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RECOGNIZING COMMUNITY, BRAND COMMUNITY, AND BELONGING

This chapter will clarify the relevant terms we all need in order to recognize and support community building. As we distill the terms, we provide a list of elements that must be incorporated for success. Just knowing the terms provides all with a stronger vision to recognize and discern effective brand communities.

As we stated in the introduction, we define a community as a group of people who share mutual concern for one another. (Hereafter in this book, we will refer to “mutual concern for one another” as “mutual concern.”) Communities convene around at least one shared value, usually more.

In his book The Art of Community, Charles shares fundamental wisdom about how communities come together and create belonging using principles tested over the course of more than a thousand years. It’s available if you need to understand community fundamentals. In that book, Charles distills seven principles used to bring people together:

1. Boundary: the line between members and outsiders
2. Initiation: the activities that mark a new member
3. Rituals: the things we do that have meaning
4. Temple: a place set aside to find our community
5. Stories: what we share that allows others and ourselves to know our values
6. Symbols: the things that represent ideas that are important to us
7. Inner rings: subgroups in a community that together present a path to growth as we participate

We will dig deeper into specific kinds of communities, so let’s recap: Communities almost always share some values, identity, and moral prescriptions (how people should act).

This definition may seem unfinished to you. You may argue that you know of a collection of people who share values, identity, and moral prescriptions, but don’t feel like a community. You’re right! For example, Charles still identifies as a returned Peace Corps volunteer. Charles also still values international travel, cultural sharing, and serendipitous adventure. And he thinks that there are moral and respectful ways to explore foreign cultures, as do most Peace Corps volunteers. However, given that his Peace Corps service ended years ago, he is not active in a Peace Corps group that shares mutual concern between himself and other returned volunteers. There is such a community in the world, but he is just not a part of it now.

He considers his relationship to other Peace Corps volunteers as tribal. This means that they share some values and identity, yet he is not organized, active, or even in communication with other volunteers. If someone collects names of returned Peace Corps volunteers living in California, he will become part of a list. That list doesn’t make the people on it a community. Without mutual concern, whatever Charles is included in is not a community but a group. (And this is OK.)

By contrast, Carrie is a part of a Seattle yoga community in which members gather for yoga classes and workshops. She recognizes that friendships have formed among members so that they care for one another even outside class time. This makes her experience as a community member far richer and more fun than just showing up for poses in a group.

There’s nothing wrong with groups. Most of us are involved with lots of groups. An advocacy campaign (say, advocating for clean Oakland streets) may never develop into a community, but as a group, it can serve a rich and powerful role for Oakland. The danger comes when we can’t distinguish between groups and communities and we expect more from a group than it can ever deliver. Or we fail to invest in a group to grow a community (say, an Oakland streets cleanup community) and then despair at the failure.

In 2014, an activity known as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge inspired people to create and post more than two million videos online.¹ The challenge was an effort to raise both awareness and research funding for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). In each video, participants were doused with a bucket of ice water, and they then challenged others they knew to do the same. This mobilization campaign served a deep need to activate people into a conversation about a disease and to raise money. It did not knit participants into a community where members cared about one another. Now, growing an important conversation and fundraising for a cause can be a very satisfying outcome. It’s just not a community-building effort. It’s mobilizing a group.

This book speaks to a broad spectrum of organization types because fundamental principles apply broadly. So, for this book, organization refers to people participating in an agreed order, including at least one element of membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctions.² The following organization types, although very different from one from another, all count:

• Business: working for financial profit
• Nonprofit: humanitarian motivated and acting to relieve suffering, advocate for the poor, protect the environment, provide social services, and more³
• Religious or spiritual organization: offering spiritual growth and education
• Community-based organization: serving needs within a particular geographical area
• Association: connecting people to benefit from one another professionally
• Ephemeral organization: formed in extreme and disaster environments for rescue and relief⁴
• Political organization: working toward political change
• Movement: working for cultural change

In this book, a brand refers to any identifiable organization (whether for-profit, nonprofit, political, or otherwise cause-driven) that offers value to others. The brand uses a distinguishing name.

