How to move a Facebook group to a paid community

Facebook will not give you your members' email addresses, and that single fact decides everything else about this move. What a group hands an admin is a way to post to people. It is not a way to contact people. The difference sounds academic right up until the day you want to be somewhere else, and then it is the whole problem.

Which means moving a group is not a data migration. There is no file to download, nothing to map into columns, no import to get right. It is a sequencing problem: you have a window in which you can still reach these people, and you either spend it in the right order or you spend it announcing a place that is not ready. We make Drry, a community platform, so we plainly have a stake in you moving somewhere. The order below is the same wherever you land.

A group is a megaphone, not a mailing list

Run the ownership test on a Facebook group and the answer is uncomfortable. You built the audience, you wrote the rules, you did the moderation, and the contact details sit with Facebook. Your members gave their email address to Meta, not to you. They joined a group inside a product, and the relationship the product records is between them and it.

For the members you already have, that is not a setting an admin forgot to switch on and it is not something support can be talked into. It is the arrangement. What an admin can change is the arrangement for the NEXT person: a group lets you ask a question of anyone requesting to join, and a question can ask for an email address. So the group is a megaphone pointed at people you cannot phone, and a door you can put a clipboard beside. The clipboard only ever collects the people who walk through it after you set it up, which is the whole argument for setting it up today rather than on the day you decide to move.

What you do have is attention, and it is spending down

The list is not the asset. The asset is that several thousand people currently pay some attention to a room you control, and you can put something in front of them without asking anyone's permission. That is worth a great deal, and unlike an email list it does not sit still.

• Posting while it is still yours. The ordinary thing you have done for years, except now some of the posts point somewhere.
• The top of the group. A pinned announcement is the one piece of permanent real estate an admin has, and it works on people who show up long after you stop posting.
• An event, or anything with a date on it. A reason to be somewhere at a particular time moves people far better than an invitation to go and look at something.
• A question on the way in. Anyone asking to join can be asked for an email address before they are let in. It does nothing for the members you already have, which is why it is not the answer to this page's title, and it is the only item on this list that adds to something you keep. Turn it on first, on the day you start thinking about moving, because every week it is off is a week of joiners you will have to reach some other way.
• Direct messages, sometimes. Depending on people's own settings and whatever limits Facebook applies, you may be able to write to some members individually. Treat it as a way to reach your twenty most engaged people, never as a way to contact a thousand.
• Whatever you already own elsewhere. A newsletter, past buyers, a booking list, the people who have emailed you. This is usually smaller than the group and worth ten times as much per person.

The reason to treat this as a depreciating asset is that every one of those depends on you still being the admin of an active group. Groups go quiet when the person running them has half left. Accounts get locked, sometimes wrongly. Co-admins fall out. None of that is likely in any given month, and all of it is why the window should be spent rather than saved. If you are going to move, move while you are still the loudest voice in the room.

The order to do it in

Almost every failed migration failed at the same step, and it is the first one. Somebody announces the new place, a hundred curious people arrive that afternoon, and they find one welcome post and no conversation. They leave, and you do not get to announce it twice.

Before any of it, switch on the join question described above, because it is the only thing here that works while you do everything else. It takes a few minutes, it collects addresses for as long as the group stays open, and every week it is off is a week of joiners you will have to reach by posting instead. It is not in the numbered list because it is not a step you finish.

• 1. Build it, and make arriving worth it. Before a single person is told about it: the place exists, it looks like you, and there is enough inside that a new arrival has something to read, watch or do in their first five minutes. Not a finished product. Just not an empty room with your logo on it.
• 2. Move twenty people first. Pick the most engaged handful, the ones who answer other people's questions, and ask them individually. Say plainly that you are opening it to them early and you want them there when everyone else arrives. This is the single highest-leverage step in the whole move, and it is the one people skip.
• 3. Announce with a reason about them. Not that Facebook is terrible, not that you are tired, not that the algorithm is unfair. All of that may be true and none of it is a reason for anybody else to move. Name what is better for them on the other side, specifically.
• 4. Run both for a while. A few weeks at least. Keep answering in the group, and keep the best of it happening in the new place, so the pull is visible rather than announced. People move on their own schedule and most of them are not reading everything you post.
• 5. Close the door, leave the sign. Turn off new posts or archive the group, with a pinned post saying where to go. Do not delete it. Somebody will find that group in eight months, and the pinned post is the only thing that will still be working for you.

