A couple of months back, Vik Duggal gave me some sage advice: get involved in communities. They provide a means of building trust that is impossible with broadcasting at more scale than 1-1 communications. To this end, he recommended trends.vc, the paid membership community started by market researcher Dru Riley.
I was already moderately active in a couple of communities, so I worked in them for several weeks before joining Trends. I wish I joined earlier. The difference in engagement was eye-opening. I tried yet another (less expensive) paid community and saw how this engagement was far from guaranteed.
Following all this, I engaged with management at three of these communities to learn more about what works to drive value. A few lessons emerged from these interviews.
First, engagement levels are different by time and day. Some patterns are short-term or noisy. At a minimum, there is usually a weekday/weekend pattern. One important task is figuring out when people are around. But sometimes, there is a longer-term trend of engagement happening somewhere else.
In correspondence, one administrator admitted to being in a "quiet period" of low engagement. "This has happened before, and it will happen again." He was sympathetic to my reluctance to pay even small money for a community that was not driving value. He offered a free period to stay engaged and see if the conversation level comes back. He believed that this was cyclical and would respond to "some ideas" he had for value creation in the coming months.
King Knute could not hold back the tide, but the tide would recede again all on its own. Figuring out how to survive through these changes will be essential for long-term survival.
Second, the community is its members, not its leadership. As I traveled among some smaller communities, I saw the same people driving engagement. These emergent leaders happened for two reasons. First, this is who they are. These are people who do not care to start communities but are often leaders of any room they enter. Second, small communities give them the space to act in this informal role.
In my limited observation, larger communities are more about formal leaders. Tooling amplifies their message. People join these more prominent groups to listen or speak - that's a job to be done! In contrast, smaller groups function on discussions. Emergent leaders facilitate this messier, flatter interaction.
Third, content seeds engagement and maintains stickiness. I was sold on Trends by the thoughtful market research. My initial incentive was to interact with people thinking about these reports to get the next 20% of the value. Once within, Dru had created two pieces that drove further initial engagement. He had a game - standups - that would deliver rewards based on consistent participation. This encouragement for consistent progress was what many of us need - including me. The main prize is around earning a ticket to elite community events - a meetup and a mastermind.
The second community content initiative that drove value was the discussion of the following report's topic. I got access to insight before the final draft came out. Of course, this discussion is not the curated summary of the release, but it is where that extra 20% was. The interest in the report would be while it was in progress, not after it was published. I did not expect this phenomenon, and it is necessarily something that can only happen in the virtual space near the author.
Fourth, intimate events drive significant value. Not all the communities I am involved in have these. Those with events have more engagement. One makes a meetup its raison d'etre. The other offers it for members who have "won" its games.
The former has 40-50 attendees per meetup. They made a wise decision to use breakout rooms for the main body of the event. That way, it's no more than 6-8 people in a room getting to have a discussion. In recent weeks, they started a training program for community members to lead rooms to improve facilitation. Trained room leaders who are not room leading on a particular day can add more value to keep the discussion going. The same subset of emergent leaders continues the conversation in the persistent, non-event part of the community. There is a - slow - accretion of people pulled in from the meeting who then take part on a more longitudinal basis.
The second one uses short one-on-one meetings to facilitate high-quality conversations. A few of these run in a row. You never know who you are going to talk to within your sequence. The conversation is barely long enough to seed a dialog that can extend into the community. So far, this has worked well.
I've seen some non-intimate events as well from communities. Brownbag teaching events, speakers, mini-conferences have all arisen. To my mind, these have the worst qualities of content and events. As events, they are ephemeral. And second, they are one-way: a speaker delivers their content.
Q-and-A can help with this one-way aspect. However, because the group is non-intimate, this requires a facilitator to speak for the audience. The audience itself remains silent.
Thankfully, many are recorded, which addresses some of the impermanence. But now the one-way quality sticks out because a recorded talk is content!
I do not yet have a handle on how these four observations might feed into each other. For example, can events reduce the long cycle of engagement? Can a community without content bring it in to drive membership and rejuvenate participation?
It seems like there are elements of a flywheel here - what creates momentum, what causes drag. I don't pretend to have sufficient data for a recommendation for those managing communities. I do plan to keep participating to see how I can drive value for others.
Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash