Updated: Jul 16, 2026
Getting started with beehiiv Community
Community Beta Disclaimer: The community feature is launching in a beta state, available to all paid beehiiv plans. During this time, we will be prioritizing user feedback and making frequent updates that may cause some images or details in this article to differ slightly from what you see in the app.
Community gives your audience a shared space to connect with you and with each other, right alongside your newsletter, podcast, and digital products. It lives at yourpublication.com/community, so the conversation happens on your own website instead of a separate platform.
By building your community on beehiiv, you can bring your content strategy under one roof, simplifying your workflow and creating a robust content experience for your audience.
What you can do with Community
- Feed: Home to all posts. You and your members can share updates and start threads, and you can pin important posts to the top of a channel.
- Channels: Organize conversation into focused areas, like General, Announcements, or a channel per topic. Every community starts with a General channel.
- Newsletter and podcast sync: Brings your existing newsletter posts and podcast episodes into your community, so it's active from day one.
- Comments and reactions: Keep conversations going. Members can reply in threads and react to posts.
- Members and roles: Give you control over who can do what.
- Direct and group messages: Let members message each other one to one or in groups. You can turn messaging on or off for your whole community.
- Onboarding messages: Welcome new members automatically. Customize the message sent by email or direct message, based on each member's settings.
- Events: Surface your event calendar and increase RSVPs by embedding your Luma calendar.
- Notifications: Keep members up to date through an in-app notification center and email.
- Paid access: Lets you gate parts of your community behind a paid tier to unlock additional revenue.
- Copilot and MCP native integration: Use Copilot (beehiiv’s integrated AI tool) or the MCP to find out info about your community and growth strategy.
Before you start
A few things to know:
- You can have one community per publication.
- Your community lives on your publication's website at /community (for example yourpublication.com/community).
- You manage everything from the Community section in your beehiiv dashboard.
- To offer paid access, you need Stripe connected to your publication and at least one paid subscription tier.
How to access your community
- From the left panel, open Community. Then, select Create your community.
- Follow the onboarding steps. beehiiv creates your community, adds a default General channel, and gives you the option to sync your existing newsletter and podcast content so your community isn't empty on day one.
- Set your community's look in Design (see Customizing your community's design).
- Invite your subscribers so you don't launch to an empty room (see How to invite your subscribers to your community).
Tech Note: The General channel is your community's home base and cannot be deleted. You can add as many other channels as you need.
Where to find things in your community dashboard
Everything for your community is organized into three sections:
| Group | Where to go | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Build | Overview | A snapshot of your community |
| Build | Design | Your community's colors and branding |
| Manage | channels | Create and organize channels |
| Manage | Sync Settings | Bring newsletter and podcast content into your community |
| Manage | Discussions | Review posts, comments, and reported content |
| Manage | Members | See and manage members and their roles |
| Manage | Events | Connect and show your event calendar |
| Configure | Settings | General settings, including messaging and paid access |
| Configure | Sync Settings | Configure how you want newsletters and podcasts to sync within community |
Explore community resources
Once your community is live, these guides cover each area in depth:
- Customizing your community's design
- How to invite your subscribers to your community
- Creating and managing channels
- Creating, pinning, and managing posts
- Syncing your newsletter and podcast content into your community
- Community member roles and permissions
- Managing your community members
- Moderating your community for owners & admins
- Setting up paid access for your community
- Setting up the Events tab in your community
- Understanding your community analytics
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