8

CREATING SHARED EXPERIENCES AND SPACE

In part 1, we spoke of the importance of shared experiences for any brand community. Although community shared experiences can include both planned and surprise events, here we will address planned events, as these are the kind that leaders organize. We’ll refer to these as “events” for simplicity.

The principles discussed here apply to both “paramount gatherings” and local gatherings. A paramount gathering is a large event for the whole community, where members can meet one another, learn from elders, and participate in the community maturation (or evolution). The paramount gathering invites people to convene from wherever they live globally. Members share in rituals. (See The Art of Community chapter on the rituals principle.) The community’s most senior elders and organizational leaders attend. Examples include CrossFit’s CrossFit Games, Twitch’s TwitchCon, and Salesforce’s Dreamforce.

Event Specification

The more specific the values, the more specific the interest.

Imagine that we plan two chocolate-tasting events. The first will be a four-hour seminar on contemporary interpretations of Mayan chocolate tradition and introductions to the artisans reviving the practices. The second will be a ninety-minute tasting of Hershey’s new seasonal chocolate flavors with all-you-can-eat s’mores. Although both are chocolate-tasting events, each will appeal to different participants, based on different interests founded in different values.

The first will likely draw participants interested in history, culinary tradition, and avant-garde foods. The second will draw people who like sweet things and maybe lots of them. One isn’t better than the other. What matters is that, as participants gather at each event, they will see and (possibly) meet others who share their interests.

Many community builders unfortunately fail to consider how (or whether) their events reflect community values. Too many seem to believe that inviting strangers to a bar after a day of work for a happy hour will naturally lead to a community. We don’t understand how inviting us to a noisy room to stand around drinking with strangers bonds us to anyone. If shared events work best when they reflect the community values, we have to ask, What values get reflected by generic happy hour bar events?

To be clear, it isn’t bad to like or attend happy hours. They just don’t usually serve community building as much as a more values-driven event.

Because communities bond over their shared values, the more an event could be or is attractive to all communities (i.e., any values), then the less valuable/effective/interesting it is likely to be for your specific community. The more specific the community values, the more specific the community events should be.

Carrie identifies as a woman entrepreneur and really likes meeting other women founding and growing their own firms. Through years of investing in growing her connections to this community, Carrie has discovered that she actually doesn’t like attending generic female founder meetups across Seattle. They are simply not specific enough to her interests. She’s discovered that she cares far more about meeting founders of any gender, creating sustainable “calm companies” with a social purpose prioritized over executive egos.

She avoids events that promise panel discussions on general business practices. She also avoids networking happy hours because they offer only superficial connection. She does seek out events connecting people and efforts for social good, because she’s confident that her specific values will match the specific programming and the crowd.

Sephora practices this in its community as well. The company calls its managed customer community with over one million members the Beauty Insider community. Sephora leaders understand that, although all members within the brand community care about makeup and beauty products, there are many different interests within that boundary. In fact, the company has segmented members into forty groups (and counting). Leadership is savvy enough to make sure that no offline event ever tries to interest all members all the time. This makes the company’s programming way more interesting for participants.

The “Sephora” beauty convention is a great example. Glamour magazine has called it “the beauty equivalent of going to Disneyland.”¹ Tickets are limited and hard to get. Sephora’s “insiders” have advance access to tickets. It is a giant event comprising many four-hour-long “master classes” on different beauty methods, including classes on hair, skin care, and makeup. Members come to learn from skilled masters in specific disciplines.

Other events invite members to meet celebrity beauty stars, and others invite fans in for special Sephora announcements. Each kind of event appeals to different members with different interests within the beauty enthusiasts community.

Later in this chapter, we will discuss intimate experiences and campfire spaces, and the importance of including fun. You’ll learn how you can support connection during shared experiences.

Invitations

In practice, participants understand how an event will reflect community values because the host establishes the intention (explicitly or implicitly) in the invitation. The shared event experience starts with the invitation, no matter how formal or informal. In fact, the invitation’s level of formality (whether a brief text, a personal phone call, or a parchment letter) may help guests understand how important, serious, exclusive, or momentous the event will be. In Priya Parker’s guide to gathering with purpose, The Art of Gathering, she explains that the invitation is one way to share the “tone and mood” you intend before participants ever show up.²

One of our favorite examples of a team using invitations powerfully comes from the multibillion-dollar online home goods retailer Wayfair. The engineering team that handles the checkout features hosts a monthly Wednesday breakfast in the office, where team members hand make Belgian waffles. Each month, they invite another team with whom they work to join. A specially printed (and a bit cheeky) invitation to the “Wayffle” breakfast is always hand delivered to guests. Emily Levada is a Wayfair executive whose role is two levels more senior than the team, and she specifically shared how special she felt when someone sought her out to deliver the invitation personally. The card quality and the personal delivery help other teams understand how important and special the event feels for the hosts (personal communication with Emily Levada, October 2019).

