5 Ideas For Community Builders

NYC Gatherings and a new podcast episode

Oct 20, 2024

This week’s podcast episode was called Community Building Challenges.

In it, one person said the following:

On one side, I want every relationship that's formed there to be meaningful, and that requires intimacy, and that requires a small amount of people. And at the same time for the success of the business, I want it to be, you know, big, and I want it to be splashy.

This is a common feeling for community builders and it was part of an incredible podcast discussion among Benjamin, Ross, Crystal, Shriya, Grace, James, Daniel, Safi, Lindsay, Sara and Joy.

Here are 5 ideas and very lightly edited quotes from the episode:

1. Run Different Experiments

My last experiment was…. we've been doing 50 person events. Can I organize these in between nine to 12 person events? For those that may be interested to get to know one another, or they're just like based around some sort of common interest. And that went really well, but it's like, Okay, I can't really scale with these like nine person events. So now this week, the experiment is like big social media stuff.

2.Encourage Member Participation and Leadership

One of our themes for this quarter is let people cook. Like, let's build leadership within the community…
Now we have a full lineup for who's going to host every single session, and we gave them a playbook, and you have full ownership. Here's what you can do the same, but you can also put your own spin on the end. You know like let's keep the 90 minute writing session, but instead of breaking the smaller groups, maybe you want to share a piece and share some feedback afterwards.

3.Try A Different Community Building Model

Usually when you're doing community work, you're kind of going big to small. And I've been finding the upside down pyramid to be a really interesting mental model for how do I take, in my own case, how do I take a table that's just met and how do I make them feel affinity for one another. And eventually, over time, have them feel enough affinity over the group to step up and volunteer themselves

4.Make A Change To The Community

Because it's a digital community we could see who was not feeling really engaged. So one thing, you might have done this, is to truly survey the group and then make the results really engaging and beautiful. But present it as like a sort of precursor to any changes or policies or ideas you're going to roll out. So you make people feel like what you're building is because they sort of indicated interest in it.

5. Potentially Scale Through Different Tiers

I think your issue kind of goes to the heart of what I've struggled with, and I think so many community builders have struggled with is - how do you grow and scale while maintaining that intimacy that makes the group so special when you're getting started? It's a real challenge. And I think a few ways that have come to mind for me are: just the way you think about registering and onboarding new members and capturing as much information about them, letting them know the mission statements and the purpose behind the group. And then potentially, once they are onboarded, maybe offering different tiers, like maybe at base level, you just kind of have happy hours and meetups. And then maybe, a more premium tier for people that really are super aligned with your core mission, and maybe they get the whole premium VIP experience.

You can listen to the episode here which covers a lot more too!