Building Community Part 1

What follows is what I have observed about building community over the last 10 years. There are 10 steps, each of which builds on the other, but can always be revisited. Today is part 1 and the first 3 steps.

1. Prepare

Before any discussion of community there must be personal preparation. Because community is relationship around more than it is relationship with, you must prepare yourself to be an effective catalyst. Community requires activation. A leader activates community and makes it happen – they unite people and ideas with other people and other ideas that previously had not come together.

What do you prepare? Your voice, your vision, your values.

These will be loose and blurred around the edges at this point – and that is fine. You have a gut instinct but you are unable to articulate it clearly at this point.

Do not under estimate how long a period this is. Voice, vision and value don’t come overnight. For me, I spent 8 months mentally preparing and getting my voice, vision and values ready for Like Minds. I spent a year getting them right for Feedback (a youth ministry back in 2004) before we exploded with growth.

During preparation time you carry out experiments, make mistakes, and learn how to motivate. Of course, the reality is that you are always in preparation as terms of preparing the community for the next level of growth, wherever you are at.

Do you build community in the mass market or in the niches? I say the latter. When you get out of the mass markets, you find the niches were there are people whose voices are unheard. This is the community equivalent to untapped potential energy: an unheard voice.

When you start attracting some criticism for your voice, vision and values, you know you are entering into unfamiliar territory and out of the mass market.

2. Passion

Community is common unity. People unite around three things: common person, common cause, common enemy. So find what is the commonality, and begin building around it. It can be pretty much anything, but the more niche the unity, the tighter the community. When a community is built on something that others don’t understand, the ‘us and them’ mentality creates a powerful niche. This is why Twitter users create such strong communities.

Therefore you must tap into passionate emotions. Why? Because they motivate people to act, motivate people to share, and motivate people deeper than financial incentive.

Any strong community exceeds financial incentive. Community members will even sacrifice finances for the community, and will work tirelessly for the community without any financial reward.

The reward is in the fulfilment of their passions. Your members achieve self-actualisation through the community’s drive.

Of equal importance is to identify what Seth Godin calls the ‘Sneezers’ – the influencers who are already leading people around this passion. Note that they are not competition. The rule is to complete, not compete. They are the ones that already have community, albeit on a minimized scale.

3. Platform

As we said, people want community, but the leader is the person who creates a platform for people to have common unity around. People generally lack the strength to pull the other people and ideas together, which is why the leader is unique.

You then need to ask yourself, what is the best platform for the passion?

Answering that question requires an article or two of it’s own, but the platform will need to have a high degree of spreadability. This means: ease of access, ease of use, ease of share. A 21st Century spin on the medium being the message is that the platform is the message. The way in which your community gathers is the clearest display of what your message is and what you stand for. Just think on what the various nuances are from each of these:

• Big event
• Twitter hashtag
• Small groups
• Weekly get together
• Facebook Group
• Community Forum or Social Network
• Training
• On the phone, or over skype
• Coordinating an event together
• An event that focusses on empowerment first, or
• An event that focusses on high numbers

Your platform will also need it’s most powerful weapon: mantra. In create to gain word of mouth you need to provide words for mouth, so powerful sayings that encapsulate your cause are critical to its spreadability – otherwise, your sneezers won’t know what to say when influencing others.