It’s Thursday. The digest is supposed to go out today, and you are sitting in an empty email trying to remember what actually happened in your community this week. Somebody posted something good on Monday. There was a thread that got twelve replies. You are pretty sure there’s an event coming.
You are not stuck for words. You are stuck trying to remember.
This is the Circle AI weekly digest setup I run every week. Under 10 minutes to build, about four minutes to run, and you never open a blank Thursday email again.
Can an AI Project Actually Write Your Weekly Digest?
Yes. A Circle project with your instructions and files loaded reads the week in your community and builds the whole digest. Mine takes about four minutes.
I want to be clear about that number, because four minutes of writing would be impressive. That’s four minutes total. I don’t write it.
The project pulled the high-engagement threads from the week, listed every event I had coming up, and dropped a link at the bottom for the one going live the same day the email sends. It made real decisions about what mattered. It did not guess at any of it, because it can see the actual posts and the actual people.
What Is a Circle Project?
A project is an assistant you set up once, for one specific job. Three things go into it: instructions, files, and your community.
Instructions
This is the job description. Think of everything you would say to a new hire on their first day.
What that looks like:
- What you want the digest to include
- How you want it written
- What you never want in it
Files
The files are the method. The instructions say what the job is, the files say how the job is done.
What that looks like:
- An email writing playbook, so the style holds every week
- A weekly digest playbook, so the structure holds every week
- Your community blueprint, if you have one
My blueprint is the big one. It’s the exercise that names my tone, who my members are, what they’re strong at, what they struggle with, and the transformation they came in for. Loading it is the difference between an email about my community and an email written to my members. If you don’t have anything like that yet, the free Community Voice Guide is where I’d start.
Your community
This is the part that makes it work. The project reads your real posts, your real members, and your real events, so it isn’t inventing a week. It’s reading one.
Instructions, plus knowledge, plus your community. Set it up once and it works every week after that. You are not building any of this from nothing. You are loading it in.
Why Send It as a Broadcast Instead of Using Circle’s Built-In Digest?
Circle has a weekly digest feature built in. Sending yours as an email broadcast trades the automatic send for control of the time it goes out.
I know the built-in one exists. I still send mine as a broadcast, because I want to pick the hour. I send on Thursdays, earlier in the day than the default.
Your community may not be a Thursday morning crowd at all. Yours might be a Sunday night crowd, or a Tuesday lunchtime crowd. That’s why the send time is built into the prompt below: it looks at when your people are actually active and tells you when to send. Your real members decide, instead of a default somebody else picked.
How Do You Set Up the Circle AI Weekly Digest?
Four steps: build the broadcast template, create the project, paste in the instructions, load the files. Under 10 minutes, and you only do it once.
Build the template first
Do this before anything else, so the project has something to pour the digest into.
What that looks like:
- Go to Marketing, then Broadcasts, in your sidebar
- Create the email the way you want your digest to look
- Save it as a template so you can pull it into future broadcasts
If you forget to name the template in your prompt, you are not stuck. Go back and tell it to update the email to that template, and it will.
Create the project
Hover over Projects in the sidebar, open it, and choose New Project. Name it something plain, like Weekly Digest Writer, and give it a description so anyone on your team knows what it’s for.
Load the instructions
Open the project, hit the pencil icon, and paste your instructions in. This is where the project learns what a finished digest is supposed to be.
Load the files
Hit plus, find the files on your computer, and upload them. The two playbooks at minimum, your blueprint if you have one.
Try This Prompt
This is the prompt I run every week, once the project is built.
“Create this week’s digest. Start by reading the email playbook, the digest playbook, and my community blueprint. Then go through everything that happened in my community this week and build the broadcast using the [template name] template from the email hub. Include the opening, what happened and what came of it, the wins we’re celebrating, what’s coming up, and one thing for people to do. Write it in the voice my blueprint describes and the style the email playbook sets. Then tell me the best time to send it on [day] based on when my members are actually most active in the community.”
Can Your Community Manager Run It Too?
As an admin you can share a project with your team. Your community manager can run the same digest, with the same guardrails, and your chats stay private from each other.
That last part matters more than it sounds. They aren’t reading your conversations and you aren’t reading theirs. What they get is the structure: the instructions, the files, the shape of a finished digest.
It takes an admin task off their plate in a few minutes and puts them back on the thing you actually hired them for, which is talking to members.
What You Are Really Handing Off
You didn’t hand off the writing. You handed off remembering. That’s the part that was costing you the morning: sitting there trying to reconstruct a week you already lived through.
A good project isn’t a chatbot you babysit through fifteen rounds of edits. It already knows how the job is done, because somebody wrote the job down. That writing-it-down is the actual work, and you do it once. If you want the line between what to hand over and what to keep, I drew it in what you should never let AI do in your community.
Recurring work is the easiest thing in your community to give away and the last thing most founders get around to. Start with the one you dread most. For me that was Thursday.
Watch the Video
New videos go up every Thursday on Your Community Strategist.
Rather Watch It?
Your Community Strategist is the walkthrough version of all of this: builds, settings, and setups on screen, new every Thursday.
More Like This
Listen: How AI Can Make You More Human in Your Community (Not Less). The case for handing off the admin load, and what it frees you up to do.
Listen: What You Should Never Let AI Do in Your Community. The one question that tells you what is safe to automate and what to protect.
Listen: Why AI Won’t Fix Your Quiet Community. What has to be in place before any of this saves you time.
Keep Going
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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