That was a while ago. The same four people ever say anything. You post a prompt on a Sunday night and it gets two likes and no replies. Most weeks you think about writing something and then don't, and the not-writing sits with you for the rest of the evening.
You have probably decided this is a failure of yours. It usually is not.
Two things before the rest of it. Nothing here will make a group talk if there's no reason for it to, and I'll come back to that, because it's the half that isn't about software at all. And we're a small, new company next to the places most practitioners host a group, which is fair to hold against us.
Quiet groups are nearly always the same shape
Look at where your group sits. It's almost certainly somewhere else.
The course, the recordings and the handouts are in one place. The group is at a second address, with a second login, and joining it was a separate thing you had to ask people to do. Perhaps two thirds of them did. The ones who didn't aren't being rude. They finished a lesson, they had a question, and there was no door in front of them, so they emailed you instead.
That's the mechanism. A conversation needs something to be about, and your people are doing the work in a different building from the one you're asking them to talk in. Nobody logs in to a group for its own sake. They log in because they were already there.
The invitation lands on the day they have nothing to say
There's a second half to this, and I almost never see it mentioned.
Think about when the join link goes out. It goes out at the start, in the welcome email, next to the login details, the schedule and the dates of the calls. That is the one moment in the entire programme when your student has no question at all. They haven't watched anything yet. Nothing has confused them yet. So the link gets a glance, and the email moves down the pile.
Three weeks later they're sitting with an induction script that isn't working the way it did in the room, and that is the day they'd have posted. By then the invitation is forty emails back. To ask, they'd have to go hunting for an address they've never used, make an account, and then put a question they feel slightly stupid about in front of eleven people they last saw on a Sunday afternoon. Most people don't. They email you, if they say anything at all. The moment they wanted the group is the moment it was hardest to reach.
If what you're weighing up is the money side of this instead, I've written that out separately: [the Skool alternative for hypnotherapists](https://coursespaces.io/blog/skool-alternative-for-hypnotherapists.html).
You end up being the only reason it exists
The subscription is the least of it.
Every announcement gets posted twice, once where the work is and once where the talking is meant to be. Every new student gets invited twice, and you chase the second invitation for a fortnight. When somebody goes quiet you can't tell whether they've stopped practising or never joined at all, because the two systems have never heard of each other. You are the join between them, and you're doing it by hand, from memory.
Then there's the part nobody says out loud. A group you're carrying makes you a little reluctant to run the next intake, because the next intake means doing all of this again. The supervision series you've taught in person a dozen times stays unrecorded. Not because the teaching is hard. Because the tidying up after the last one never finished.
Standing next to the thing they're asking about
Your people log in once. The course, the recordings, the group and anything else you've given them are on the same screen. No second invitation, no second password, nothing to find three weeks later. The person asking about the third session is standing next to the third session when they ask.
Nothing has to be timed right either. The room is there on the day they get the course, and still there in week three when they finally need it.
A group still needs a reason to meet
Software won't make people talk. Something has to be happening.
The reliable thing is a repeating date. The third Thursday of the month, an hour, case discussion, come with a question or come and listen. Put it in the calendar that sits with the course and it turns up for the people who have the course, rather than for whoever once joined a separate group.
The posting picks up around the date and thins out in between, and that's normal. A practitioner group that talks in bursts around a monthly call is a healthy group, not a failing one.
While I'm here, and this has nothing to do with any software: if I ran one of these I'd have a rule that nobody asks a question without saying what they've already tried. Groups with that habit are better to be in, and the rule costs nothing. Steal it today.
You can read a post before anybody else does
This matters more in your work than in most. People bring things to a practitioner group that they'd never put on a public forum.
Moderation is a setting. Leave it on and a new post waits for you before it appears. Turn it off and the room runs itself. Most people leave it on early and relax it once everybody knows each other.
One to one chat sits in the same place, so the private word doesn't have to be an awkward exception.
Who should leave their group exactly where it is
If the room is the business. Some people run a large open community where the conversation is the product and any teaching is the extra. Group-first software is built for that and it's better at it than we are. We're a course platform with communities inside it, which is a different shape.
If nothing is being taught this year. No cohort running, nothing planned. Then the quiet isn't about the address, and moving it won't touch the problem.
If the old threads have to come with you. We can import a list of members. Years of posts is a separate question, so ask us before you plan around it.
If the group only works when a phone buzzes. Some run entirely on people's phones and live or die on what gets pushed to them. Ask us what your members are told and where, before you move a room that depends on it.
One room per cohort, which is the whole argument
Here's the part I'd actually move for.
Communities are unlimited, so each cohort can have its own. That sounds like a housekeeping detail and it's the difference between a group that works and one that doesn't. A single group holds every level you've ever taught at once. The person in week two opens it and reads two practitioners arguing about regression work, decides they're miles behind, and says nothing for the rest of the course. The one who qualified three years ago opens it and reads the same beginner question for the fourth time, and stops opening it. Neither of them is being difficult. You've put them in one room and asked them to have one conversation.
Give the March cohort their own room and the conversation sits at one level, between people who did the same weekend and are stuck on the same script. The September intake gets a room of its own on the day it gets the course, with no four months of other people's questions to scroll past.
You're not learning a second system to do any of it. It's the same menu you already use to add a lesson.
One price, and the rooms are already in it
$47 a month. One plan, nothing to work out, no tier to decode.
That covers unlimited courses and products, up to 1,000 active students, hosted video with 1TB of bandwidth a month, the AI course builder, the AI assistant with 1,500 messages a month, unlimited communities and chat. Communities are not an add-on and they are not a higher plan. Extra video bandwidth is $10 a terabyte if you ever need it.
We take nothing out of what you sell. You connect your own Stripe account and the money arrives with you, less Stripe's own 2.9% plus 30 cents, which everybody pays everywhere. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Your students see your name and your colours the whole way through.
How to find out without moving anything
There is a 30-day free trial and it does not ask for a card.
Leave the old group exactly where it is. Take the cohort you're teaching right now, put their course in, open one room beside it, and set a date for a call four weeks out. Then watch where the questions land. If they land in one place instead of your inbox, your outbox and a group nobody opens, you have your answer, and you haven't migrated a thing.