Community building is hard work.

Between being discovered, developing a content strategy, and generating engagement (much less measuring it), managing a community can feel like an exercise in futility - like casting out 50 fishing lines and hoping for a single bite. And when there is a bite, trying to figure out what you did right, what you could improve, and how much this one bite pays off for the amount of time and effort you put into snagging it.

But community building, much like fishing, isn’t a new enterprise. In fact, it’s probably one of the oldest activities in human history: finding people with a common goal or interest, and then organizing those people to achieve those goals. But the ways in which people organize is evolving, as is our understanding of human motivation and the tools we use to coordinate and communicate with each other. The more we reorganize, the more important it becomes to learn from the communities before us, as well as from other professionals currently working in these communities.

We launched a community of communitizers - people who believe that the future of business is in the people that we can empower and the projects that they in turn can build together. We gathered together a small cohort called the Community Architect Tribe - a group of 25 Community Managers (dubbed CATs) from communities of different sizes and industries including:

• high-art marketplace, Wildxyz

• web3 community platform, Charmverse

• emerging technology education platform, InPeak

• decentralized money systems community, BanklessDAO

• tech based training community for women, EmpowerHer

Our objective…

over 6 weeks was to facilitate discussions and establish connections/resources between individuals who had both the knowledge and firsthand experience dealing with common problems of community building such as -

- engagement and retention

- defining and inspiring culture

- developing personal professional growth plans

Our idea was that by starting with a small, curated group of members (who themselves were active super-users by trade), we would be able to coordinate more efficiently, as well as generate energy and value organically.

In some ways, our hypothesis was correct.

By the end of 6 weeks, we maintained an average weekly attendance of roughly 32% for our general meetings, where each week we discussed a single topic revolving around communities. We created supplementary assignments to accompany each session’s discussion and managed to collect 29 individual assignment submissions from CATs (a 19% average completion rate), along with 177 total ‘assists’ (follow-up critiques, questions, or suggestions from fellow cohort members on an assignment submission).

As a free networking and skills development course, we’re pretty enthused with the results of the cohort, and we’re happy to have provided value for its participants. But as a foundation for our own community, we discovered a number of gaps in our methodology, namely content, commitment, and relationship-building. Before delving into these gaps however, it’s important to understand the structure behind these junctures in the first place.

Proof is in the process, right?

The Structure

We began by spreading a wide net, sharing our ideas for the cohort with community managers of both well-known and growing communities.

We wanted to achieve a balance of backgrounds and personal experience - we didn’t want a disproportionate amount of CMs from any one style or size of community to dominate because we don’t believe there’s a one-size-fits-all solution to community building or management. By selecting the individuals allowed into the first cohort, we were able to take into consideration each person’s background experiences to achieve a more representative cross-section of the knowledge and needs of current and (hopefully) future communities, as well as offering more varied perspectives to bounce ideas off of.

In addition, this gave us better odds at getting to know each member on a personal level so we could support each individual in their goals more precisely. We would also have more opportunities to schedule time to talk 1-on-1 with members outside of our standard schedules. From the logistical standpoint of a small team (and as a cohort director), this was the best option to make sure that we would be able to deliver high individual value on the community scale. As stated prior, we wanted to prioritize guiding discussions between members in order to generate actionable ideas that they could implement in their own communities. Keeping in mind that each CAT was individually responsible for managing their respective community (and sometimes several), and that our members spanned 11 time zones, we tried to keep the weekly time commitment as light as possible.

We did this for 2 reasons: to keep scheduling conflicts to a minimum, and to concentrate their attention in a single, easily measurable time window.

We ultimately decided on a single 1-hour weekly meeting for discussion, with the corresponding assignment taking another hour to complete any time before the next meeting - a total of 2 hours per week, with additional programming such as mastermind sessions and hangouts being made completely optional.

To recap:

• 6 weeks with 1 topic of focus per week

• A small, curated community with a wide range of backgrounds and experience levels

• 2 hours commitment per week, with optional weekly programming

Pretty reasonable, right?

For the participants, sure, but for the purposes of planning well-structured sessions, it quickly became an impossible order to fill. What we had offered in a high value proposition for minimal time commitments, we sacrificed almost double with regards to relationship-building and overall cohesion.

Content

Rather than dedicating more time to supporting each person’s individual goals and building up trust (as I had suggested before), we focused on trying to cram as much preliminary information, discussion questions, and group tasks on a single (fairly complex) topic into an inflexible hour to meet our ‘value’ quota. We wasted time trying to achieve the impossible task of making each discussion topic general enough to be approachable by less experienced CMs, yet specific enough to be valuable for the more experienced ones. This resulted in:

• rushed and uninformative concept overviews

• lower overall discussion participation

• fewer meaningful takeaways for individuals

The problem compounded as less productive sessions in the early weeks of the cohort resulted in lower attendance and more drop-off for subsequent weeks, despite gradual improvements in format and presentation in later sessions. Because we neglected to pick a lane with our audience early on, we lost the interest of more otherwise promising CATs than we would have with either a more narrowed scope or more space for ourselves to deliver that value over time.

