Welcome to the first issue of Community Stacks!
Thanks for being here. 🙏🏻
Like many others in community management, I didn’t set out to do this professionally.
Online communities were a hobby while I was still in school, and after graduating, hosting local meetups was just a fun way to meet new people and build my network.
That was ~16 years ago. I never imagined that it would become a career.
Now I want to pay it forward by sharing some of what I’ve learned along the way.
I’ve benefited from others who’ve done same, including:
Gareth Wilson via Community Inc
Ingrid Zapata Read via Community Made
Evan Hamilton via Community Manager Breakfast
Richard Millington via Feverbee
Rosie Sherry via Rosieland
Joshua Zerkel via The Community Code
Jillian Bejtlich via The Community Nerd
You should check ‘em out.
In the meantime, though, I’m going to start by re-treading some familiar ground…
How do you define community? 🤔
It depends on who you ask. I’ve come across many different opinions, and even debates, over what should and shouldn’t be considered a community.
I like that there’s so much variety. It keeps things interesting. My take?
It’s a persistent, connected group of people who have something in common.
Breaking that down:
Persistent in that it lasts over time, not just for a fleeting moment.
Connected because members interact and have relationships with each other.
People in that all the members are humans, not brands or products.
Something in common, in that there’s a shared interest or need uniting them.
What about audiences vs communities?
I know. We can’t seem to get away from this one, either. 😅
I believe that audiences and communities are different, but communities can emerge from audiences, and an audience is a great starting point for a new community.
An audience comes together because they want to observe or participate in the same thing. You’re halfway to community because you’re already bringing people together who have something in common.
You can make the group persistent by bringing them together repeatedly.
By giving those audience members the opportunity to connect, interact, and form relationships, you’ll have hit on all four elements of a community.
The resilience of the group will continue to increase through shared experiences repeated over time. In other words, the more you bring those same members together to interact with one another, the stronger the community will become.
That’s where Community Management comes in.
Our work as Community Managers is to facilitate those shared experiences. What those experiences are, and how they’re facilitated, varies depending on the group.
I think that’s why there are a lot of differing opinions about what defines a community. Every community is unique, and our experiences shape our perspective.
Nonprofits, education, gaming, media, retail, the public service, and tech startups all work closely with communities, but their context is very different, and the role of the Community Manager isn’t going to be the same across all of them.
But we can learn from each other. The more we share our perspectives, and the more we explore the perspectives of others, the more opportunities we’ll have to find common ground and uncover new and better ways to serve our members.
So… I’ll wrap this up with one question:
What’s your definition of community?
Shoot me a reply or leave a comment. I’d love to know your perspective.
Thanks for reading. See ya next week. 👋🏻
Cover photo by David Dvořáček on Unsplash