A powerful invitation tells guests the real (community-oriented) intention of the event. For example, we could invite you to our Oakland event next Friday by messaging you like this: “We’ll have drinks and pizza at our place next Friday. You should come.” You’ve no doubt seen an invitation like this many times.

Think about whether the invitation feels more compelling and prepares you to connect with others if we invite you to the same evening with a phone call: “Reaching out to let you know that we’d like to see you again. Next Friday we’re inviting neighbors over who we’d like to know better. This is to grow friends nearby as we build a life in Oakland. We’ll have drinks and pizza. Will you join us?”

You may not like this event (you may not like Oakland), but you can see how the second invitation sets up the experience so that participants understand that it isn’t only about a carb-loaded dinner.

We might attend an Oakland active citizen event in a beer garden, but only if the invitation says more than “Join us for a beer-garden evening.” It’ll say something to the effect of, “We want to build friendships among those taking time, doing the work, and even risking safety to make Oakland safer and cleaner. This will be a time to check in on our neighbors investing in Oakland.” The event will sound even better if it’s held in a room quiet enough for comfortable, meaningful conversation.

As we make an event more intention specific, it may appeal to fewer people. This is a good thing. For community building, it’s far better to attract fewer people who accurately understand the intention and are excited by it (quality participants) than to draw many people who are indifferent, unaware, confused, or misguided by the intention (volume participants). Community building requires participants to connect. If you attract the wrong people, the right people then discover the wrong people exactly where they want to connect.

Whether informal or formal, effective invitations encourage people to participate more and enrich themselves and others. So, no matter how big and complicated a community may grow, community is really created one invitation at a time.

Intimate Experiences

The small grows to big—never the other way round.

Community leaders who talk to us about building community often envision building to a membership that will eventually fill an arena. Indeed, teams at Salesforce, Twitch, and CrossFit have all achieved this.

Although it’s possible to grow to such a level, remember that people don’t feel connected to your community because they joined a big crowd in an arena. They feel connected because of the individual conversations, private moments, and vulnerability that they experience with other participants.

We call these “small” experiences intimate experiences because they feel intimate even if they take place in a giant room, a field, or an arena. They almost always occur when we are physically close to others, in both planned and, very often, unplanned ways—for example, while waiting in a line, sitting in adjoining seat rows, or even eating a meal close by.

As leaders inviting people together and creating experiences, we need to allow and support with time, space, and permission the intimate experiences that connect participants.

Of course when participants share intimate experiences, they begin to form or deepen relationships. These participants won’t just feel connected to the individuals within the intimate experiences; they will also feel closer to the greater community. Further, they will very likely feel more appreciative of and connected to the brand that made the intimate experiences and connections possible.

Campfire Principle

To encourage rich intimate experiences, leaders should use the campfire principle. This doesn’t mean that you literally create campfires (though you can). The principle means that leaders create the kind of experience and space often found around campfires.

At campfires, we have proximity, permission, and conditions to connect meaningfully with others. Most important, campfires are small enough that everyone can participate, if they choose, and feel seen. Proximity and permission are fairly self-explanatory. By conditions, we mean factors that give people the context to share private conversations that can grow into vulnerable and memorable relationships. This can entail handling any variables that will distract or inhibit a possible vulnerable conversation—noise, interrupting messages, time limits, menacing oversight, anything.

Twitch’s Bobby Scarnewman described campfires as giving participants “a chance to open up and say what’s really on their mind and what they’ve been trained not to say in uncontrolled settings.”

Even as a campfire group grows, participants remain connected around the fire, and the conversation on one side can differ from the one on the other (intimate experience). But we still experience the intimate campfire together. Campfire experiences are where community relationships actually begin, and they enrich whatever bigger event is going on around.

We can create campfire events at which participants can find an intimate experience. We can also offer campfire space where there is no planned event, but participants can use the available space for intimate conversations.

When we plan big events, we want to ensure that we’ve planned or (at least) allowed for campfire events and spaces within the big event. This will include ensuring that participants get invited to and can find the campfire experiences whether through self-selection or by invitation only.

