A collection of non-obvious community building insights

After moving around a lot over the past few years, I've repeatedly had the pleasure of being part of communities built from scratch, building community myself, making friends in new cities, constantly hosting, being around new people. The combination of these experiences has given me a good sense for what works - hosting gatherings people actually want to attend, making connection with new people very fun. I've seen communities flourish, fade away, sometimes skyrocket.

I'm writing this to share some non-obvious insights about what makes communities tick. This is an evolving collection. For a more structured and comprehensive approach, Jono Bacon's writing is great. What follows are the things I've found are often missing or less intuitive when you're starting out.

1. Especially if its your first time, building community is much easier with at least one other person. Having two hosts for any event/online group is always better than one.
   • The dynamic between you two will shape the early foundations of the community - you are the defining cultural epicentre.
   • Off-the-bat, each of you will attract slightly different types of people, making it significantly more interesting.
   • If you'd like to have gender balance, at least one of you should be a girl.
2. Have a loyal core group that comes every time you host in-person/is active online.
   • A strong core sets the tone and intrigues new people!
   • The core group be tight and familiar, but radically welcoming. Actively invite new people into conversations and facilitate introductions.
3. Spend time with people outside of the formal gatherings, even in work-centric communities. We are humans after-all.
4. Follow-up with people
   • Follow up with content, conversations, intros and questions relevant to what you chatted about in-person. If your community is online, follow up with people in dms - this is key to making it feel real. What you follow up with will be different every time and is dependent on conversations in real life/in main channels.
   • You should always have context on the interesting things discussed in the room. Your core group or community co-host will help here, or alternatively, towards the end of the gathering, ask people about their most interesting interactions.
5. People will not fill out surveys, so always get feedback during the event.
   • Ask for feedback before people leave, either by bringing it up casually in conversation or asking the entire group at the very end.
6. The best feedback comes from 1-1 chats
   • People are much more likely to tell you their honest opinions when in a comfortable 1-1 conversation. Talk or text people directly to learn what they did or did not enjoy.
7. Be likable and approachable
   • You need to be the type of person people want to stay in touch with after the event. And not just because you work at X company, but because you're fun to be around, have good energy, are interesting and cool.
   • If people aren't actively reaching out to you after the event, something's wrong!
8. Deliver value to other people
   • Position yourself as someone genuinely helpful by asking people what they need and delivering on that when possible. This is a mindset to really fall into, rather than a rule to follow.
   • The best way to be a strong core of a community is by being the person people come to for help.
9. Food is a great ice breaker
   • Food facilitates interactions. Especially with finger food/charcuterie platters where people spend time picking and eating their food. Conversations start here!
10. Think through the design of everything surrounding your community
    • Invitations, rsvp links should look good.
    • High-quality design attracts high-quality, interesting people.
    • Think through graphics, font, copy. This is extremely important.
11. If you're handing out physical materials, make sure they're extremely high quality
    • For example, a zine that people would want to put in their home, on their bookshelves.
12. If you're hosting a paper reading, give people 15-20 minutes to read the papers at the beginning and make sure to print the papers. Most people won't read beforehand and therefore, won't have a magical experience.
13. Be present in as many conversations as is reasonable. Ask questions, be curious about people, direct conversations to be less traditionally work-focused.
14. Host in a way that helps people both give and get. You can do this by carefully curating the group, actively make intros, and sparking conversations.
15. Engineer communities in a similar way you would engineer a great product: have a clear design statement in mind and think through the end-to-end experience. Think about the feeling people get when they walk into your space, how the lights look, how welcoming the space feels, what interacting with you will feel like, whether the environment is set up for good conversations. You should create a magical experience, like you would with a product.
16. Create association with an already-existing mission, product, community or idea.
17. Loudly communicate intention of your event beforehand and throughout the event.
18. Measure how well you're able to create these spaces. As with products, there's many different metrics you could use. Bail rate, community engagement, direct feedback, growth, number of questions asked, how many people reach out, new product users etc etc etc.
19. The best way to organically spread community is for people to bring their friends. Product-led growth, community-led growth.
20. The more connections are made at your event, the more likely people are to come back for more. At the end of the day, people go to things in real life just to meet people. They can learn about things online. All they want is to meet others who are like-minded. Facilitate as many meaningful interactions between people as possible.