Prompts to get you started with the Community MCP

Thanks to everyone who came to the MCP Deep Dive last week, if you missed it your can watch back here. The question I got most afterwards was some version of "okay, but what do I actually type?", so here are the prompts I'd start with, plus a few things I learned the hard way while building the MCP and planning the Deep Dive session.

If you haven't connected it yet, follow the steps here. Worth knowing up front: the analytics and admin tools need administrator or community-manager permissions, and everything is read-only so there's no tools the MCP can post, edit or delete to your community.

Start here: ask it what it can do

What can you do with my community data? Go through the tools you have access to and tell me what question each one answers.

Do that before anything else. You'll get a map of the thirteen tools in plain language, and you'll spot two or three things you didn't know you could ask. Then follow whichever one sounds most useful to you.

Prompts worth trying

Each of these will work as written, but feel free to change the dates based on your timeframe.

How are we actually doing?

How is the community doing between 1 June and 31 August 2026, compared with the previous quarter? Give me the headline numbers, and tell me where I should be worried.

Ask for the worry, not just the numbers. That's what makes it go deeper instead of handing you a summary.

What are people searching for and not finding?

For 1 June to 31 August 2026, what did people search for and then not click on any result? Show me the top 15, with how many results each search returned.

My favourite one. The "how many results" part is what makes it useful, a query that returns nothing is a content gap, but a query that returns four thousand results and gets no click is a findability problem, and the fix is completely different.

What does a member actually get?

Search everything we have for "[a question your members ask constantly]" and show me what a member would actually get back, including whether each result has an answer.

Pick a question you're sure is well covered. It's uncomfortable and it's worth it.

Are we closing questions out, or just replying to them?

For 1 June to 31 August 2026 versus the previous quarter: how fast are we answering questions, how many were asked, how many answered, and how many are still unanswered?

Then follow up on the arithmetic if it doesn't add up. "Answered" means a best answer was marked, questions that got helpful replies but no accepted answer sit in a gap between the two figures, and that gap is usually bigger than the unanswered count.

What did we actually ship for them?

What ideas has the community raised that we've delivered in the last six months? Show me the top ones by votes, when they were first raised, and when they shipped.

The "when raised" column is the one that matters. It's the difference between "we shipped ten things" and "we shipped ten things people had been waiting years for", and the second one is a much better post.

Who's carrying the community?

Who were our most active contributors between 1 June and 31 August 2026, and has that group changed since the previous quarter?

Four things that will save you time

1. Always give it explicit dates. "Last quarter" is ambiguous and you'll get a different window than you meant. 1 June to 31 August 2026 is unambiguous. If you're comparing, say so explicitly.

2. Ask for a specific number of rows and remember the total moves with it. "Top 15" and "top 100" return different totals for the same period, because you're summing a different number of rows. If you're going to quote a figure, say "across the top 15" rather than "in total".

3. Ask it to check its own numbers. Something like "do these figures reconcile with each other?" When two metrics move in opposite directions, or an aggregate doesn't match its components, it'll usually find it and tell you which is a lot better than finding out in a QBR.

4. Follow up rather than re-prompting. The second and third questions are where it gets good. "Why?", "show me the ones behind that number", "which of those should I act on first" all work, and you don't lose the context you just built.

Wrapping up

If you find a prompt that works well on your community, post it in this thread. I'll fold the good ones into a proper guide.

And if something returns nothing, or a number looks wrong, tell me that too, that's genuinely useful for where we take this next.