Community Building
Most community initiatives fail before they actually start.
This probably sounds familiar: You are invited to an event that introduces a new community. It’s a successful event, and all plans sound promising.
But after three months you still haven’t heard anything else about it.
A lot of initiators launch their plans with a big bang forgetting about the effort it really takes to build trust and identity.
Without identity and building trust: No long term participation.
Your goal should be activation instead of attention.
This starts with…
With more than 650,000 members from 67 different countries, the Female Entrepreneur Association is a great example.
The mission of this hub immediately describes a strong drive and connecting factors: The community is driven to inspire and empower women from all over the world to turn their ideas into reality, build successful businesses and live a life they love.
Complementary to this meaningful mission, this community has become successful through a good communication strategy in which “continuing to learn” is central.
The community has been publishing a video every Tuesday for years in which tips and advice are shared about building a successful business.
Most initiatives fail, but yours will be less likely to fail if you start with a solid foundation, and if you allow others to participate in making it their own.
I know what I am going to do when I am allowed to go to cafes again. I am going to buy myself a delicious breakfast. And I’ll buy you one as well. I am going to look for 5 people. I’ll ask them to test my work. With simple questions I am going to learn about 85% of the usability problems. Not like this: Did this notification sound give you the information you needed in your experience?
“More isn’t always better, Linus. Sometimes it’s just more”. – The Movie Sabrina (1995). Do large communities add more value than smaller ones According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the “magic number” is 150. His theory concludes that we can only really maintain about 150 connections at a time.
We can hardly remember a time when all of this wasn’t possible. Online communication tools and social platforms enabled us to develop bigger communities more easily. But do we achieve so much more by making everything bigger? Sometimes people tend to focus so hard on making everything bigger that they lose sight of what’s really important.