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STARTING AT THE BEGINNING

Just about everyone we speak to wants to work on supporting mature-stage communities. In this stage, friends meet up spontaneously, there are interesting and relevant activities going on year-round, there are insider jokes and funny stories that get recounted, and there is greater power in numbers than there ever was when members were just enthusiastic individuals. We know.

Unfortunately, for those of us who want to create great community, like everything else in life, things begin at the beginning. This is the part that so many want to skip because it’s unglamorous, the results are uncertain, and progress moves more slowly than we want. It’s often also scary because we might prove that we can’t bring people together with our best efforts. This is normal.

Just like life in general, when we start with clarity, vision, and focus, whatever follows goes better (if never perfectly). Eventually, when we’ve created something that works, we get to laugh at the humble beginnings.

Clarifying Organizational Purpose

It’s hard to make a good meal if you haven’t decided what makes a good meal. Does it have to be hot, easily portable, eaten with the fingers, gluten free? No meal scores a perfect 10 on all possible measures of “good.” Imagine preparing a meal without first choosing a menu: chicken fingers, banh mi sandwiches, or soup noodles? You may end with sandwiches stacked in noodle bowls and wonder why lunch just didn’t “feel right.” We see the community version of this very often. Leaders present options before they know what a good community will look like for members and the organization.

All too often, organizations decide to launch a brand community without first clarifying what they want their brand community to do for their organization (let alone for members). For any of this to work, you’ll of course need to offer some enriching opportunity for members to grow.

The beginning is the right time to ensure that organization goals and member aspirations overlap, align, or complement one another. Explain at least to yourself how the organizational goals and the community purpose fit together. The beginning is not the time to choose how much it delivers, because you don’t yet know how, if, or how much it will work.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss understanding members’ roles in different stages, how to choose your leadership team, and critical growth principles for a changing community.

Understanding Your Members

If you don’t know who you’re bringing together (or whether they even want to come together), you’ll need a lot of luck to succeed. So to depend less on luck, you must understand your prospective members as full human beings (beyond the brand relationship). With both care and consent, start conversations with prospective members about everywhere they go and everyone to whom they’re connected. Remember, these efforts are all intended to discover ways they want to grow, not to manipulate them.

If we wanted to plan a perfect birthday party for you, we’d have to know what you eat, do, like, believe, and feel when it is not your birthday (and not dinnertime): Do you like big gatherings or small ones? Are you vegetarian? Are you a morning person or a night owl? Are ritual and tradition important to you, or do you prefer spontaneity? And so on.

This research is always tailored to the needs of prospective participants and the inquiring brand. Only you can discover all the areas helpful when considering the communities your participants want to find.

If you’re feeling stuck when it comes to conducting such research, a good place to start is to consider asking about the following areas. (These categories were developed with assistance from Sarah Judd Welch in an interview, October 2019.)

We’ve found that the best way to learn about people’s lives after they’ve started a conversation about themselves is to encourage them to tell stories about their lived experiences and then ask about their feelings during those experiences. We like the nonjudgmental open prompt “Please tell me about a time when you . . .” Some examples:

. . . attended a professional development meeting

. . . volunteered for a community

. . . participated in a conversation about ________________

Imagine you’ve been asked by a private school parents’ group how to encourage new parents to get connected in school communities. What kind of questions might help you choose the kind of invitations to try?

We know of a parents’ group that was confused as to why scholarship-recipient families didn’t like attending charity auctions where, over several hours, guests watched others bid more than $10,000 each for ski vacations, theater tickets, and special-access dinners. We learned that no one had ever asked the new parents what kinds of events would make them feel most welcome.

The invitation–member mismatch can remain hidden until the work to understand members is done firsthand. For example, one of Carrie’s financial services clients was confused about why its members didn’t participate in live chats among themselves about their own retirement plans. Goodness knows they all wanted to retire comfortably! When the leaders then actually spoke with members, they learned that many members didn’t have retirement plans to talk about! In fact, members had sought out the firm because they couldn’t afford a personal financial planner for one-on-one help. When the company then included retirement-planning experts in online chats and forum threads, the members showed up with rich questions.

The “best” and most powerful forms of research are, in descending order:

1. In-person, one-on-one conversations
2. Video calls
3. Surveys

Never confuse these options as equivalent research tools.

