Congrats, you've completed your Social Identity Cycle! You now know who your members are, how they will participate, and how to validate and reward them. And hopefully, you have some ideas of how you'll measure the health and engagement of your community. That gives you plenty to work with on the community level of your strategy. We're ready to move into the third and final level of your community strategy: the tactical level.

In this chapter we'll look at the spaces and experiences that you're creating for your community, and what you'll do day-to-day to make those spaces and experiences highly engaged. We'll talk about the different kinds of experience you can organize, go through the 7Ps of community experience design, and talk about the specific elements that can make your community experiences truly meaningful and memorable.

The Two Kinds of Community Experiences

Although there are a lot of actions a member can take along the commitment curve, the real community magic happens when they participate in a shared experience.

It's your job as a community builder to thoughtfully design spaces and experiences that draw your members in, make them feel at home, and serve as a proper environment for the kinds of interactions you want them to engage in.

All community experiences fall into two buckets: synchronous or asynchronous.

Synchronous experiences are where members are participating live, at the same time, usually in the form of an event or meeting. Think conferences, workshops, discussion circles, meetups, etc. These kinds of experiences can be virtual or in-person. They're great for helping members connect more intimately, have deeper conversations, and create serendipity.

Asynchronous experiences are where members interact without needing to be present in the space at the same time. Think forums, groups, messageboards, and chat groups. These kinds of experiences only happen online, and allow members to connect with the community 24/7. It's more accessible since people can connect from anywhere in the world at a time that is convenient for them. And it allows members to hold conversations with larger groups of people, collecting a wider variety of feedback and insights.

Most great communities I've seen have a combination of both. They offer asynchronous spaces for members to connect every day, get answers to questions, and engage in discussions. Then they'll complement those spaces with live events and gatherings where members get to interact in-person or virtually over video.

Asynchronous experiences provide breadth. Synchronous experiences provide depth.

Companies sometimes think of in-person or event-driven communities as hard to scale, but just look at the Duolingo example we spoke about earlier in the book. 2,600 events are being hosted per month around the world, by empowering members to self-organize. Virtual events like Google's DevFest gathered tens of thousands of developers around the world for over 200 simultaneously hosted events. Dreamforce, Salesforce's big conference, brought together over 70,000 attendees in San Francisco. Burning Man gathers close to 80,000 people in the desert, and has local “burns” being hosted all around the world year-round. Event-driven communities absolutely scale.

Bringing members together live enhances the asynchronous experience. Now when members interact on your forum, it won't just be an avatar but an actual person that they've met, talked to, and shared an experience with.

And online spaces will enhance your offline experiences by making sure members can stay connected, and continue to support each other in between live gatherings.

My recommendation, in most situations, is to do both.

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

Music is the perfect metaphor for facilitating community engagement. A great song will have a steady beat with different lyrics, a chorus where everyone knows the words to sing along, and a crescendo where the energy peaks and the crowd goes wild.

A great community is the same. It will have a steady cadence of different content and experiences for people to engage with (the beat), regular rituals where everyone knows how to participate (the chorus), and then one or two big energizing experiences every year where the whole community comes together (the crescendo).

The key is repetition and consistency. When your members can experience your community in a consistent, repetitive way, it will make it easier for them to develop a habit of coming back and they'll know exactly what to expect and how to participate.

A simple way to do this is to create standard, recurring experiences. Keep the overall format of the experience the same, and host it at the same time every day, week, month, quarter, or year.

A brainstorming exercise I often take companies through will help you come up with ideas for recurring experiences you can host for your community, based on different time frames. You can do it yourself or with your team by writing out across the top of a piece of paper the following time intervals, as shown in Figure 6.1.

Under each interval, write down at least three ideas for what you can do to engage your community with a recurring experience daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually.

If you look at any great community, there's a good chance they have experiences hosted at all, or almost all, of these frequencies.

A general rule is that the less frequent the experience is hosted, the bigger the production it will be.

Consider most religions for example:

• Daily: Members pray at home.
• Weekly: They go to their place of worship to gather and pray together.
• Monthly: There's an event, a fundraiser, or some other sort of gathering.
• Quarterly: There's usually a holiday every three months or so.
• Annually: There's a big holiday that brings everyone together.

These rituals are consistent year to year. Everyone knows when they are and they already plan on participating. The format is the same each time, but still leaves room for creativity and exploration within the format the makes it more exciting for members.

Figure 6.2 shows some of the ways this cadence shows up in the CMX community:

• Daily: We start and facilitate discussions in our online community.
• Weekly: We have recurring threads like our New Member Welcome on Mondays, Promoday on Wednesdays, and Friday Fundays.
• Monthly: We host a local event on the first Tuesday of every month, and have dozens of chapters around the world who do the same.

  

• Quarterly: We do a big study with the community and publish a new research report.
• Annually: We host CMX Summit and CMX Global, our two large conferences.

So you can see, on a daily level, the experiences are more minimal (prayers, discussions) and as the timeframe gets larger, the experiences are bigger and more produced (events, holidays, conferences).

