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CONTENT STRATEGY

Content for community building means many things to many people. We’ve seen the term used to describe anything created to support a community. This includes the text on forms, large celebration events, and all the postings, announcements, and invitations for those events. It is hard to talk about appropriate content when the term refers to everything in every medium for everybody.

Here, the term community content describes resources and experiences that support three goals:

1. Organizing participants
2. Connecting participants emotionally
3. Educating participants in a manner consistent with community values and goals

Understanding how content can help and harm is deeply connected to understanding your members. If you aren’t sure how well you understand your members, go back to part 2!

If your community materials don’t serve the three goals we’ve listed, they don’t count as community content here. It’s content for something else, which isn’t necessarily bad; it’s just not community content. For example, community content differs from material that serves strictly marketing, customer support, and any other goals different from the three listed goals. We discuss how brand community serves those goals later.

Content Forms

There are two broad community content forms: media and shared experiences.

Media. This is any text, visual, or audio resource that supports emotional connection, organization, and/or education.

Shared experiences. These are events that emotionally connect, organize, and/or educate participants. Ideally, they do all three. It’s best if these events are also fun. People generally dislike and avoid unpleasant events, and we (Carrie and Charles) specifically avoid unfun events ourselves.

When you offer content, it must be in alignment with the community’s purpose. Otherwise it’s distracting to your membership. Imagine inviting Harley riders to a DIY knitting workshop at Etsy’s headquarters. You may think that this is so obvious it isn’t worth mentioning. But we’re regularly surprised by how many leaders offer content without considering whether or how it aligns with community purpose. Just because something is fun or interesting does not make it appropriate content for your community. And more content is not better. More appropriate and community-aligned content is better.

This principle allows you to cut distractions from your content offerings and show participants that you’re gathering and serving them for the reasons they found you.

Now, you can host fun events because they’re fun—for example, a Harley knitting and movie night. The wisdom to take away here is that you can’t assume that any event is good for any community. If your Harley riders want to knit . . . buy the yarn. But! Do the research first, instead of sowing confusion about why an event is being hosted in your community.

In our experience, inappropriate, ill-fitting, or confusing events typically reflect desperation on the part of leaders. They don’t know how events serve members, so they try “anything” or try to copy events that worked for others. That’s a recipe for programming that confuses members.

The content must serve participants’ needs. Remember, connecting (actual emotional connection) with others who share values counts as a need. If your event will help participants connect, then ensure you’ve structured it so that they can connect, instead of standing around wishing they could find deeper connection. And make the intention explicit in the invitation.

The biggest mistake we see is creating content that focuses so intently on a main-stage event that it leaves no room for members to participate, share, or connect. An example is an online live stream with an expert with no welcome from an elder or invited discussion before or after. Such events ensure that participants never reveal anything vulnerable or meaningful. Repeated events like this train members to perceive your “community” as a place for superficial transactional experiences.

Content Categories

Once you reach critical mass stage, your participants should create as much content as formal leadership creates, if not more. But leadership’s participation sets the example for all members. The content that you plan, encourage, and allow must serve particular purposes so that participants get value when they experience it. The following sections offer an overview of content value areas.

Education

Educational content helps participants do something better and grow into who they want to be. The growth can take the form of skills or topic understanding (for example, motorcycle liability law). Even better, education helps participants grow internally into more mature and wise people, beyond their skills. (The Art of Community discusses how communities support growth externally and internally.)

For example, Etsy hosts craft and sales workshops where members learn both from one another and from experienced Etsy staff.

Stories

The stories your community shares reflect your lived values (not just madeup pretensions). Typically, important community stories refer to three topics:

• How we formed
• How we are changing
• How we affect the world beyond ourselves

Danielle Maveal, an Etsy founding team member, explained that Etsy headquarters posted stories about their communities on the official Etsy blog. The company would run monthly roundups about Etsy Team meetups, challenges, and triumphs. The stories together created a record of the changes and lessons learned among the leaders as they created a new platform for makers. Although Danielle admits that these posts were “low-performing content in terms of views,” teams’ seeing their names and initiatives on the Etsy blog “meant a lot to the Teams that worked so hard.” In addition, this content modeled behavior and sparked ideas for other teams.