Brand communities are often inspired, created, or influenced by an already established brand, but not necessarily. For example, enthusiasts (such as camping, music, or video game fans) can start an identifiable community (e.g., the Oakland Adventure Club, California Dragon Boat Association), and the organization itself operates as a brand community.

For ease of communication, we’ll use the terms organization, company, and brand interchangeably.

Brand Community

A brand community is a special kind of community. All brand communities we’re discussing aspire to serve both (1) members and (2) at least one organizational (brand) goal.

In this discussion, an authentic brand community includes all these elements:

• Members who share a mutual concern for one another’s welfare
• Members who share a connected identity founded in shared core value(s) and purpose⁵
• Members who participate in shared experiences reflecting the shared value(s) and purpose

This working definition is purposefully broad. Many principles for building different kinds of brand communities apply across the board.

As we have explained, successful brand communities serve both members’ and the organization’s goals. If a community fails to serve one or the other, you’ll have trouble inspiring one or the other to participate as soon as it figures that out. Building brand communities takes work, and there’s no reason to do the work unless there’s a benefit to all involved.

When a community is connected to an established organization, it’s important that the community’s and organization’s goals overlap, align, or complement one another. For example, Yelp is a crowdsourced review forum for local businesses. Today it attracts more than seventy million people a month through its mobile app and website.⁶ Yelp’s purpose is to guide readers to helpful resources including reviews. Yelp Elite members (a brand community) want to connect with other review writers to share friendship, experiences, and grow better at writing reviews. All intentions are aligned.

The same is true for the Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Company and the Harley Owners Group (HOG). Riders want to ride, and Harley wants to sell motorcycles, merchandise, and accessories. In both cases, no one wins by holding back the other side.

If the organization’s goals are not in alignment with those of members, then there is a real question whether the organization can offer genuine value to members.

When a brand community stands alone as an organization (e.g., the Oakland Adventure Club), then typically there’s no conflict between the purposes of the organization and those of the members.

For the sake of clarity, we offer a few examples of brand communities to at least scratch the surface of what’s out there:

• Activist community. The United Religions Initiative (URI) connects individuals promoting interfaith cooperation and ending religiously motivated violence.
• Celebrity fan community. World-famous performer Lady Gaga created the Little Monsters fan community to connect and support her global fans.
• Collaborator community. Google gathers invited thought leaders together in “Labs” to collaborate on an envisioned future and influence Google investments and spending.
• Customer community. Online streaming platform Twitch created the Community Meetups program to connect their users in cities around the world.
• Employee community. Home builder True Homes invests in many events and activities to connect all its employees in satisfying ways.
• Enthusiasts community. HOG chapters connect brand enthusiasts who own Harleys or are invited guests of Harley owners.
• Professional community. The New York State Association of Independent Schools connects education professionals to support one another across their region.
• Sports community. The California Dragon Boat Association connects boat paddlers.
• Volunteer community. Global software company Salesforce created the Trailblazer Community made up of users who volunteer to support other users.

How do brand communities succeed in serving both members and the organization? Consider this example.

Participation

Here, a participant is anyone who freely takes action to participate in a community in some way. This is intentionally a very broad definition. All brand communities include participants who share mutual concern. Discovering participants is one way to recognize a community.

In time it will be important for you to understand the differences between types of participants, such as novices, members, elders, principal elders, and allies. For simplicity in this discussion, participants refers to anyone participating, including both visitors and members in general.

A visitor is someone who seeks to learn more about your community. Typically, this individual discovers your community (reads about it, visits the website, sees a video, or visits an event for the first time) and then can grow more interested.

A member is someone who returns to connect with members, considers themselves a regular participant, and ideally has experienced some kind of opt-in initiation. The initiation gives them reason to see themselves as a member. Without a recognized initiation, members are difficult to distinguish from visitors. Even if the initiation experience isn’t dramatic, there should always be some discernible difference between members and visitors.

Very often, we want to create community events that draw the right visitors—those who will return and grow into members.

Consider an Oakland Miata drivers’ community. Members go on drives together, visit races, and share meals where they discuss fixing and improving Miatas. Anyone who discovers the community via website, video, or flier can participate in virtually all the planned events. But just showing up, even registering online for a drive, doesn’t make someone a member. When someone shows up to learn more and experience the community, that person is a visitor. What do we mean? Anyone visiting your house is not instantly a part of your family just because they walked in. There is a process that makes someone a family member. (It may include marriage.)

Visitors participate, but participation alone doesn’t make them members. Visitors may even visit a community several times. Membership results when someone crosses a boundary into the community. The boundary is always monitored by at least one elder, someone with history and at least informal authority in the community. When an elder handles this role, we call them a gatekeeper; there can be many gatekeepers in a community. Communities have different ways of determining when and how a visitor appropriately becomes a member. In many cases, there is a “novice” or “probationary” stage (which can go under many different names). The important lesson is that visiting participants should make an informed choice to cross the boundary into membership.

In the Miata community, crossing the boundary may include paying membership dues and participating regularly in planned activities. In other communities, the standards may be much higher.

In all real communities, not all participants are members, but all members are participants.

Participation Conditions

Participants show up, participate, and then return because at least three conditions are in place for any activity or invitation.⁸ If any one of these is missing, then the participant generally won’t meaningfully engage. The three conditions are as follows:

1. Choice: the ability to say yes or no to membership and participation
2. Connection: forming relationships with other people
3. Progress: advancement toward a purpose

Protect choice. If members “must” participate in a community, they’re usually coerced into taking part. This means they’re fulfilling a transaction to avoid bad outcomes. This is the opposite of community connection.

It’s OK to have requirements for membership (e.g., dues). But if you require members to pay and they cannot opt out of membership, then building a real community is difficult, if not impossible. You’ll largely remain a group because members lack choice.

Support connection. Members want to be recognized by others and accepted for who they are. This includes being appreciated for shared values and commitments.

Ensure progress. People want to experience progress toward some purpose. This might mean progress toward mastery of an art, skill, or field. We often refer to this progress as a form of growth toward “being.” People want to be a support, change maker, friend, cook, dancer, firefighter, or anything else.

When you consider brand communities that once interested you but from which you drifted away, you may now recognize that the community did not meet one of these three conditions.

Mutual Concern

When building any community, mutual concern among members remains both fundamental and critical. Without it, there is no authentic community to support an organization. This is why mutual concern is often missing in what we call “mirage communities” (more about these later in this chapter). For example, if you have a newsletter reading list, subscribers may respond back and forth to your emails. That’s great. But if those subscribers don’t yet care about one another’s welfare, there isn’t a community (yet).

What you have is a list of readers or followers, and there’s nothing wrong with this. Community building takes different and far more investment toward creating something richer and more powerful, and offering different possibilities.

From your own experience, you can undoubtedly think of groups to which you’ve belonged where the participants cared about one another, and groups where they didn’t. Once you look for them, the differences are obvious.

Feeling Camaraderie

Nurturing a group into a brand community requires at least two commonalities among its members:

• Shared values (at least one)
• Shared purpose

In our favorite description of camaraderie, we say that we feel camaraderie when we learn that others share our common value(s) and purpose(s). Sharing only one of the two is never enough. (These ideas are based on personal communication with Aram Fischer, April 2019.)

If visitors share both common values and common purposes, we call this being “compatible” or a right “fit.” It’s important that visitors learn quickly whether they are compatible. Compatible visitors will know whether they want to return and explore fuller participation.