Imagine that we have invited you to a weeklong brand community summit for five hundred leaders, to be held on Hawaii’s Oahu North Shore. Now imagine that during that week, we invite you to join just six of us to watch a sunset sitting around a beach campfire, sipping jasmine iced tea. You can probably predict that the evening’s conversation, sharing, and laughter will be much more meaningful to you, and will connect us more deeply, than all the time we spend among the hundreds of summit participants. Although intimate experiences may occur during the big five-hundred-person event, they’ll happen far more often within campfire spaces. And although intimate experiences can and do form serendipitously, they’re much more effective if you plan for them.

A planned campfire event within a big event (say, our summit) can be any event where participants will experience intimate enough space, time, freedom (permission), and conditions to share an intimate conversation, even if it’s in a space set up within a big arena. At our summit, walks on the beach, meals at tables of eight people or fewer, musical jams, or discussions on niche topics can all count.

In principle, you can just offer a campfire space with seating and a fire ring (real or metaphorical!), or you can plan a campfire event (including singing and skits) with invitations.

The important point is that no one will gather around a campfire if there is no campfire space.

For example, our Oahu summit will be far better if we plan ahead and provide a dozen cozy spaces with seating, comfortable lighting, and ocean views for new friends to sit together. Standing around a parking lot is much less fun, but that’s exactly where many events figuratively (and occasionally literally) leave participants to gather intimately.

To apply the campfire principle to an arena event (or any big main-stage event), you must arrange areas where participants can feel comfortable gathering and speaking in an intimate experience.

When we attend events, we can tell right away whether the producers understand this basic principle by the spaces they set up. If all the resources are set up for a main stage and the intimate gathering spaces are an afterthought (or simply missing), then we know the event is all show and that the leaders deprioritized bringing people together.

Campfire spaces can appear obvious, but sometimes are recognized only by trained eyes (now yours). Go back to the imaginary Carrie and Charles five-hundred-person brand community Hawaii summit. Now imagine that we invite all five hundred to an evening beach campfire. Are we going to plan for one giant campfire for five hundred people (plus crew) milling about? Or would it be better to set up several fires in different areas so that the spaces are more intimate? If we were really sophisticated, we’d set up several campfires and also (1) a walk down the beach in groups of no more than six, (2) a silent surf meditation gathering with reflection over tea after, and (3) a ukulele sing-along at the hotel. Each one serves as a campfire event with its own space. Planning several campfires means more intimacy at each.

There is reason and value in creating a main-stage event that can draw people together. The wise organizer also creates smaller campfires to encourage and add intimacy.

Consider that the travel to and from venues (walking groups, carpools, and shuttle rides) can also serve as campfires. In fact, we see this all the time, even while participants and planners frequently miss it.

Can you build a campfire online? Of course! But you’ll see now that they’re often missing. Online campfire spaces are missing if leaders have invested all their resources into a fancy landing page and newsfeed, while neglecting a forum to join specialized and intimate groups, engage in a conversation about specific needs, or explore niche topics. The online spaces are also inadequate when they’re filled with distractions including irrelevant advertisements, links to other groups, and unrelated updates. The distractions tell members the space isn’t protected.

Imagine a telecommunications brand inviting your IT administrator, Maria, to join a support community for your company’s new business internet package. If Maria logs in and discovers an invitation to “Ask questions and get involved,” without any qualifying questions, the host company is treating the space as an arena. Sure, a community supporting an internet package is less sexy than . . . almost anything we can imagine. But for some, such a support community can be a job saver. Those participants are seeking campfire experiences to get just the right help when they need it from just the right people who understand them and their pain.

So if instead, this brand invites participants to find a group for their specific needs and user types, provides a way for participants to introduce themselves to those with similar needs, and personally invites them to a group call for collaboration with others in their organization, it is using the campfire principle.

Fun

One of the most important components to include in events is fun. If a gathering isn’t fun, then consider canceling it or redesigning it to include fun. Like us, you may think this obvious. Unfortunately, we’ve both attended events where it was clear that no effort was invested to make it fun (at all). Remember that for relationships to form, participants must return for more events. If the events aren’t fun, who wants to return?

The good news is that there are many ways to make events fun, and most of them don’t include tacking on silly elements to a boring day.

We’re big fans of Stanford professor Stuart Brown’s work understanding the importance and influence of play. He shares what he calls eight play personalities that can help us understand what features help different people relate to experiences as play.³ The distinctions can help us recognize how our different events can relate to different kinds of people.

PLAY PERSONALITIES

Artists and creators. Fun involves making things that are beautiful, functional, or goofy. These people may also enjoy taking things apart, repairing, and restoring. This can include decorating.

Collectors. Fun includes the thrill of collecting the most, best, or most interesting objects and/or experiences. Although the experiences might look like exploring, collectors want evidence that they’ve “collected” a new experience.

Competitors. Fun involves competitive games with specific rules. Competitors play to win.

Directors. Fun involves planning and executing events. Directors are organizers. The planning can be as much fun as the outcome.

Explorers. Fun involves adventure and exploring. This provokes imagination and creativity. Such exploring can be expressed through physical, emotional, cultural, or aesthetic experiences. There must be a component of discovery.

Jokers. Fun involves nonsense and silliness. It often looks like foolishness.

Kinesthetes. Fun involves movement. This often takes the form of athletics, dancing, or yoga. Kinesthetes like to move their bodies through space. Remember that the movement, not competition, is the focus.

Storytellers. Fun involves creating and experiencing thoughts and experiences in a story. Many kinds of performers are storytellers.

The play personality distinctions can help us understand that not everyone will consider every fun event fun. We may notice that members group together within one play personality and focus on particular events accordingly. As leaders we can experiment with different kinds of fun events.

Etsy created an online marketplace for “makers.” Obviously most of the company’s events offer fun to artists and creators who connect to learn skills and make crafts together. This is plenty of fun for them.

If you want to learn more about fun, please read Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, by Stuart Brown (with Christopher Vaughan).

Shared Space

All communities must have shared spaces to retain long-term strength. Shared space is a venue for meeting that allows participants to ask for help and deliver support. Whether they do or don’t depends on several factors. We’ll speak to those later. In this discussion, space can mean a physical location or a digital location where participants can meet.

Posting cool stuff in an online space is never enough. Watching someone speak or perform in a space is better than nothing, but groups with no aspirations to community can watch things “together” (think of concert audiences). The shared space serves community building when there are avenues for participants to share who they are in some intimate (and vulnerable) way and understand that they can both ask for help and offer support to others.

What counts as a shared space will differ depending on an event’s scale, because obviously the shared space must serve the event size. For many intimate experiences, an intimate space is needed—such as a restaurant table for six Harley riders exploring the California coast. But if you’re participating in a giant experience, then a much bigger space is required, such as several downtown Atlanta buildings for the Academy of Management conference.

Think of an event you attended recently, at which you considered yourself connected in community, perhaps a meal with family. What made you feel connected? Our guess is that you had (at least one) conversation with six or fewer other people (at a time). In that conversation, you recognized that you shared (at least some) values with the others. Almost certainly, explicitly or implicitly, someone offered support in that intimate conversation. This doesn’t happen by accident. The space is the container that sets the conditions and tone for that vulnerability.

An intimate space is the kind of place that encourages or facilitates intimate experiences. Although the space and experience are related, they are separate elements. Leaders very often encourage and facilitate intimate experiences by offering comfortable and helpful intimate space.

Even when we participate in a giant event, our most important memories almost always consist of an intimate experience nested within the giant experience. You’ve probably attended at least one giant sports event— collegiate, professional, maybe even the Olympics. The memories that tie you to the other people who were there generally don’t involve thousands of other spectators. They’re mostly connected to the dozen or so people around you.

Imagine your excitement upon receiving an invitation to share dinner with your favorite music artist, Lady Gaga. Now imagine showing up and discovering that this means you will share dinner with her . . . by video and with thirty-five thousand other invitees who will watch the live stream in a Los Angeles stadium. Will you feel more connected to Lady Gaga or her fan community? You might be happy to have received a free ticket to an event she leads, but otherwise it would probably feel weird to “share dinner” with Lady Gaga miles away (which is one reason why artists don’t do this). Part of the problem is that you aren’t sharing space.

You may have fond memories of watching a winning game with friends, and remember how much the experience helped you feel connected. We believe you. You shared space with them. Had you watched the same win on your phone on a beach alone, we’re confident that you wouldn’t feel the same strengthened connections with others. Shared space matters when knitting community. It influences how community bonds grow.

If we don’t consider, prepare for, and invite people to the right shared space, participants will not experience one of the key elements that bonds a community.

Digital space can count as shared space. To be effective, there must be some digital boundary that participants cross in order to enter into this space. Online community members may have to log in to a dedicated site or download a special app to interact with others. In this way, insiders can be confident that participants include only those with appropriate convening values.

Once inside, participants must be confident that there are hosts (elders) who protect the safety inside the space and ensure that the experience reflects the convening values.⁴ The boundary crossing and host supervision make the digital space special and thus a community shared space.

Principles for a Good Physical Venue

In the best venues for community events (whether a chapter meeting or a national convention), you must control the “end-to-end” experience as much as possible. If strangers can stroll through your event, and others can make distracting noises or keep the lighting too bright (or too dim), they can erode the effectiveness of the space.