The mistakes that lose people

These are in rough order of how much damage they do, and the first one is worth more than the other four combined.

• Announcing before there is anywhere to arrive. The move happens once, in the minds of the people who click on the day you post. An empty room is why these migrations fail, and no second announcement performs like the first.
• Asking people to sign up twice. A form, then a confirmation email, then a separate account, then a profile. Every step loses a share of the people on it, and you are asking somebody to spend effort on a place they have not seen yet. One link, one screen, in as far as you can get them.
• Moving somewhere that needs an app download. An install is a much bigger ask than a click, and it is the ask most likely to be postponed and then forgotten. If the new place works in a browser, say so in the announcement.
• Deleting the group. It feels like commitment. What it actually does is destroy your own signpost and every searchable answer you ever wrote, in exchange for nothing at all.
• Turning a free audience into paying customers on the same day you move them. Two hard asks arriving together, where each one would have been reasonable on its own. This one has its own section below.

And the honest part: some fraction of your group will not follow you, whatever you do, and the fraction is usually larger than people expect. That is not a sign the move was wrong or that you ran it badly. Most members of most large groups are not engaged, they are merely still joined, and the gap between those two things was there before you touched anything. What the move does is show you the real number, which is uncomfortable on the day and useful for years.

Should the new place be paid?

A free Facebook group becoming a paid community is two changes at once, and people routinely underestimate the second one. Moving asks somebody to change a habit. Charging asks them to re-describe their relationship with you, from someone they follow to someone they buy from. Both are fine. Both landing in the same paragraph is what makes a move read as a bill.

• Free now, paid later. Move everyone you can, get the room busy, then add paid tiers for the deeper thing. The most members move, the conversation survives, and you learn what people actually want before pricing it. The cost is that you have to raise the money question a second time, to an audience now used to free, and some people will treat it as a broken promise even if you promised nothing.
• Paid from the start. Far fewer people arrive, and the ones who do are self-selected for actually wanting it. Revenue from day one, a room that is easy to run, and honest signal about the value of what you have. The cost is real and should be said out loud: you are choosing to leave most of the group behind at the moment you have the most reach you will ever have.
• A founding rate. Paid, but the first wave gets a lower price that stays theirs for as long as they keep the membership. It rewards the people who moved on trust, which is the behaviour you want, and it gives the announcement a deadline that is about them rather than about you. The cost is a permanently cheaper cohort, so pick a number you can still live with in two years.

There is no right answer here, only a trade you should make deliberately. Whichever you pick, say the price in the announcement rather than after the click. People forgive a price. They do not forgive finding out about it on the second screen. If you want the longer version of the pricing question, we have a whole guide on how much to charge for a membership.

Where we fit, disclosed

This is the part where we describe our own product, so discount it accordingly. Three things in Drry happen to line up with the order above, and they are the only three worth mentioning here:

• A free plan to land on. No card, up to 100 members. Step one of the plan above is having somewhere that already exists and already has something in it, which is difficult to do if the first step is a subscription.
• Member emails from the Free plan. The thing a group gave you was a way to reach people. When you publish something, your members get told, which is how a new room gets a heartbeat instead of waiting to be checked.
• Export on every plan. The list you rebuild is yours to take away, which is the whole reason this move is worth the trouble. Our position on that, and how to test a platform's exit before you trust it, is in if you cannot leave, you do not own your list.

None of that touches the Facebook side, and no platform's marketing should suggest otherwise. The export does not exist, and the work of moving people is done by you, in the group, in the right order. What a destination can do is be ready when they arrive and not be the next place you have to leave. On that second point, own your audience makes the broader argument, and which platforms let you use your own domain covers the one asset that survives your next move as well as this one.