We recently hosted a week long Community Sprint where we dived into what community builders should do before they start a community. I currently refer to this as Community Discovery.
As part of the learning sprint we created the Community Discovery Framework, which is what we’re going to dive into in this issue. The Framework will provide you with a few key questions to explore and discuss as you prepare to build community, and help you weigh the trade-offs of various approaches.
There are three phases to community discovery: charting the course, mapping the terrain, and preparing for launch. In this post we’ll walk through each step.
You can download the full-color version, grayscale image, or the printable PDF.
Are you as excited as I am?
“Good community discovery equips you with insights, confidence, and foundational relationships to launch and maintain a meaningful community.”
At the heart of this process is good community research to enable you to make better decisions about your community.
How can you know what good conversations look like if you have nothing to compare them to?
Or, how do you know what people care about, unless you are observing and participating in the conversations that are happening?
This whole process is not about building community. It’s about preparing us for the potential journey of building a community and helping us validate whether we should proceed, or not.
Let’s look at the seven parts of the Community Discovery Framework.
This is often referred to as a community vision or perhaps the community goals. Call it what you like — in the Community Discovery phase, it’s important to know the direction you are intending to go. Clarity is not needed at this stage, an open mind and a sense of direction is.
At this stage there shouldn’t be any stress to refine this into too much. Should there be excitement? Yes! Should there be pressure to know the specific details? No.
Clarity of vision comes over time. To start, it can be as simple as ‘you want to create a space where to connect over a specific theme.’ Or maybe it’s ‘you want to create a supportive and transforming place for your customers to thrive.’
The truth is, at this stage, none of us really know where we’ll end up — the key is putting something on the page and committing, even if just temporarily. Creating a direction for your community is a much more helpful perspective, than trying to pinpoint a specific vision.
Communities are built through the ongoing day-to-day activities of how we show up — where we have conversations, what we talk about, how we present ourselves, and more. The trouble is that it often comes as an afterthought.
When we understand where we are heading, clarity and productivity follows in our daily actions — it helps us understand how we should show up, the things we should say, and the decisions we make. Without alignment a community can lose its focus and direction — essentially losing its ‘why.’
A scattergun approach to building community does not work. Often when we build community we end up trying to share, meet, and discuss things in all the wrong places. It’s not that the places are particularly bad. It’s just that the approach and locations often don’t align with the community compass.
Every activity we do needs to align with how we show up in addition to where we’d like the community to head.
If you want a community of deep thinkers, then you best show up in places that have deep thinkers AND do community activities that align with deep thinking.
If you want to be known for good and new ideas then you better make sure every bit of content, event or activity you host communicates that in some kind of way.
If you believe and plan to uplift people in your community, how can you act on that even before you have a community of your own?
When we plan for how we want to exist in our community, really this means we are planning the creation of community energy — the vibe, how we treat people, the way we respond, the things we care about, and so much more. These are our behaviors, actions and community activities that define our community.
Community growth can come later. When starting out it is super important to be laser focused on aligning every action in the right direction.
I think explicitly defining what we do and don’t do is a powerful way to describe our principles.
These are the behaviors and community activities that we show intention in doing. Perhaps it’s being witty. Or serious. Or fun. Or deep. Maybe we want to be helpful. Or intentionally discuss new ideas. The options here are really endless.
Key questions:
These are behaviors and community activities we intentionally opt out of. Maybe we don’t like long debates or discussions. Or perhaps we choose to opt out of discussing old ideas (and as a consequence what we do is spend time talking about new ideas).
Key questions:
In either scenario, there is mostly no right or wrong — the point is to build confidence in who the community plans to be. We must be aware that how we show up defines the future of our community. Even if we are not building community yet, our intentions on how we show up can be rooted in our early conversations with potential community members.
Finding your people is a continuous process. People are transient — in their community journey with us and also in their journey with their own life. People come and go, the more we can understand and adapt with that, the better the community we can build.
There are a few key things to think about in the people discovery process.
How will we define and refine our people?
How will we seek diversity?
Where will we find them?
People discovery can be a slow process, especially before starting a community. It often feels pointless and the growth is hard to see. I encourage you to stick with it as much as possible. It won’t seem like it at the time, however, with a long term view these kind of actions are scalable, in a very human driven way.
When we think about who we’d like to build relationships with it’s easy to fall into a trap of connecting out to the most connected people. Those that are most visible. These are the ‘influencers’ — the very, very busy people.
I would ask you to take a step back and look at your potential community with a wider lens.
I currently look at this in terms of the Orbit Levels — Explorers, Participants, Contributors and Builders. When we go out looking for people to build relationships, we want to map people who would fit into these levels within our community.
You might think that connecting with ‘influencers’ (who have the potential to become Builders almost immediately) is a great strategy to get a community going quickly. However, the reality is that influencers, more often than not, won’t have time for you. Really you need to create influencers from within the community you hope to build.
We should think about where to connect with people at all four levels, which are:
For all of these people — where will you find them? And how can you create meaning and value for them?
As a reminder, we are not building community yet. We are thinking about how to find, understand and connect to people who may be interested in the community we plan to build.
Key questions:
Conversations in Community Discovery are all about learning and building trust with a diverse group of people.
One way to think about exploring conversations is to reframe them. Almost any piece of communication can be considered as a conversation. You can take any medium and use it to converse. Some require more creativity than others, but the principles remain.
Another way to look at conversations is to see them as learning opportunities. Entering a situation with an open mind and with curiosity is a game changer. Go out there to learn about people. The more you do this, the more people will open up to you and share valuable insights to help you build your community.
The magic about this, is that all the previous steps that we’ve covered so far in Community Discovery will help you explore conversations that matter. Conversations that add value and create meaning.
This means no more talking into the void, yay!
You will have conversations with confidence:
Key questions:
In community our role is different — we are value creators. We are on the constant search for ideas on how to create value and connection for our people.
Patrick Woods says it well and makes value capture look easy in comparison to value creation!
“Value creation exercises include many of the activities carried out by community teams, developer advocates, content creators, and event organizers. This includes creating content and tutorials, developing training materials, hosting events, and creating spaces where people can share ideas and connect with one another.
Value capture is about generating pipeline and qualifying and closing prospects. These are your demand generation experts, SDRs, SEs, and AEs who are generally aligned and compensated on, capturing value.”
The good news is that creating value becomes easier to identify with the more Community Discovery you do. Partly this is down to the research and conversations. The other reason is the simple act of knowing — we have a much higher chance of finding ways to create value if we know what we should be looking out for.
What can you create:
Does this mean we are ready to go build community?
Let’s answer that question by going back to our definition of community discovery:
The purpose of community discovery is to equip you with insights, confidence, and foundational relationships to launch and maintain a meaningful community.
So how are you feeling about starting a community now?
Hopefully by the time you get to this stage you’ll know whether to build community or not. We have to remember that sometimes community is not the right answer — just because we go through this process doesn’t mean we have to push our way through building community.
When seen in action, community feels so special, magical, and out of this world. People watch in disbelief at what some communities can do together. The impact, the change, and the innovation.
Looking from the outside in, it can feel like stuff just happens. I would argue this is rarely the case. In almost every community, there is someone, or some people, doing the leg work behind the scenes to make things happen.
Taking an active research driven approach, like Community Discovery feels logical, it makes sense, and the processes tap into our human needs to connect and build trust with those around us.
I would also argue that it’s fun too! The more you dive in, the more opportunities naturally arise, should you be willing to open your mind to discover.