousands of sites go down with it.

Skool is back online, but this raises a bigger question: if your platform goes down, how do you reach your members? How do they reach you?

Most Skool community owners collect contact info in their three signup questions. Some use two of those fields for phone number and email.

You may have noticed our three questions focused on you and the communities you wanted reviewed, not contact info. That was intentional. We wanted to learn who was joining and how to serve them best.

Collecting contact info was always on our roadmap, especially as we launch paid plans. We'd planned to write this post anyway next week, but Skool helped drive the point home early.

So what should you do?

The safest approach is using two of your three signup questions for email and mobile number.

If you only have one spare field, ask for mobile. Email open rates keep dropping, while text open rates run above 90%.

If you don't collect contact info at signup, build a way to collect it later, once members trust that you won't spam them. And for paid clients, collect as much as you can, including social links.

It can be as simple as this:

"Thanks for being a member of Skoolology. We didn't collect personal info at signup because we wanted to learn what you needed most and earn your trust first. But things happen, like platforms going down, so we'd love a good mobile number and email. We'll only use them for emergencies, like a Skool outage, and we'll never spam you. Just securely message

@Donna Thornton

@Todd Thornton

with your info and we'll add it to our offline database. Takes less than 30 seconds."

One more thing for Skool owners: please download your member info regularly and store it somewhere safe, off your platoforms.

If you rely on an app built on top of Skool as your CRM, remember that when Skool goes down, that app will likely go down with it.

P.S. The 30-Day Celebration parties have been a blast. If you haven't joined one yet, check the calendar. Only two left. These are all about celebrating you, our members. We just hit #205 in our Skool category ranking in a little over a month, and that's not because of us. It's because of how great our members are.

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Skool Went Down This Morning: Lessons for Every Community Owner