If a visitor doesn’t share common values and purposes, then they’re unfortunately incompatible or a wrong fit. This doesn’t mean that a brand community is doing something wrong. In fact, it’s important that not every individual will fit with every brand community: Many motorcycle riders won’t fit in HOG.

The key here is that participants need to learn the relevant shared value(s) and purpose(s) so that they can experience camaraderie.

If you have doubts about your values and purpose, then it will be hard for visitors to feel or recognize whether they have camaraderie. If you try to bend values and purpose to whoever finds you, then you can never offer consistent value to members.

Part of creating a strong brand community is choosing what values and purpose your organization will commit to, and encouraging only the right people. You can’t be all things to all people. In fact, drawing a strong boundary for the right people is always an important part of creating a resilient and effective brand community.

When we invite compatible people inside based on values and purpose, we call this an invitation to “cross the community boundary.” The boundary creates an inner ring for members where they feel safe inside to explore the shared values and purpose (camaraderie). (For more on the boundary principle, you can refer to The Art of Community.)

If members are in fact incompatible, then community integrity is eroded. Imagine attending a HOG event and someone who loves motorcycles joins to discuss sourcing 2004 Mazda Miata parts. Too much of this will pull away from the brand community purpose. It really doesn’t matter that we all like twisty roads and the wind in our hair.

Please note that selecting members based on values and purpose is a morally neutral idea. The distinction can be used to create really strong and supportive communities, and it can be used to create the opposite. Anyone can create a community or inner ring based on vile and hurtful values and purpose. (We know of too many.) This can even happen inadvertently when we choose people who “just feel right” for membership. “Just feel right” often really means “people who look and act like me” and the others will never belong.

We encourage you to do something far more powerful: Create a brand community with clear core values and purpose so that you can welcome a broad range of people who are compatible with an enriching purpose, instead of adhering to a vague notion of who belongs and who doesn’t.

For example, we admire the efforts by Nish Nadaraja to ensure that the Yelp Elite originally connected people to “share what’s great about their city” as opposed to write a lot of reviews for a website.

Every successful community has leaders (formal or informal) who keep the community inside safe enough. “Safe enough” means there is the possibility of vulnerable conversations and the avoidance of “wreckage.” (See more on inside safety in part 3.) Vulnerable conversations make feeling connection possible.

We also admire Etsy’s efforts to gather and celebrate artists and their craft beyond working to sell goods. Etsy is an online commerce website that focuses on handmade and vintage items. The site hosts over two million sellers, many of them craft artists who call themselves “makers.” Over thirty-four million customers now buy on the Etsy platform.⁹

Danielle Maveal was a founding Etsy team member and Etsy’s twelfth employee. She helped build the Etsy Community team and soon after launched and managed the Seller Education team.

Every day in Etsy’s Virtual Labs, Danielle shared that members met to share their craft work during critique sessions. Danielle knows that sharing work for criticism includes real vulnerability for makers. So an Etsy team member or community leader (elder) developed ground rules and modeled acceptable behavior when sharing both positive and negative feedback. Then all participants were invited to share positive and critical thoughts, moderated by the elder. For sharing their vulnerability, makers were rewarded in growth for their work and business (personal communication with Danielle Maveal, August 2019).

Vulnerable conversations are necessary to develop connected relationships. Here vulnerability means uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. This includes anything that participants fear will cause others to possibly reject them if revealed. Often this includes any evidence of weakness, failure, inadequacy, and some feelings (such as fear, loneliness, or even unbridled delight).¹⁰

Although “safe” looks different among, say, Army Special Forces operatives and Oakland hospital chaplains, the principle is the same. All need to believe they can share something vulnerable within the community and remain connected. Even leaders in the toughened special forces community ensure consequences for those who make their community unsafe.