Many event producers choose terrible venues for connecting people. They may do so out of lack of resources, lack of research, or lack of empathy. But it pains us when we see a crowd of people who want to connect and the space inhibits what could otherwise be an intimate and powerful experience.

The next sections describe some principles to consider when choosing your venue.

ENSURE SAFETY

Participants can hear one another, remain calm, and share themselves, confident that they choose who hears, sees, or judges them.

When there is a history of aggression or reason for concern, you can share a code of conduct beforehand that, as necessary, establishes both appropriate behavior and how to report violations. Ensure that all organizers and volunteers are aware of this code and the reporting process.

CONTROL THE PRIORITIES

Selling drinks, meals, or tickets should never be the top priority for a community leader. This is a marketer’s priority. Although the space may offer options (such as raffle tickets), you must control what priorities get protected. Ensure that no one else chooses when, how, or in what medium to get participants’ attention. We often see competing people with divergent priorities using announcements, video screens, “experiences” (e.g., photo booths), and the like pulling participants away from intimacy and connection. Although media and activity diversity might help an event appear more interesting, the host must ensure that participants experience a space protected as a container for intimate connection. For example, five-foot-tall video advertisements looming over conversations always have an impact, whether you notice the influence or not.

ENSURE ACCESSIBILITY

You must ensure that the right people can find and get inside the venue. This often means considering questions like “Can a veteran in a wheelchair, a parent with children, members without cars get to and into your space?” Further, you must ensure that those in attendance are culturally welcome. Hosting a women filmmakers’ symposium at the Hustler Casino is one obvious example of a poor choice.

Sometimes barriers exist that go unnoticed until the right questions get asked.

Charles visited the Oakland Adventure Club earlier this year. He noticed that the photos on the walls depicted dozens of only Caucasian people. How welcoming does a place that displays photos only of white people feel to an Asian American visitor?

HOG gatherings are often held in bars. This can be great for people who drink alcohol. But if every event is hosted in a bar, it will exclude people who don’t drink alcohol or even avoid it.

You will have to consider how welcome your visitors feel in your spaces no matter what else you want them to feel.

MAKE IT COMFORTABLE

This sounds obvious, but it clearly isn’t for many planners. Consider noise, lighting, appropriate furniture, temperature, luggage storage, even coat storage. Charles presented at a conference at which luggage and coats were strewn around the learning space because no one had provided an appropriate place for either. All of these kinds of variables can distract participants from the reason for their gathering.

Make sure there is sufficient seating and spaces for private conversations, recharging electronics, and quite places to retreat to. If you can’t provide all the comforts you’d like within one venue, you can share suggested local businesses and public spaces where participants can go for a break—hopefully with new friends.

MAKE IT FUN

We all like to go to places that are fun! Places that are cheap and easy for you are not necessarily fun. Carrie recently attended a Seattle-based conference that offered optional midday dance classes so that participants could get out of their heads and feel refreshed, silly, and connected. Organizers scheduled no other programming during this time, so it did not force attendees to choose between fun and learning. The conference was held at Monkey Loft, a high-ceilinged warehouse furnished with bean bag chairs, hammocks, plants, and craft tables. There were some spaces for loud music and others for contemplative silence. Carrie loved the care the hosts exhibited in offering a fun space in the middle of a conference.

ARRANGE SEATING FOR A COMMUNITY EXPERIENCE (NOT OBSERVATION)

Furniture arrangement powerfully influences people’s behavior, whether in favor of connection or of observation. We’ve attended far too many “community” events at which the chairs all faced a microphone at the front. We call this “auditorium” or “lecture” arrangement. This cues participants that they’re expected to sit down, shut up, and watch. Which is precisely what they do.

For more connection, set up your furniture so that participants can easily see one another, turn to each other, and chat. Dividing a gathering into “pods” of six people is a simple way to start.

Remember, round tables themselves of course don’t create community naturally; they only help make a setting. Leaders must turn attention toward the attendees’ pods so connection can happen. Round tables used where participants all face a stage are mostly a waste and typically just plain uncomfortable.

CONSIDER ALL YOUR SENSES

By far, it’s best to ask attendees ahead of time about their special needs and accommodations, such as wheelchair access, elevator needs, companion animal accommodations, and language interpreters (including for sign language). If you don’t ask, you will almost inevitably exclude some who fear the space won’t accommodate them comfortably. There’s also a real chance you discover you can’t accommodate the people who show up because you’re unprepared.