Effective member research does not necessarily need big investments of time or money. Sometimes speaking to as few as ten people can provide meaningful insight. And if you can’t find ten people to talk to you, that’s a meaningful insight too.

In Carrie’s work, she often runs surveys among many customers and then invites respondents to speak further. Next, she will connect with select customers by phone for what she describes as a “discovery” call. This gives her a chance to learn about the customers’ goals in both their work and personal lives. Because community works best when it supports progress toward a goal, she listens to where these customers want support, whether they yet recognize this or not.

GOALS FOR DISCOVERY CALLS

• Assess whether there is a group with a shared identity (based on values) and purpose that seeks to connect in a community. If there are such people and they already have a satisfying place to connect, it may be unnecessary and ineffective to create another. In fact, it can be harmful to fragment an already close community.
• If you believe that it’s worth creating a community, then determine the purpose of such a new community. You need to learn how members will grow, be enriched, and get supported as they come together in a new way.
• Start building relationships with participants who will be candidates for “founding membership.” (We will discuss founding members later in this chapter.)

Without interviews, you’ll be left with assumptions. Whether you recognize it or not, this leads to making choices based on stereotypes. When investing in brand communities, we must remember that each person is a complex human being, and when we learn more about these individuals, they will inevitably surprise us. Community members relate very differently than traditional customers. They return to grow and contribute, not just transact.

Understanding the Stages of Community Maturity

The beginning stages of community building are usually rough and often filled with doubt. If you don’t question your decisions daily, then you’re probably doing it wrong. This is because none of us actually knows how a group will respond in a dynamic world each day. People are complex. Great community leaders are more facilitators than dictators. They know that they don’t have all the answers, so healthy questioning is an important part of the experience.

Researchers have described community stages in many ways. All the named stages here are intended to help us understand what’s going on and what to expect next. We encourage you to recognize these four distinct growth stages, which we’ve distilled from several sources: ¹

1. Inception
2. Establishment
3. Critical mass
4. Segmentation

Inception Stage

In the inception stage, the founding members constitute the community. The community starts because there is a need (for support, knowledge to share, create relationships, etc.). Founding members’ discussion will provide clarity on why the gathering is needed and who should and will get invited. We will discuss choosing and working with founding members later in this chapter.

Establishment Stage

A good benchmark for identifying the shift from inception to the establishment stage is when the returning-participant rate reaches and then remains at about 50–60 percent.² This means that half or more of participants return for more connection. In an online community, you will see members begin discussions on their own. Members will generally self-organize for experiences. They will be unwilling to wait for leadership to execute ideas or events.

Norms—for example, common terms, behavior patterns, and discussion topics—will establish themselves. Rules for communication and participation etiquette will surface.

As total numbers grow, members will select roles within the community. Some members will lead discussions, some will provide support, and many will look for both support and knowledge. Some will step forward as leaders; others remain as followers. Some members volunteer information; others use the shared knowledge in their own lives.

The only way to get to the next stage is for leadership to recognize the ways that members want to contribute and then to extend trust and resources to encourage this best-case development.

In digital spaces, some participants may remain lurkers. Lurkers may read messages posted by others, but do not actively contribute to the community. Nevertheless, they are present and take value from their experience. Lurkers live in a gray area between visitors and members. They will show up and constitute an important part of online communities.

Critical Mass Stage

The critical mass stage is marked by additional members taking on leadership roles and upholding community guidelines on leadership’s behalf. This is typically done by the core 1 percent of members. Obviously, members must be invited, allowed, and supported to take on these roles and the authority that comes with them.

At this stage, resources come to the community without leadership needing to bring them all inside or specifically asking for them. Some participants may, for example, offer a space at which to host an experience; members may ask permission (or not ask) to host their own member events. Leaders must recognize this as offering contribution instead of strictly as transactions.

Other brands may ask to partner for events or promotion because they want to connect with the community/audience to which you now have access.

At this stage, there will be a “need for a more explicit and formal organization with regulations, rewards for contributions, subgroups, and discussion . . . In this stage, . . . trust and lasting relationships emerge.”³

Segmentation Stage

In the segmentation stage, a community branches off into subcommunities (figure 4.1). These subcommunities are a type of inner ring; not all members fit in all rings. (For a more complete discussion of inner rings, see The Art of Community.) For example, a main group of beauty enthusiasts might branch off into segments of skin-care enthusiasts, makeup enthusiasts who are moms, and people who only use environmentally friendly makeup. These segments, or inner rings, may develop their own subnorms and more nuanced focus that live under the umbrella community’s values and purpose.