Now not all communities need to focus on all of these time frames. Burning Man, for example, hosts one epic event per year and that's pretty much it! It's such a powerful experience, though, that people spend all year preparing for it, creating artwork, fundraising, and gathering with their friends and camps. So even though the organizing body of Burning Man only does the one event, the community has created its own recurring experiences throughout the year to keep getting together. And of course, the community also started organizing their own local “Burns” around the world.

So don't worry if your community doesn't have content and experiences for all of these time frames. Just use this template as a way to brainstorm ideas for how you can create more consistent recurring experiences for them to engage with.

Consistency is incredibly important in communities. It's much easier for members to engage when they know that we welcome new members every Monday, that a meetup is going to happen on the first Tuesday of every month, and that our conference happens around the same time every year. It helps them build a habit of coming back consistently.  It's already on their calendar. They have to do less guessing about what's going to happen when.

These kinds of recurring experiences aren't only valuable for helping members form habits, they deepen their connection to the shared identity over time. When they show up to an event and they know what the format, flow, and rituals will be, they feel like they're “in the know.” When I show up to temple for Yom Kippur, I know the order of operations as I walked in the door, put on my tallis, and went through the prayers in the same order that they do every year. I know I'm going to fast for 24 hours, and that I'm going to absolutely demolish some bagels when the sun goes down. These are our rituals.

When someone comes to CMX Summit who's been there for 10 conferences in a row they feel a sense of pride and familiarity. They feel like an established member of the community. They know the rituals and regular experiences that show up at every event. They know we always have “birds of feather” discussions, where we set up lots of round tables, each one with a different topic, and attendees can just sit down and start discussing that topic. They know we'll have an “introvert zone,” a talk-free space our former CMX Summit lead Evan Hamilton created to provide attendees an opportunity to quietly hang and get some alone time. They know that every speaker will get a massive heartfelt standing ovation when they get on and off the stage because we do it every year.

Of course, not everything in a community will be recurring and repetitive. Having variable content and experiences is important, too. It keeps your members on their toes and makes them want to come back to see what they might have missed. While CMX Summit happens around the same time every year, we don't want the experience to be exactly the same. Members won't feel as compelled to come back if it were the same content, the same exact experiences, the same people, etc. So every year, we come up with new creative experiences and content to mix things up and surprise and delight our members. If a new experience works well, it might just become another staple in the CMX community.

The 7Ps of Community Experience Design

Once you have a good idea of the types of experiences you want to create for your community, whether they're synchronous or asynchronous, and recurring or one-offs, the next step is to design the experience itself.

When designing any shared experience, there's a standard set of pillars we use called The 7Ps:

• People. Who are we gathering?
• Purpose. Why are we gathering?
• Place. Where are we gathering?
• Participation. What will participants do?
• Policy. What are the rules and guidelines?
• Promotion. How will you invite members?
• Performance. What will success look and feel like?

If you're launching a new forum, use the 7Ps to design your experience first. When you want to host a new kind of event for your community, you can design it with The 7Ps. Any experience you create for your community, The 7P's will be your guide.

Curating the Right People for the Right Purpose

It always starts with people. When designing any community experience, the first thing you should think about is who you're going to be bringing together and why.

Our temptation is often to make events and spaces open to anyone, or at least everyone in our community. But like we discussed in Chapter 3, there are a lot of different identities in your community. Each of those identities may have unique needs, goals, and reasons for gathering.

So who are you going to invite into this space or experience, and why?

One way to get more specific about who you're inviting to participate in an experience is to start with your business goal in mind:

• If your goal is to improve customer retention and success, then perhaps you'll want to create an online group just for your customers to support each other.
• If your goal is to drive word of mouth and referrals, then you can organize a dinner and invite both your most loyal customers and your biggest target prospects so that they can sit and talk to each other.
• If your goal is to get more insight for your product, you might want to invite members who have experience using your product to share their experience and tips with each other.

Your purpose can also be tied to the kind of interaction and relationships you hope to be able to facilitate:

• If your hope is to facilitate a very practical conversation, then think about who can you invite to the space who has deep experience with the topic you'll be discussing.
• If you want to make people feel like they're a part of something really big and exciting, then it may make sense to bring *everyone* together for a large event. Customers, prospects, audience members, employees, partners … everyone.
• If you'd like to host a deep, vulnerable conversation, then you might want to only send private invitations, and choose people that you know will be respectful and personally invested in the topic.

Large events and online spaces are still going to be made up of many smaller spaces and experience. So you can still break it down into more specific spaces with an intentional purpose and group of people. Perhaps you host a VIP dinner for your customers at your conference. Or you create an “anonymous questions” section in your forum. Any identity that exists in your community is an opportunity to create an intentional, dedicated space.

We have a whole range of spaces and experiences where our community gathers at CMX and Bevy. We have spaces just for Bevy customers. We have spaces just for our CMX Connect chapter leaders to interact and support each other. We have free communities open to the entire industry, and premium spaces for paying members focused on enterprise communities. We have big global conferences, medium-sized local meetups, and small curated discussion groups. Every space has a unique purpose, focused on serving a specific group of people.