SIGHT

• Put the light where you want attention. (Candles on dining tables are great for drawing attention to the center.)
• Dim those areas that would visually distract from where you want participants’ attention.
• Notice what is ugly, dingy, or dilapidated. This clues participants that you don’t care about the space (or them).

SMELL

• Notice what smells clean, fresh, sour, dirty, or rotten. Clean the space of dust and debris.
• Add flowers, open windows, and replace stinky furniture or carpets.
• Only use minimal (if any) potpourri, perfumes, and other strong manufactured odors. Many people are sensitive or even allergic to such artificial smells.

SOUND

• Notice where and when it’s noisy. This distracts whether you think it does or not. Some attendees will be more sensitive to sound than others, and loud music or noises can overwhelm and even trigger fear or panic.
• If unexpected noise shows up, such as a maintenance or cleaning crew, manage it so that it pauses or finishes as quickly as possible. Pause your activities if you need to. Pretending the noise isn’t distracting tells participants that the host is not protecting the space.
• Can participants hear what they need to at all times? If you expect interactive sharing to the whole room, prepare the appropriate microphones. We’ve seen producers want interactivity and then never set up the audio equipment to make this work. We’ve also seen music drown out activities, and too many speaking groups scheduled for one room. Each time, producers didn’t consider the sound.

TOUCH

• Notice whether participants can sit, where they can sit, and what they can sit on.
• Notice tables, charging resources, and the space where participants will stand and walk. Ensure that all are comfortable enough for the time you’ll invite them to stay and leave enough room for people with wheelchairs and other mobility devices to navigate.
• Consider all the surfaces that participants are likely to touch. Charles participated in an activity where an instructor invited participants to fall to the ground in a trust exercise. She didn’t notice the skin-gashing rocks until Charles fell on them (really).
• Ensure that the space is warm enough and that people can regulate their temperature. Carrie knows of one community builder who, upon arriving at his venue discovered it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit. He sent crew to to buy dozens of blankets for attendees.

TASTE

• Food is almost always a good idea. Across many cultures, offering even a small amount of food means welcome. It reveals that the host cares about the participants. We agree with a restaurateur friend who believes that in many cultures, food is simply a proxy for community. When we bring food, we bring a piece of community.
• Notice where and how participants will get food when they’re hungry, and how difficult that will be. If you want them to stay near, ensure that appropriate food is near. (This sounds obvious, but it isn’t to many.)
• Note that if you arrange food because it’s easy and cheap (junk food), participants with specific food needs may have to leave to get their own appropriate food. We have both done exactly this ourselves.
• Carrie notices that leaders in her circles provide the same snacks over and over. When she spends ten minutes arranging for something different, including gluten-free, vegan, kosher, and nonalcoholic options, “people’s minds are blown” (sometimes that’s all it takes).

Rejecting Conventional Wisdom

Most people don’t study how to bring people together into meaningful and connecting experiences. They go with conventional wisdom. We’re living in the loneliest era, so it’s safe to assume that conventional thinking has failed us.

For example, bars are usually terrible places to build community. They are noisy by design, they expect us to buy drinks, and they fill the space with lots of stuff intended to distract us (screens, games, lights, signs, even pretty people). All of this pulls us away from protected intimate experiences.

Yet think about all the people you know who assume that a bar is a great place to build community. Consider that if your conventional wisdom isn’t at least compatible with the time-tested wisdom in this book, then it’s probably unhelpful, maybe harmful.

We mention this because chances are that someone you work with will reject the principles here, noting that events are “usually” planned another way (conventionally). Consider what wisdom they are drawing from and whether you want different results from those in the past. If you want different results, you’ll have to set up and use your spaces differently.

Principles for a Digital Space

If your community started online or mostly connects online, creating physical space for participants to connect will greatly strengthen the community. We can’t stress this enough. Consider Twitch, the online gaming platform with well over 150 million users per month. Although millions find and connect online, Twitch understands the importance of supporting dozens of small physical gatherings around the world; in addition, Twitch hosts two annual TwitchCons, to which tens of thousands pilgrimage. The company understands that no matter how big its community grows online, the physical gatherings strengthen the community.

Many brands invite customers worldwide to connect in digital space. Fitbit, Salesforce, and Sephora are all examples of brands that do this successfully involving tens of thousands of people. Designing a brand-appropriate digital space can be more challenging because we can’t use all five of our senses. Due to these sensory limitations, digital spaces often do not create the depth of relationships that can be created in physical spaces. That’s not to say there is no power or importance to online connection; we must just keep appropriate understanding and perspective.

