What I Know About Community Building
For four years, I worked to build a big, branded, and imperfect community for women. That whole time, and in the months since, I’ve been reflecting on what it takes to build a vibrant and sustainable community organization. By trying my own hand at hyper-local grassroots organizing and engaging with my neighborhood mutual aid network, I’ve learned a ton about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to building a truly connected community. There were new lessons I learned navigating both the principles and the restraints of mutual aid networks, things I hadn’t considered when building branded communities. There were also tactics for optimization and scale that were common when building branded communities that I saw could be applied thoughtfully to grassroots organizing. By taking a little from each, I think I have some insight into what might help others build strong communities in both fields. My hope is that these learnings can help you kickstart a meaningful community of your own.
Community is one of those words that means different things to different people. For clarity’s sake, I’ll share my definitions of the word. To me, community is as simple as a group of people helping each other out. So, community building is about listening to people, caring about what they say their needs are and working to build something that can fulfill those needs. Those needs can look very different depending on your community — they might be as basic as toilet paper, diapers and food, or as aspirational as new friends, business contacts, and skill sharing. In either case, lying underneath those asks is the real need — -belonging. From my perspective, belonging can also be described as feeling connected and invested in other people.
Building a Successful Early Community
Planting the Seeds of your Community : Your early members will have an outsized impact on your community over the long term. Try thinking of the early members of your community as seeds — they’ll grow with your community if taken care of and may even bring others into your ecosystem. They will also be a powerful collective voice when it comes to seeking feedback and perspective as your community grows.
Mutual Aid recognizes that everyone in a community has value, and is served when that value is recognized. In this sense, it avoids the hierarchy that happens in charity of the servers and the served, and replaces it with building a floor where everyone in a community is cared and accounted for. Establishing relationships and trust with neighbors is a pathway for building successful localized communities.
At each of the membership based organizations I helped build, we looked to our own networks of connections, for the most outstanding, unique and connected people we knew. We asked the earliest of passionate adopters to recommend folks from their networks as well. We made lists of people we knew, sort of knew and hoped to know. This is where the metaphor of seeds and planting is especially useful — you want to build a garden that can support and nourish a wide variety of life. There are certain plants, even very lovely ones, that will overtake your whole garden, or only grow with plants of their own kind. There are others that grow together and enrich each other’s soil.
Other thoughts to consider when identifying early folks are:
Are these people potentially gatekeepers to a larger community you’d like to get into the mix?
Would you consider them a participator, agitator and connector?
Getting clarity around your why and who you’re building this for.
Early Community Can’t Be Automated
In the early days of community building, it’s essential for the community leaders (or brand) to model the behavior you’re hoping to set as a shared standard and to guide your members along the way. This process is human-focused, high-touch and has nothing to do with speed or optimization — in fact, it requires immersion in the experience to live and learn in real time. For an early community, this stage is all about building a foundation and much of it has to be 1:1.
For example, in the early days of The Wing, I would invite folks who lived in the same neighborhoods or shared the same Astrological sign to gather for breakfast. I’d send the invites, manage the RSVP list and facilitate the event on the day of, orchestrating 1:1 introductions along the way. From these facilitated meetings, friendships and business deals were hatched — folks felt cared for and the feel-good connection to the community was on the fast track! We created a framework that showed members that we wanted our community to gather and drive connections in fun and unexpected ways.
Participating in Mutual Aid work has strengthened my opinion that early community work has to be intimate. It is slow growing, requires consensus, and a constant return to trust-building. Without a conversational element as a guiding light, there isn’t a way to uncover the community’s needs.
True participation and human observation, on the floor, in the chat room, on the street, wherever your community really lives, will give you the data points that DAU/MAU, NPS or event attendance numbers can never reflect. If you’re in the room, you will know how it felt, how the conversation flowed, or didn’t. You’ll see that attendees made plans to continue the conversation offline. If you’re immersed in human conversations, you can understand what your people want and need from the community and help you refine the experience with their immediate needs in mind.
What I would have done differently
Hand over the keys to your members!
Remember when I said the community leaders have to kick things off? It is key for a new community to set the tone, model the behavior you want to see and then find a way to hand over the keys.
Mutual Aid organizations structurally rely on establishing a path for volunteers to participate as a means to operate and growing, branded communities should pay attention to that format.
Alternatively, it’s very possible that an organization can hold on to the “community keys” for too long — I’ve been a part of that happening. Now, I know that when members begin asking for ways to lend a hand and get involved, it is time to create a path to hand over those keys! Focus on building with the community, not just for the community. Building programs that reward participation, provide a sense of ownership and establish participation as a requirement to membership will instill a feeling of reciprocity and value within the community.
Remember what I said earlier about 1:1 connections being hard to scale? Now, I believe that if you build programs that reward your most passionate members for engaging and supporting the health of the community, they will be your most powerful and trusted allies to scale the magical feeling of early, intimate community days.
Keep it Simple and Specific.
Meetup founder Scott Heiferman credited the early success of his community to specificity. Something like, “Dog Lovers” didn’t catch fire as much as “Queer Austin Shih-Tzu Owners” did. At The Wing, the energy of the very early days, particularly around the 2016 election, had us vibrating with energy and an urgency to do MORE! Include more people, open more locations, add to the brand offering… I admit, it felt invigorating to offer the magazine, a podcast, the merch, and beyond. Looking back, some of those beautiful additions began to distract us from our foundation — the members, the community and their needs. Ultimately, I would recommend not trying to do everything!
Branded communities can learn from the narrow focus of successful grassroots organizing. One organizer mentor suggested focusing my own organizing effort on trying to meet all of the diapering needs of a small, specific group before attempting to broaden the scale. So, instead of trying to meet the needs of all parents in NYC who need diapers, could we reframe and focus on meeting the ongoing needs of 30 families? And, indeed, we did meet those needs! Staying focused and specific allowed us to meet direct needs.
The best and most lasting communities all gather around HIGHLY SPECIFIC needs. This shared context is key for bonding and it gives strangers an immediate, intimate reason to know and trust each other. For any kind of growing community, consider that every ounce of padding added to an offering can erode intimacy faster than it was built. When you keep things small, specific and simple you’ll lay a sturdy foundation.
Ultimate community success requires meeting your members’ needs.
It sounds simple but it’s hard! It’s iterative and will be an important precedent to establish in early days of community, aka we are here (as leadership or as the brand) to listen and learn about what you need from us. The action-planning and integration of the observation is just as important to setting the community up for sustainable success as the gathering of the feedback.
I admire the approach that mutual aid organizations use. A need is communicated to a leader, the leader organizes with their network to meet the need. I was shocked at the directness and simplicity of the approach for meeting the community’s needs for food, diapers, formula, PPE, etc. It comes from the understanding that those asking are the best experts in their own lives and needs. No meaningful relationship building or community expansion can happen without that foundational trust.
Branded communities take note — when your community tells you what they want, listen to them. Organize and prioritize your time and the time of your team to work to meet those needs. Once you’ve created a program or offering to meet those needs — -ask your members what they think. If your organization doesn’t have a way to listen to your members or get feedback consider starting simple with direct outreach (aka just talk to people!) or a survey. Listen, Act, Give, Get Feedback, Repeat.
Community is a living, breathing organism made up of people. And like people, it will expand and contract, flourish and fail, just as we do. Even as I write this, my opinions and perspectives on community building are growing, shifting and adjusting. From here, please take what works for you, leave the rest and onwards to build your community!