For example, former Army Special Forces operative Eric Paul explained that everyone in his team had to stay with a “battle buddy.” This helped protect all on a mission and avoided the need for searching for a lone lost soldier. When someone broke the rule, “mass punishment” was assigned for the whole team so that the rule would be respected in the future. Eric shared further about how master sergeants made “after-action reviews” a conversation where real and helpful criticism could be shared safely among soldiers (personal communication with Eric Paul, August 2019).

When people (including us) exhibit vulnerability, they’re uncertain about how others will react. They seek empathy but fear they’ll be negatively judged. We agree with Brené Brown when she asserts, “Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them. Vulnerability is based on mutuality and requires boundaries and trust. It’s not oversharing, it’s not purging, it’s not indiscriminate disclosure.”¹¹

Others must earn our vulnerability over time, as happens in communities with safe (enough) spaces. As leaders, we must understand that without a space for possible vulnerability, real connection will never develop.

Feeling Belonging

Belonging is a feeling. None of us wants to participate in a community where we don’t feel good, welcome, or appreciated. We certainly won’t stay and invest. Of course, what makes us feel in particular ways differs from person to person. When possible, people leave places where they don’t feel belonging. They proactively move to where they do feel belonging. At the end of the day, we want to create a feeling of belonging among participants. Otherwise, community never works. At best, you’ll just get grouping.

Research indicates that belonging shows up when we experience two feelings:¹²

1. Feeling valued (or needed) by the entire group or some part of it
2. Feeling that we are a fit for what is needed in the community and the environment that has been created

Reflecting on the past twenty years of research and practitioners’ experience, we say that the feeling of belonging usually arises when participants experience some collection of the following feelings at some level:

• Accepted
• Welcome
• Valued
• Cared for (mutual concern)
• Appreciated
• Possessing insider (esoteric) understanding

To create these feelings, the community must provide an experience where participants can notice they are accepted, welcome, valued, cared for, appreciated, and in possession of insider understanding.

Notice that successful leaders generate positive feelings in participants, which inspires participants to return and become members. Though this can sound like a magical task to some, after you’ve learned principles that make communities work, it will sound more achievable.

As a feeling, belonging is experienced internally as a first-person experience. These experiences are difficult for a third-person observer to measure, but that difficulty makes the experience no less critical.

Many first-person experiences important in relationships (and the world) don’t lend themselves to quantified measuring, such as a mother’s love or the trust in your neighbor. Measuring belonging is similar to measuring a mother’s love.

A critical takeaway here is that creating community involves far more than offering a trade or a transactional relationship. It includes offering a space (digital or physical) and experiences that inspire feelings. If you forget that— or worse, never understand this—you’ll waste a lot of time.

Insider Understanding

Successful communities grow stronger the more members share insider (esoteric) understanding. By esoteric, we don’t mean something weird; we are just referring to things insiders understand that outsiders do not or cannot.

Melissa Allen is a retired firefighter captain. She shared how much she appreciates spending time among other firefighters in her community because they understand the complexity, pressure, and passion that often come with the role. They share much never-spoken understanding and compassion for one another. This is so strong that she notices that if a firefighter spouse joins the group, the conversation changes. This isn’t because spouses aren’t welcome or loved. It’s because they simply never share the insider understanding that career firefighters gain.

Usually when we seek out people who have shared an experience similar to our own (fighting cancer, living overseas, running a marathon), we seek others for shared insider understanding.

In a very different kind of example, within the Lady Gaga fan community Little Monsters, Elena (last name withheld on request; interviewed April 2019) volunteered as one of the first moderators. As a new Gaga fan, she had posted Gaga photos and videos on social media, and her friends considered it spam. They didn’t share her enthusiasm and identification with Gaga. She noticed that the first time she posted similar media on the Little Monsters platform, she immediately saw forty-five “likes.” Others reached out to her with warm comments and “followed” her profile. The Little Monsters members also reached out to her on other social media platforms so that they could connect further. She had found other insiders who understood her feelings and identification with Gaga.