Group Identity, and Debate and Conflict

This content respectfully and civilly talks through conflicts and in doing so helps clarify the group’s identity. Once the identity is clarified, some members may be inspired to leave. This can make the community stronger because those who decide to stay have a better understanding about their ongoing connection.

Welcoming Invitations

This regular content welcomes new members to participate. You may consider such posts to be frivolous, especially if they’re frequent. We assure you they’re not. If your community is growing steadily and members remain to contribute, you will reach a point where some members become “veterans” and others are the “new guard.” Segmentation can be positive (even necessary), but segmentation should be intentional, not simply arise because there are few or no ways for older members to initiate, welcome, and get to know to new members. If the connections don’t happen, an unnecessary and unhelpful schism (split) will become predictable (or inevitable). Such schisms of course inhibit experienced elders from supporting the maturation of younger members who seek guidance.

Instituting a formal welcome is critical for blending old and new groups. The activity gives veterans an easy way to contribute, and helps new members quickly feel seen, recognized, and acknowledged.

Even early in Etsy’s growth, the company understood the importance of a strong welcome to all new participants, so it scheduled daily “Newbie chats” for all new members. Within these digital spaces, all those new to Etsy could connect with more senior members. The conversations established a relation-ship of welcome and support and modeled the communication tone within the community.

Celebration and Recognition

Content must celebrate the people within the community. Celebrating individual and group milestones, such as membership anniversaries, outside awards, achievements, and life changes, is critical. Each celebration reveals that members are recognized as whole people, not only for their transactional value to the community.

Etsy, for example, still encourages local members to create “craft parties” to “celebrate creativity” and connect members. The guidelines specifically encourage leaders to “make fun a priority.”¹

Collaboration

Organizing time and space to create things together is critical to binding a community. Part of leadership’s role is to steward members’ helping one another. If a resource is needed in your community, whether for an individual or for everyone, you can create an experience where members gather to create or revise that resource as needed.

Danielle explained that in her time at the company, Etsy scheduled regular in-person “skill shares” where teams gathered to cocreate workshops to share skills broadly among members. Often at Etsy parties, participants would build something together—for example, “Adopt Me” vests for animals looking for new homes and tiny hats for preemie babies. The list of generous gifts made together is a long one.²

Cultivation of Friendships

Content that cultivates friendships helps a community feel more connected. Without it, your “community” may (almost certainly) feel like a transactional place to “get stuff”—such as information, access, or special deals. If this tendency is unchecked, your community will devolve into a group.

This content makes members and the community more memorable for participants. This content is often the most common material found in an online community space, which surprises many leaders who don’t understand its value. Although content for forming friendships alone is never enough, a healthy community can produce a lot of this and remain relevant and strong.

Friendship cultivation most often appears in two related ways.

DISCLOSURE (SHARING SELF)

Participants share (disclose) things they want others to know about them. In the best outcomes, this leads to vulnerable sharing. No one feels connected with people from whom they must hide all their beliefs, identities, and values. When the disclosure is offered, participants discover shared commonalities even if they are “off topic” from group goals. In part, the connections grow because we like people who we think are like us.

Vulnerability is something that has to be “earned” by a group. In other words, sharing too much vulnerability too soon will distance people rather than bind them. What the right amount is, is determined by culture and subculture. We can’t help you more than that here. The most important lesson to take away is that disclosing vulnerable truths can be really powerful in connecting members, so take notice of vulnerable sharing and encourage it. Also, be aware that at some point you must consider what vulnerabilities are best saved for very intimate conversations outside of larger-ring conversations.

ASKING FOR HELP

Participants ask for help and (ideally) find it. Communities transcend groups because of the mutual concern. When members provide help because they care, the fundamental core of community is present. In fact, if your community consists of nothing more than a few people who care about one another, asking for and offering help, you have a community far better than have many leaders with giant mirage communities.

• • •

Sharing of self and asking for help aren’t things you can bargain for, force, or trick people into doing. In an effective community, participants offer these things because they perceive the community to be a safe space where they can do this. Self-sharing and help-seeking arise because you’ve adequately prepared and offered the space. In by far the best examples, leadership models self-sharing and help-seeking first.

Coercion may provide a spectacle of friendship cultivation, but it actually makes the space less safe. Invitations to participate must remain invitations and no more.