FIGURE 4.1. The Segmentation Stage

The four stages are only broad descriptions to help us understand what’s at hand. Some stages may exist concurrently, typically in two contexts: (1) You have already built an active audience connected to your brand before you launch the brand community, or (2) your community is particularly newsworthy and goes “viral.”

In both cases, you can easily have members who are already connected at a more mature stage when new participants rush in to join without norms, expectations, or familiarity with the organization.

Reaching Critical Mass

The critical mass stage is what all brands hope for—a group of people connected enough and large enough to somehow make a change together. In movements, this stage is often called the “tipping point.”⁴

We look for these indicators of critical mass:

• Resources come to the group without leadership asking for them. This can include volunteer time, event planning, formation of subcommunities, and more. Asking for resources will remain important: It never goes away. In fact, the stronger the community, the bigger the asks will become.
• Participants find the group without direct invitations to explore membership. At some point, participants will get enough value from participating that they’ll share the experience with others in camaraderie. It’s great when people find you, but the real celebration comes when the community delivers enough value that others want to share it.
• Organizational priorities will shift away from growth toward serving a stable size for more satisfying engagement with current members.

At critical mass, leadership begins a balancing act between attending to growth and nurturing satisfying engagement with those already connected. Some communities don’t need growth for their purpose, so they can focus only on engagement. Most brand community leaders want growth, so their balancing game will just remain part of what they do. Many leaders then wonder what leadership needs arise at critical mass. Here we provide a quick summary:

WHAT TO DO

• Separate responsibilities within the organization. Some people focus on growth, others on programming. Communication and coordination between leaders should remain, but no one can optimally serve those two priorities simultaneously.
• Carefully check back in on your purpose at regular intervals. Ensure that the community is still serving the purpose. If not, get back on track.
• Facilitate and support relationships between veterans and new members. It will become easy for new members to remain disconnected from veterans who already have friends and can forget to invite, include, and support newer members.
• Give more responsibility to the community to give feedback about what is (and isn’t) working, and to manage the parts of the community that they are most passionate about.

AVOID

• Forgetting and ignoring those who got you to a more mature stage.
• Becoming a dictator as management needs grow with a larger community (remember Twitch almost losing Speedrunners).
• Moderating inconsistently. Members leave if they can’t trust leadership to handle the space.
• Relating to your community as free labor. The fact that you’ve built an engaged group willing to do things on your brand’s behalf does not mean they always will. They can and will leave you if you abuse their commitment.

Choosing Founding Members

The beginning is the most fragile and sometimes most frustrating and scary time. We all wonder whether our efforts will ever come to anything. Founding members are the early members who get the community from its beginnings to the critical mass stage.

The term founding member may not fit with every community’s purpose, especially if you consider yourselves to be beginning organically. The term is used here only to help distinguish members who support the community from its inception and help build it into something more stable. You may prefer to call them inaugural leaders, early adopters, original participants, early fans, or anything else. No matter the term, they’re crucial to success.

Many brands hire someone to organize and nurture a community who may not fit the profile of their prospective brand community members. Shira Levine was an experienced online community leader, but not (yet) a beauty fan when she led the Sephora Beauty Insiders community relaunch; by contrast, Danielle Maveal was a “maker” when she helped build the Etsy maker community. The founding members may not understand how to form a community around shared values and purpose, or they may not have the skills needed to do so. Hiring skilled help can be a great support.

The members invited in the beginning are important because authentic community grows around core values. The wrong founding members can bring toxic values into a nascent group. For example, a volunteer for women’s political campaigns who is primarily there to find new romantic partners would make a bad founding member.

Traci Cappiello was a volunteer founding member of the Google Places community. These participants share public reviews within Google Maps. Traci first discovered the community when Google hosted events for reviewers. She joined because she wanted a way to share and “showcase” her native New Yorker knowledge. Traci is now a program manager for Google Local Guides, a group of “power reviewers” (personal communication with Traci Cappiello, September 2019).