Delivering value in the first two weeks of joining is crucial to a member’s long-term success within any community. If that value is concentrated in fewer points of contact, then failing to deliver during those times will result in greater overall losses. If you fail to deliver on value, there needs to be some other form of motivation to keep members around, which brings us to…

Commitment

As mentioned above, participation in the Community Architect Tribe was completely free. Members needed only to submit an application and in some cases hop on a call to follow-up on a few of their application responses before we made the decision to invite them into the cohort or not. If they were accepted, they needed to join our private Discord server and provide a brief intro about themselves.

What this provided was a casual, low-stress atmosphere to participation. Everyone who applied was interested in what we had to offer, and shared at least a passing curiosity as to how we proposed to realize it. What this atmosphere didn’t provide, however, was a sense of responsibility within the cohort nor commitment within the community. If someone didn’t think our sessions were worth their time, they had no reason to continue attending them.

As is often the case, both in communities and personal relationships, you get out what you’re willing to put in - it should come as no surprise then, when you ask little from your members and get little in return.

Now, I’m not saying that we should’ve forced everyone to buy-in to participate in the cohort, or that we should have had everyone sign a contract swearing their undying soul as CATs. Doing either of these would’ve been huge barriers to entry, given that we didn’t have any sort of proven track-record of success or value beforehand, and they truly had no clue what their commitment would’ve entailed.

The only thing they could reasonably commit to, without certainty of what to expect from the cohort program, was their own growth. This small ask - a written and communicated commitment to improve themselves in any way, gives members a point of contact and purpose with other members undertaking a similar, yet individualized growth journey. This seemingly innocuous goal allows members to

• collaboratively identify their pain points

• set up personalized plans

• keep each other accountable to their own personal commitment

And this is what we neglected to ask for.

Without a sense of commitment to the community, the community members, or to themselves, the CATs were provided with little sense of direction within the cohort, instead having to either find one for themselves, or to leave without loss - financial or otherwise. A community without a sense of purpose is like one without a community at all. Bringing us to the final sticking point in our experiment…

Relationship-building

It should go without saying that the more high-quality members you’re able to make strong, meaningful connections with, the better off your community is going to be in pursuing mutual goals. But how do you find those star-studded contributors that help you make your community shine?

Conventional wisdom suggests something of a numbers game. Many will swear by the 90-9-1 rule: 90% of members will do virtually nothing, 9% will be somewhat active and contributing, and the last 1% will drive nearly all the engagement and content creation of the entire community (with, sometimes, even the development team included). Taken to an extreme, it doesn’t matter who you’re allowing into your community or what their reasons are for joining. It only matters that they join and aren’t being actively harmful to your community. The engagement will follow, and many would say it’s enough to be called a community.

We were hoping that, by playing the numbers game and checking those boxes, we’d have a community of people interested in our vision. With the metrics shared above, it would very much seem like we’re at the very least crossing our t’s and dotting our i’s by providing the necessary structure and parameters by which members could technically succeed and earn a dandy POAP. The metrics tell that story. For someone looking for value, they either got it, or they left.

But look from the perspective of someone looking to JOIN, not USE, a community - someone trying to find somewhere where they are validated and have a sense of purpose that they resonate with (someone who you should genuinely want to have in your community):

They aren’t looking for a job.

They aren’t trying to be on top of some leaderboard.

They aren’t necessarily looking for tips and tricks, or to unlock achievements or ranks.

They’re trying to relate with people that they have something in common with.

They want to find and interact with people that understand their interests and passions, and can relate to why they’re interested and passionate about them. They want friends they can share inside jokes with. They want caring seniors that can teach them more about the things they already love, and motivated juniors that they can pass their own excitement onto. They want to feel like they belong in that community.

And this is what every community should do, regardless of what that community is - build relationships with people, not just structures in a space.

Architecting a space for a community to thrive goes beyond stability and design - it needs to facilitate the relationships and interactions of the people who come there, and the goals they have in mind. While metrics can help in illustrating the overall health of the forest, it’s vital to familiarize yourself with the trees and their little peculiarities to know whether or not that picture is in fact a community, or just a bunch of green triangles a single shock away from a blazing inferno. Community members need to be seen and treated as people, not as numbers.

Final Thoughts

In hindsight, the lessons we are taking away from this cohort of Community Managers all comes down to what we had set ourselves up to do, but were ultimately too unsure of ourselves to execute on properly. All the pieces were laid out in front of us, and here we find ourselves with a picture we had only approximately predicted. But if you are able to

• design your content deliberately without over-promising on value

• establish a meaningful commitment between your members and the community

• dedicate the time and energy to get to know and support your community members

you’ll be able to build a community backed by loyalty and genuine interest, rather than hype or FOMO.

In spite of these mistakes, there were individuals who stood out in their engagement and participation throughout all 6 weeks of the Community Architect Tribe, who look forward to our community’s development as we continue to push the gospel of a community-driven future - where members are united in purpose, deeply connected, and are actively contributing. We plan to iterate on our cohort process, taking the lessons learned from our missteps, and use them to guide us in the pathway forward.

We believe that community should be a priority, not an afterthought. As we continue to slowly grow our own, launching our community page and more content, we will continue to engage and attract more community passionates to build the bridges between our various skillsets and experiences, enabling us to make stronger connections within our own community just as well as outside of it.

If fishing and community building are work, herding CATs is an artform.

BBT🎋

We value: trust, transparency, integrity, flexibility, compassion, commitment, quality

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