Typically, digital community spaces work best in particular circumstances:

• As a supplement to an offline community
• As a space to discover others with shared identities, interests, and location
• Where participants’ accessibility to one another is a problem

• When a stigmatized and/or vulnerable commonality brings people together—for example:

  • Sexual challenges (disease or trauma)
  • Survivors of trauma who wish to remain anonymous Marginalized identities and issues
  • Mental health issues or neurodiversity
  • Niche groups who feel geographically isolated (fan communities)

Six important principles for any community digital space apply to brand online spaces:

ENSURE THAT MEMBERS CROSS THROUGH A GATE

Participants must choose to participate and then take an action to cross from the outside into an inside space. In other words, they should not be able to find themselves inside your community space accidentally. For example, if they arrive in your community as a result of an online search, they should be aware that they arrive as an outsider. They must elect to become members. Such next steps may include downloading a specific app or entering a specific code.

WELCOME MEMBERS

Authentically acknowledge members as they arrive for who they want to be known as. Generic welcomes aren’t enough. If you’re welcoming software engineers to an open-source software event, then the welcome should clearly acknowledge arrivals as software engineers who care about open-source projects. The welcome should remind members of their shared identity as people who build software in a way that is open, accessible, equitable, and flexible.

ONBOARD MEMBERS FOR INFORMED PARTICIPATION

Visitors should be able to recognize and understand the values, culture, and (at least some of the) norms before they participate. For example, in forums that allow uneducated and immediate participation, the inevitable experience of repeat questions signals to participants that the space isn’t well regulated and that the boundary is not protected. This is bad for authentic community.

Although barriers can limit participation (for instance, placing a requirement on the number of threads participants must comment on before they are allowed to post their own thread), appropriate barriers with accessible gates will protect meaningful engagement and connection on the inside.

ENSURE THAT LEADERS BOTH STEWARD PARTICIPATION IN THE SPACE AND MODEL IDEAL BEHAVIOR

This creates a context so that participants feel safe to go beyond fronting. Leaders should not only model the ideal behaviors of the community but also recognize others who do the same, both in larger and private spaces.

MAKE COMMUNITY GUIDELINES KNOWN, AND USE THEM

This establishes trust and safety. According to Reddit’s Evan Hamilton, consistent and timely enforcement is the way that most successful groups create feelings of safety. Guidelines evolve over time with the community, and they mature in ongoing conversations.

Moderators must consistently and publicly moderate. This includes privately conversing both with harassment victims and with perpetrators.

There is no perfect way to write and enforce community guidelines. The good news is, you can search for community guidelines in use today. You’ll find many examples to inspire your own.

ENSURE THAT THE LOOK AND FEEL CORRESPOND TO YOUR MEMBERSHIP

Look and feel here refer to the experience of such design elements as the colors, typefaces, and layout of a user interface. There is no one design option that will suit all communities. (Duh—there are no butterflies on the HOG website, but there are plenty on the Butterflies Community, a website for new moms struggling with their mental health.)

The wisdom on building successful digital community space is deep and nuanced. To understand enduring principles regarding the complexity of building such spaces, we highly recommend the book Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities by Amy Jo Kim.

There is no getting around it: to handle look-and-feel design, you will almost certainly need to work with an experienced designer. We recommend that you save yourself many headaches and months by bringing one on as early as possible.

To get to great look-and-feel designs, the best brands start with a prototype space and then invite a few members to judge and comment. You can respond to their preferences before a launch. Then, of course, continue to iterate over time. Both the community and times will change.

The following are just some areas you’ll need to consider in your design:

• Layout. Ensure that it’s easy to find ways to engage, including discovering events and new posts, and navigating to relevant subgroups. The layout should mimic mental models that members are already familiar with (e.g., the connections between a main group and subgroups). Consider how the layout presented will change, if at all, for first-time visitors, those who have transitioned to being a member, and then for leaders.
• Buttons and calls to action. Consider the most important thing you want members to do when they are in your digital space and ensure that there is an easy way for them to do it. Ensure that buttons that lead to actions are easy to find and recognize.
• Imagery and iconography. Consider how imagery will clearly communicate the purpose of the community. And consider how iconography, such as moderator badges, will signify special roles.
• Member profiles. Consider how profiles appear in the community and can be found. Also plan how much participants can customize them and update their own image or avatar.
• Consistent application across channels. The design should look consistent so that participants recognize and feel familiar with your look whether they’re reading an email newsletter, attending an event, or replying to online posts.
• Private spaces and subgroups. Consider how members will break off into smaller groups to segment into specific areas. Consider whether anyone can join these spaces or whether members must be invited.
• Search. Ensure that it’s easy to find past conversations and other members.