She explained,

I started writing reviews on Google Places for fun . . . and was invited to attend some of the first events ever where I met people just like me. Finding people like me who loved exploring in such a fast-paced city was key, and I met both locals and transplants who explored with me . . .

Knowing I ultimately help millions in making better decisions with their time and money is the true reward . . . I knew I was one of the first members in NYC (and eventually the world), but didn’t know that it would grow to be a 100 million+ global community of people passionate about sharing more than reviews.

Note that Traci helped found the community around Google Places because she wanted to share something and connect with others for exploring; she was not looking for a trade relationship with Google.

If founding members who lack camaraderie stay, both their words and behavior will show outsiders that your purported values are mere propaganda.

When starting a community, we recommend starting with three qualified founding members. Research and experience indicate that then growing to (as few as) ten will provide a strong foundation for the continuing journey to the critical mass stage. In the real world, founding members typically already know one another because they’re connected by the core values bringing the fledgling community together.

FOUNDING MEMBER QUALIFICATIONS

1. They live the values of the brand and the brand community.

   We already know that what we do speaks far more loudly than anything we say. If it’s an outdoor recreation community, then you need people who get out to recreate. If it’s a motorcycle touring community, then you need people who ride motorcycles. Even more important, you want people who are already invested in growing in the way that the community will help participants grow.

   The founding members’ choices, behaviors, and vision will set the tone for the community culture and priorities. Imagine a volunteer community in your hometown whose founding members never take the time to volunteer or support other volunteers: not likely to succeed.

2. They already take action in value alignment.

   The community helps focus and support the values and life choices that the founding members have already expressed. The new community participation doesn’t serve as a “fixit” or “motivation” for them to take action in this area of their life. Anyone can see they’re already in action. Imagine a Beatles fan club founding member who buys a Beatles album for the first time because they joined the community: That wouldn’t make sense.

   The true commitment and accomplishments of the founding members should inspire prospective members because they want to grow as the founding members have grown and continue to grow.

3. They have opted in.

   This is straightforward and should sound obvious by now. “Voluntelling” people that they’re founding members is unfortunately common. Such a misguided effort is a classic example of leadership unaware of how to create community. We recommend that you share this book with anyone who doesn’t understand this!

4. They clearly understand the community purpose.

   Communities grow around values and succeed with purpose. If members don’t know or like the purpose, then they aren’t helpful. In fact, they’re a distraction.

5. They are, or can be, in ready and responsive communication.

   People who won’t respond or exhibit care can’t build a core team. Too many leaders seek such people because they have a well-known “name” or because they think the participation will improve in time. New communities are stronger when they avoid such obstacles.

There are two common problems when prospective founding members are invited to participate:

1. They don’t know what is expected of them, so they can’t or won’t meet those expectations.
2. They don’t know how to contribute.

When inviting and supporting founding members, you must make clear the actions they’ll be expected to complete. That conversation will help both them and you understand how they can contribute to the community purpose.

Allison at Fitbit understood the importance of making clear what she expected from founding members. Before her community grew worldwide, she asked for many things from her founding members. In the beginning, however, she asked for at least four unambiguous contributions:

• Share honest opinions on the new online forum design, look, and feel.
• Flag content worth moving from the old forum to the new platform.
• Refer other candidates for founding member invitations.
• “Seed” (start) conversation threads on the private new platform.

Ideally, your clear and specific requests (almost certainly different from Allison’s) will provide an exciting invitation for founding members to express the values they already exhibit and live.

If the “what” and “how” questions about contribution don’t get addressed, then founding members will be confused about their role and value, which leads to disconnection. When the more junior members see this happen, they won’t know how to derive value from their own participation because they see even elders grow disconnected and miss direction. Start the relationship right with a conversation clarifying how founding members are properly qualified and how they can (and should) contribute.

Remember that, in the real world, not all founding members will keep their commitments. This is both regrettable and typical.

It is also unfortunate that we have to remind mirage community leaders that people who don’t want to contribute (because they have been “voluntold”) aren’t helpful. Coerced volunteers will cause distractions and create friction, impeding cooperation between leadership and truly motivated members.

If you can’t find or attract founding members, then there may be missing trust with your brand that you must address before any real brand community can work.

Founding members may not commit to continued participation for a long period (years). This is fine. Lives and priorities change. Founding members get the community to critical mass. If they do that, then they have nobly served their role. Ideally, they had lots of fun too.