Jeremy Ross cofounded an online platform called Honeycommb, which builds and hosts fan communities for many brands, including Lady Gaga, Manchester United USA Supporters, and North American Tribal Leaders of Sovereign Nations. He told us that brands often want at least one private online space for fans because brands have learned that their fans often get ignored and ridiculed when sharing their enthusiasm in public. The fans are excited and relieved to participate in a space where their enthusiasm is both understood and appreciated. Twitch’s Marcus Graham believes that the stigma associated with video gamers is an important factor in explaining why Twitch grew into a global gathering space for gamers. For many, Twitch was perhaps the only place they could express their enthusiasm safely to others who understood and empathized.

When an organization convenes a community, participants are drawn in because they share some values more intensely than do outsiders. We want to feel understood by the people who share our values. We want to see that the people inside understand this more than the people outside our community. This is one reason why a community can’t succeed if it accepts anyone, anytime, with any values.

Shared Experiences

All brand communities share experiences. These are often planned events, but they don’t have to be. They could be extemporaneous outings (e.g., rock climbers meeting at a cliff base) or emergencies (e.g., firefighters convening at a call). For real communities, there must be many experiences where participants can and do return.¹³ If there are too few shared experiences or they’re not enriching enough for participants to return, then the relationships that knit participants into a community don’t get built.

A shared experience is an event for a community that articulates, references, or reinforces the shared values of that group. In a brand community, the brand’s values must agree with the relevant member values. Brand community shared experiences include particular elements:

• Reinforcement of values. The experience reflects and reinforces insiders’ (members’) important values. Participants should feel the attraction to and appreciation for the specific experience more than outsiders do. In other words, the experience doesn’t appeal to just about everyone everywhere.
• Time boundaries. There is a beginning and an end to the experience; that is, others cannot go back in time to share the experience when it is over.
• Space boundaries. Participants must go to a specific place (physical or digital) to share the experience. This means that no one can “send” them the experience. Typically, this also means that participants must be invited, or learn about the event from an insider, “in the know” person. Invitations are typical, but not always necessary.

Understanding how shared experiences work for a community calls for more nuance and thought than simply doing something fun. (We’re totally supportive of fun.) Even for advanced community builders, it’s important to regularly assess the purpose and form of your community’s shared experiences. You can find much more on creating successful shared experiences in chapter 8, Creating Shared Experiences and Space.

Empty versus Meaningful Engagement

When we build an authentic community, participants (visitors and members) will engage. What do we mean by engage? We’ve seen the term engagement used to refer to, well, just about everything, from reading a blog post to tattooing a logo on one’s body, visiting a single meeting, leading a regional subgroup, and replying to a social media post. We’re going to use the term more specifically.

Meaningful community engagement is any action by a participant that supports that participant in (1) caring about the welfare of other community members and/or (2) feeling connected to the community as a whole.

Meaningful engagement is experienced only by members, not organizations. Only members can decide what is in fact meaningful; when they find it, it inspires them to remain connected. This enriches and strengthens a brand community.

You may now wonder how to determine or measure the depth or meaningfulness of engagement.

As we noted earlier, quantitatively measuring “engagement meaningfulness,” like measuring maternal love or mutual concern, may be nearly impossible. And like maternal love, meaningfulness still matters a lot for most of us.

There are detailed and nuanced ways to explain the difference between quantitative and qualitative measurements. For simplicity and practicality here, quantitative means objectively measurable by an outside observer. Qualitative here refers to a description of a first-person experience. We can quantitatively measure how many gifts your mother sends you. We can only seek to understand how much your mother feels love for you qualitatively by asking her to describe it (personal communication with Gabriel Grant, PhD, October 2019).

Because quantitative measurement is straightforward, we often see organizations default to measuring behaviors that contain actions (clicks, visits, views), but that never tell them whether people feel more connected or caring. When leaders can’t measure quality, they default to measuring quantity, which usually fails and misleads without informed discernment (Grant interview). In chapter 11 we will discuss this measurement problem called surrogation.