In the conversations addressing these seven areas, consider various perspectives related to experience, culture, physical abilities, age, member location, and any other relevant issues. Designing for accessibility is an enormous and vital topic for online communities. Many great resources exist to teach both experts and novices about accessible design. Carrie recommends Accessibility for Everyone, by Laura Kalbag, to support your efforts.

Conditions for Shared Spaces

A successful venue enables and supports participants’ communication and connection. Two conditions must be in place for this to work.

• Time for participants to talk to one another. Participants must understand they’re in a space with both time and permission to speak with one another. Scheduling events with every minute filled with attention directed toward a stage, videos, eating, administration activities, or skill learning doesn’t give the participants opportunity for intimate experiences that build community. Something may get done, but it won’t meaningfully deepen relationships.
• Sound conditions that allow for real conversations. If participants can’t hear one another, they can’t share a conversation. If you play music so loud that participants must shout to be heard, you’re thwarting connection. We’re surprised by how often event producers who say that they want to connect people choose venues (a loud bar) or events (loud concerts) where even we, community experts, can’t connect with others.

In digital spaces intended for community connecting, the same rules apply. Participants must have access to a feature whereby they can share a private (intimate) conversation with a small subset away from the “noise” of the greater gathering. This allows for intimate experiences.

Features of Shared Spaces

For a community shared space to work, participants must understand explicitly or implicitly that the following four features are in effect:

1. The space feels safe (enough) on the inside. Participants must understand (usually by observing norms and examples) that the inside space is safe for them to express both (a) their pertinent values and (b) more vulnerable and intimate identity.

2. A gatekeeper protects the boundary. Participants must see (explicitly or implicitly) that one or more people are keeping outsiders out and that anyone who won’t support the shared core values and purpose will be removed. An exclusive invitation or a nomination process can serve as a gate. The most important lesson here is that participants must understand that there is some kind of screening process and people protecting the boundary. (The boundary principle chapter in The Art of Community discusses how leadership uses boundaries in constructive ways.)

3. Inside, members can identify one another as distinct individuals (i.e., there is clarity on who says what). In communities, participants want to be seen and recognized, and to see and recognize other members. If this doesn’t happen, it isn’t a community.

This is one reason we are (fairly) adamant about name tags. If the inside is safe and participants really want to connect, then we should help participants forge connections and relationships that will carry on outside the community space. For whatever reason, there may be some cultural resistance to name tags. We find that when the leadership makes known the rules for the space and leads by example, the resistance dissipates. We tell participants, “The name tag isn’t for you. It’s for the people who want to talk to you.”

In an online space, there may be good reason to hide identities for a time. In these cases, avatars (unmistakable visual representations of participants, including photos) remain important until true identities are revealed.⁵ Total anonymity without reputation building and accountability never works in nurturing online communities. In fact, it exacerbates community-destroying behaviors such as bullying and harassment. Participants need some way to build up a reputation for contributing that is connected to their profile, even if the profile uses a pseudonym for exceptional reasons.

4. There are prompts, facilitation, and/or permission from a host (leadership) for members to meet and express interest in other participants. Typically, this means that elders model social connection and invite participants to connect as well. The modeling demonstrates the expectation that participants are meant to connect.

Most people in a crowd fear speaking to strangers without prompting. This is one reason the host’s role is so important. Hosts can set expectations for a space that change the whole experience inside. Many event producers dismiss or misunderstand this.

When hosts explicitly invite all participants to connect with one another, often with a prompt, they are telling the participants that this is the expectation for the space. Even more important is the hosts’ role modeling. If they only hang with their best friends, enjoy the open bar, and dance or sit solemnly listening to performed music, they influence the space more than most understand.

Simply telling people to “connect,” “make friends,” and “have a good time” never works. We recall a conversation with one community leader we’ll call Thomas, who prefers to avoid name tags. He thinks they make any event a “networking” event. He then goes out of his way to introduce people who attend.

Consider the math: If there are two hundred attendees at a two-hour event, even one with no logistical distractions, how many minutes as a host can Thomas invest in connecting each guest? How does he know when he misses someone? Does he ditch guests who want to chat with him for, say, five whole minutes? What Thomas doesn’t recognize is that his flitting between guests role-models for all that the space is intended for short, superficial conversations. Although he wants something more, that’s all visitors see from him.

• • •

If you want to further explore creating meaningful shared experiences that move and connect people, we cannot recommend The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker, highly enough. We hope her wisdom saves billions of people from pointless, boring, and disconnected events for years to come.