“Community” has become the king of buzzwords lately. Here are my four major tips for someone trying to create and sustain a community.
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“Community” has become the king of buzzwords lately.
I doubt you can scroll Twitter right now and not see a single tweet thread talking about community. But it’s an emerging trend for a reason, as more companies are seeing the power of community, and more products are built around community being a core pillar of the experience.
As Lead Community Manager at Morning Brew, focused on our Educational experiences of Learning @ Morning Brew, here are my four major tips for someone trying to create and sustain a community.
Community is more than a Slack channel
Whether it’s your third Slack, fifth Discord, or the people you just met at a party all joining a group chat to plan a trip to Mexico, we’ve all seen “communities” form and then fizzle out as fast as they started.
Community isn’t just throwing people together in Slack—it’s what happens after you do that. In fact, if it’s easy to do, it probably isn’t a community yet: Community has friction because human relationships have friction.
So before you get super excited and deem your group a community, be thoughtful about the elements you’ll need to sustain. Ask yourself:
- Why are people joining this community?
- What does our community stand for?
- What experiences will we have that allow us to achieve our goals?
Only having a solid answer and gameplan for these questions will allow a community to succeed, just having the latest video platform or group chat app won’t.
Don’t automate the humanity out of your community
Scaling community is a challenge and it can seem oxymoronic. The attributes that make a community special (intentional, personal, relational) are the same things that are difficult to replicate at scale. However, if community is to be a valuable business asset, some elements of it will have to scale.
In the first cohort of MB/A, we made individual acceptance videos for every professional that got into the program. These were highly successful, but an incredible time sink—something that really couldn’t scale. As we grew, we switched from personalized videos to personalized copy: Still a lot of effort, but something that can be done much more quickly than video production.
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Find the elements of personalization that are integral to the success of your community, and safeguard these from the depersonalization that can come from scaling. It can be tempting because it’s easier to scale—but it’s the hard things that are still done manually that come to define the community.
Community managers are architects, not stars
Community managers should think of themselves as architects.
A community should be like a properly designed building: People understand why they are there, navigation is intuitive based upon proper signage and indicators, and the different rooms inside create different environments.
Just like an architect, you should spend a lot of time thinking about how the design of your community will elicit the types of interactions you want. And most importantly, just like an architect leaving the building once it is complete, a great community is one that can carry on if the community manager leaves.
Feedback is incredibly powerful: Show it’s valuable
How many times have you filled out a feedback form, only to never know if someone read it because you never saw the changes you want implemented?
Community is powerful for many reasons, especially because it gives you a direct line to your customers and all the feedback they have for your business, product, or experience. However, this feedback will immediately dry up if you don’t recognize the effort it took to share it, plus show some signs of implementation based upon it.
For MB/A, we messaged nearly every individual that filled out feedback surveys telling them we appreciated their feedback and why we were (or weren’t) going to make changes.
Advice: Do the same for your community. They will feel heard, which will add to their sense of belonging; you’ll get incredible ideas that you are able to ship immediately, which will make the product/experience better; and you’ll engender a sense that everyone is collectively building the community together, which increases affinity for all involved.