Empty engagement is engagement for engagement’s sake. It eats up time and mind space. It also disregards emotional connection or serving needs. For example, imagine that we post cute photographs of ourselves in our online community, living a picture-perfect life in a tropical wonderland. There’s nothing wrong with cute pictures. But this is empty engagement if we’re hiding our true selves, challenges, and longings while hoping to fool others with our posturing. No matter whether participants do this knowingly or not, we call this avataring. We know it’s empty because no one is growing a closer understanding or mutual concern with such activity. Communities that confuse avataring with connecting will not grow real, meaningful connections.

We see this frequently in social media groups and other mirage communities, where the engagement includes posting memes and selfies that never speak to the group’s values or goals. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with pretty photos, selfies, and memes. They can add important diversity to daily life’s sobriety and challenges, but let’s not conflate avataring with authentic community-enriching engagement. We will discuss helpful content principles in part 3.

Meaningful engagements relate to the community’s core values and purpose. The engagement also grows or demonstrates mutual concern.

It may be difficult as leaders to distinguish what’s meaningful and what isn’t. There will always be a gray zone where some participants consider an engagement empty and others consider it meaningful. It’s important that you can distinguish engagement types at least in broad ways, because the distractions of empty engagement will lead to a community’s stagnation or decline.

Empty engagement means almost nothing for community enrichment. It can gain attention (promotion), but that’s not the same as growing something durable. Consider grocery brands that reward customers with a gas card. The brands get lots of grocery lists and gas purchase locations. Every purchase can get counted as an engagement, but none of it builds connection or community.

To help us distinguish between meaningful and empty engagement, imagine that we’re planning a pizza party in the Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland for the Oakland Public Works (OPW) Department. OPW is an identifiable organization (brand) that supports volunteer trash pickers, among many other volunteers. Imagine an OPW manager named Michael who would love volunteers to feel more connected and to remain vigilant, and he always appreciates new volunteers making Oakland cleaner. (Yes, we know: A pizza party is probably not the best community-building investment possible for OPW. Just roll with us for now.)

There are any number of ways to throw a pizza party, from flying in Italian masters to arranging Maltese dogs for pizza-lunch cuddling.

The first imagined event will take place this Wednesday. We’ll hire University of California, Berkeley undergraduates to

1. Hang a banner that reads “Thank You Oakland Volunteers.”
2. Hand out free pizza to anyone nearby with a “Thank you for making Oakland amazing” greeting.
3. Hand out an OPW volunteer registration card with each pizza slice.
4. Offer a free soda for every social media posting tagged “Oakland Public Works Amazing.”

We can measure at least four kinds of engagement:

• How many times a pizza slice was taken
• How many people took pizza
• How many social media posts resulted
• How many people drank soda

We’re confident that we’ll rack up big engagement numbers as long as the pizza flows. And you already instinctively know how poorly the measured engagements will reflect the current or future community of OPW volunteers and stakeholders. Although the event may build brand awareness for OPW, it will do little else except spend OPW funds.

Giving away pizza (or tacos, beer, T-shirts, etc.) will not build a pizza community or any other kind. It’s never the pizza alone. We’ll discuss effective elements in chapter 10.

If Michael at OPW really wants to connect current volunteers for retention and also recruit new responsible volunteers, we can consider how to make an event connect with the community values and purpose.

