It’s Monday morning. You open your Circle community, take one look at the feed, see a week of posts you haven’t read, and close the laptop. Who has an hour to scroll through all of that?
You’ll get to it later. Later turns into Wednesday. By Friday you’re digging out, and the question someone asked on Tuesday still doesn’t have an answer.
That Monday catch-up used to take me at least an hour.
Now it’s the first five minutes of my day. Here’s the weekly community recap prompt I run every Monday, the setup that makes it work, and how I go from recap to a posted reply without leaving Claude.
What Does a Weekly Community Recap Prompt Actually Do?
It reads the last seven days of your Circle community and hands you a sorted list: what needs your attention, what’s hanging, and what’s resonating, each with a one-line summary and a direct link.
It runs through the Circle MCP, the connection between your Circle community and your AI tool of choice. Once it’s connected, your AI can answer real questions about your real community. No exports, no copying and pasting, no manual work. It’s pulling actual data.
This assumes you’ve already connected the Circle MCP to your Claude account. Here’s the prompt I run every Monday morning:
Give me a rundown of what has happened in my community in the last seven days. For each significant conversation, include a one-sentence summary of the topic, the status, and the direct Circle link to the thread or post so I can click through and respond. Sort the list with anything needing my attention at the top, then hanging threads, then resonating ones. Keep each entry to two lines so I can scan quickly.
About 30 seconds later, the whole week is in front of me.
Why Does the Sort Order Matter So Much?
A recap is only useful if it tells you where to start. Sorting by what needs you, then what stalled, then what’s working puts your first reply at the top of the list.
Every line of the prompt has a job:
- Significant conversations, so you get the threads that matter, not a replay of the whole feed
- A one-sentence summary, so you know what it’s about without opening it
- The status, so you can see at a glance where each conversation stands
- The direct Circle link, so going from reading to replying is one click
- Two lines per entry, so you can scan the whole week in one pass
Then the order. Needing my attention is what you owe: the posts waiting on you. Hanging threads are conversations that started and stalled, the ones a nudge could bring back. Resonating is what’s landing without you, worth knowing about even when it doesn’t need a reply.
Read from the top and stop when you run out of time. The most important replies are already first.
Why Do Most Circle MCP Prompts Come Back Generic?
Because the AI doesn’t know your community. Context fixes that: a Claude project loaded with your community voice guide means every prompt runs through who your members are and how you talk.
This is the part most people skip. They drop a prompt into a fresh chat and hope for the best. Sometimes it works. Most of the time you get something generic, off target, or written like a stranger.
The question I had to answer was how to make a prompt do what I actually want. Not what the AI thinks I want. The answer was context: teach your AI about your community before you ask it to do anything.
The project
A Claude project isn’t a regular chat. It carries instructions, context, and reference material into every conversation you start inside it.
What that looks like:
- Create one project for your community work
- Give it instructions for how you want it to work
- Load your reference material once, so you’re not re-explaining your community every time
Run your community prompts inside that project, never in a blank chat.
The community voice guide
My Community Voice Guide is something I developed for my own communities. It isn’t a workbook. It’s a training resource for the AI.
It teaches the AI who my members are, how I talk, what we value, and what language to use. Once it’s loaded into the project, every prompt I run goes through that lens.
Your prompt library is only as good as the context behind it. A great prompt with no context still sounds like nobody in particular.
How Do You Reply to a Post Without Leaving Claude?
Ask Claude to draft the reply in your voice and tell it not to post until you approve. Read the draft, adjust it, then tell Claude it’s okay to post.
When I ran the recap, a member named Casey had posted asking what my next MCP video should cover. So my follow-up was a reply draft. Here’s the shape of it:
Draft a response to [member]’s post, [post title]. In my voice. Show me the draft first. Do not post anything until I tell you it’s okay to post.
Because the voice guide is loaded into the project, the draft actually sounds like me. Not perfect. A really solid starting point.
Nothing gets posted until you say so. That last line of the prompt is doing real work. You see exactly what’s about to go out before it goes anywhere. Where to draw that line more broadly is its own conversation, and I laid it out in what you should never let AI do in your community.
From there, you have three options:
- Say “okay to post,” and Claude posts it straight to your community
- Ask for a change and review the new draft
- Edit it yourself, paste your version back, and say “post this version instead”
I told Claude it was okay to post, and the reply went live in my community. From “I need to respond to this” to posted took less than a minute.
Should You Run the Recap Weekly or Daily?
Weekly works for most communities. If yours is really active, run it every morning: a 30-second catch-up beats falling behind by Wednesday and digging out by Friday.
The Monday version replaced a ritual that took me at least an hour. Scroll, remember, piece the week back together, then go find everything I meant to answer.
Daily is the same prompt with a shorter window. Change “the last seven days” to “the last 24 hours” and keep everything else.
Pick the cadence that matches how fast your feed moves. The goal is that nothing sits long enough to go cold.
This recap is for you and your team. If you want the member-facing version, the email that goes out to everyone, that’s the Circle AI weekly digest setup.
Try This Prompt
No voice guide yet? Start here. This gets you a working first draft to load into your project.
“I run a [type of community] on Circle for [who it serves]. Here are [number] posts and replies I’ve written in my community: [paste them]. My members are [describe who they are and what they’re working on], and what we value is [your values]. Draft a community voice guide an AI assistant can use to write in my voice: how I talk, words and phrases I use, words I’d never use, and how I respond to questions and wins. Format it as a one-page reference with short sections and an example for each.”
Read it against your own instincts and fix what’s off. It drafts. You decide what sounds like you.
The Connection Gets You the Data
Most people treat the Circle MCP as the whole trick. Connect it, write a prompt, done.
The connection is what lets the AI see your community. What makes the output worth using is everything you taught it before you asked: who your members are, how you talk, what matters in your space.
That’s also what gives you more room to be human in your community. The AI does the finding. You do the replying.
The connection gets you the data. The context gets you the results.
Watch the Video
New videos go up every Thursday on Your Community Strategist.
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More like it on Your Community Strategist, new every Thursday.
More Like This
Watch: Circle MCP Tutorial: The New Member Welcome Prompt I Run Every Week. The next prompt in the series, built on the same project and voice guide.
Watch: Automate Your Circle Invite Follow Ups With Claude Cowork. Another recurring Circle job you can hand off once the connection is in place.
Listen: What You Should Never Let AI Do in Your Community. The line between what to hand over and what to keep.
Listen: How AI Can Make You More Human in Your Community (Not Less). What the hour you get back on Monday is actually for.
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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