We will do at least three things differently:

1. Use language in invitations and activities on-site that connect directly to the community values
2. Create a shared space for relationship building inspired by the values
3. Ensure that participants have access to an intimate “campfire experience” when they attend

This second event will require significantly more preparation to establish intention and venue:

1. Send an invitation to past volunteers explicitly acknowledging their part in making Oakland safer and cleaner. Invite them to a bounded space to meet other invited volunteers and learn how they all make a difference in Oakland.
2. Allow each volunteer to bring two friends interested in getting involved with Oakland volunteering for a safer and cleaner city.
3. Share that volunteers will get an opportunity to learn how OPW can support new projects.
4. Introduce volunteers within neighborhoods to learn how they contribute. They’ll sit together in “intimate spaces” where they can talk.
5. Give Michael the space and time to share what inspires him to support OPW, and invite participants to share their inspiration with one another.
6. Explain that we’ll serve pizza from Oakland’s own Bare Knuckle Pizza so that we can celebrate our commitment and friendship within the city together.

This second imaginary event is by no means an ideal experience. As with all new things, we’ll discover how effective it is by experimenting. The imaginary example reveals how structuring an experience can lean toward growing relationships and mutual concern and support. It will remain hard to know how meaningful the participant connections, conversations, and memories will become. This is the nature of creating something qualitatively important and then measuring it quantitatively. Participant numbers and length of stay help us a little bit, but not very much. The success will largely be measured through qualitative study—asking participants about their experience. (See part 3 for more on measuring success.)

Given that the second event invites participants to connect with their values and with others who share them, you have an idea how much more that event can enrich the community.

As an experiment, imagine yourself invited to the second pizza party, except swap “making Oakland safer and cleaner” to something you care about more (women’s education, refugee safety, fun in school, etc.) and consider whether you’d like to experience such an event.

Mirage Community

Now that you understand what a community is, you will notice many instances in which so-called communities fall short. When we look closely at communities managed or labeled by an organization, we often find what we call a mirage community. A mirage community may look like a community to outsiders and the untrained. But those who are close to it can easily see that it’s not the real thing. Mirage communities lack fundamental infrastructure and deliver none of a community’s powerful outcomes for members or organizations.

A mirage community is a group that aspires to form community, and may even call itself a community, but lacks fundamental elements that constitute a community. As a result, mirage communities fail to deliver positive community and organizational benefits.

Many times, you can recognize them because participants will miss at least one of the three conditions that support meaningful and returning engagement:

1. Freedom to say no to participation or membership
2. Connection to other people
3. Progress toward a purpose

The fastest way to make a community building effort create only a mirage community is to neglect participant freedom. Coercion occurs when someone uses fear and threats to get people to do (or not do) something that the coercer wants done (or not done). We know of company leaders who think they are “leading” an employee brand community when in reality they’re coercing. In fact, we know a nationally recognized professional association that used to “voluntell” members how they would participate and contribute. “Voluntelling” was a euphemism for threatening members’ credentials if they didn’t give what the leadership wanted. Unsurprisingly, the association’s members were deeply dissatisfied at every level. There was no actual community. At best, there was community theater (members acting as though community existed), a classic mirage community.

When people try to build “community” with coercion, they’re always creating a mirage community at best. We recognize this right away when we hear language like this:

How do we make people . . .

Show up to our event?

Post more?

Engage more?

Give us . . . ?

Authentic community leadership asks such questions in a far more collaborative, caring, and connected way. This sounds more like

How do we encourage members to . . . ?

How do we make clear that . . . ?

How do we share that . . . ?

How do we invite them to . . . ?

How do we make it safe for people to . . . ?

How do we better model . . . ?

How do we grow awareness about . . . ?

There will come a time when leadership must share instruction, requests, and requirements. If any of these needs are contextualized outside a conversation of serving, enriching, emboldening, supporting, or protecting the inside, then it’s likely to be coercion.

With coercion, as soon as people can get away from you, they will. That’s why it isn’t community. By the way, as soon as they get away from you, they’ll tell anyone who will listen that their experience was terrible.

Remember that research indicates that Americans everywhere report that they tell more people about poor service than they do about good experiences.¹⁵ So when your participants see that you’re manipulating with coercion, they may do a better job sharing about your harmful mirage community than they ever would about a positive community experience.