Whatever you organize, always start with people and purpose.

Aligning Size with Purpose

While it's common to want to grow your community, adding more people to a community space or experience isn't always a good thing.

A person will be much more willing to be vulnerable in small groups where they know and can see everyone who's listening and there's an expectation of confidentiality. If they were sitting on a stage in front of 1,000 people, they aren't going to be as open and vulnerable.

The smaller the group, the more safe the members will feel. So if you want to create a community experience where people can be vulnerable, share emotions or secrets, and be really open, you'll want to keep your group small. Smaller groups also mean that there's more visibility into who's in the group and how much they're contributing. Going back to Nadia Eghbal's classification of communities, “clubs” or small groups will have higher participation rates.

For other communities, bigger can be better. More members means more access to knowledge. It (usually) means a more diverse group of people to share insights. More opportunities for collaboration. If your goal is to help members get answers to questions quickly and efficiently, you're going to want a lot of experts in the community who can help them out.

Bigger can also make members feel like they're a part of something really exciting and important. The Women's March was one of the largest protests in the history of the United States. It's sheer size made them feel like they were a part of a meaningful and impactful community.

You can offer a diversity of experiences for your members, big and small. Don't take on organizing too many experiences at once, but consider that you might have many different kinds of people in your community who prefer different kinds of participation. Some members might like participating in a big forum, and some will prefer smaller online mastermind groups. Some will like attending big conferences and others will prefer getting together for a dinner. Online or offline, big or small, passive or active, you can offer a range of different experiences for your members to get involved in the way they need at that time.

I've found that people generally crave the size of community that they don't have. When our network spreads too thin, we crave intimacy. But intimate groups lack diversity and are slow to change, so we start to feel isolated and seek more options. It ebbs and flows.

• Small groups → big groups → small groups.
• Move from suburban → urban → suburban.
• Focus on family → friends → network → friends → family.
• Gather in small meetups → big conference → small meetups.
• Small cults → big religion → small cults.
• Inner circle → outer circle → inner circle.

If there are only small events focused on a topic, you probably have an opportunity to build a large gathering.

If there's only large gatherings, try building a smaller, more intimate group.

Today social media feels too broad and unsafe, so people are seeking more focused, independent communities. One day we'll feel siloed again and want to connect with larger networks.

Smaller groups provide the opportunity for more intimacy, but less diversity. Larger groups provide the opportunity for more diversity, but less intimacy. We tend to need both diversity and intimacy throughout our lives.

One last note on choosing the right size for your community: Whatever size group you choose to bring together for an experience, make sure you choose a space that's the right size for that group.

Online, a forum with 10 people in it will feel empty, and a chat group with 1,000 in it will feel extremely overwhelming. Don't launch a forum for 10 people. And don't squeeze 1,000 into a single chat feed.

Offline, putting 400 people in a space designed for 1,000 will make your event feel empty, and poorly attended. Put that same group of 400 people in a space designed for 350, and it will feel sold out and in-demand.

The size of your space is really important.

If I find a space is too big for my in-person event, I'll figure out ways to shrink the space. Put up partitioned walls or pipe-and-drape to make the space smaller. Move all the furniture so that it's bunched up in a tighter space rather than spread out around the room.

Online, there's not much you can do to hack a space when the numbers aren't right. Just make sure not to overwhelm a tool built for small groups with large numbers, and make sure you have enough people in your forum or group to make it feel full and active. 150 members is a good start for a lot of forums and Facebook Groups. Don't start off with too many subgroups and sections. Get critical mass in a few first, then add more spaces over time.

Choosing Community Software Platforms

One of the most common questions companies have is, “What platform should we host our community on?”

In fact, this is often the first question companies ask. They go straight to looking at community software platforms before really understanding their overall community strategy, and their goals for the specific space or experience they're organizing.

Your software platform isn't your community. Your software platform, like a physical venue, is just a place where your community gathers. Your people and the relationships among them are the community. And your goal will be to design spaces that are exciting, functional, and accessible for your members.

You'll find three levels of community software platforms:

• Level 1: Free tools on existing social platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack). They cannot be customized, and there is limited or no access to member data. The big benefit is that since members are already there, it's easier to keep them engaged and bring them back into your community (Cost: Free).
• Level 2: Low-cost tools that you can host on a subdomain and own the data. There are limited customizability and integrations. They offer a middle ground of customization and data ownership, without costing an arm and a leg (Cost: $1k–$10k/year).
• Level 3: Enterprise-grade tools that are expensive, but fully customizable and have lots of integrations. You'll generally need developers and designers to help you build these spaces out, or that will be built into the cost of the software (Cost: $10k–$100k/year).

Some companies choose to build instead of buy. Usually, these are companies where the product is the community, like IndieHackers, the Ministry of Testing, and Product Hunt. It's really important for these kinds of indie communities to make their experience feel really unique and to have full control of the experience. For companies that have a product that isn't a community, it's generally recommended to buy instead of build, as developing and maintaining a community platform is usually very expensive and time consuming.

There's a whole range of criteria you can use to make a decision on community software. Here are a few I recommend getting clarity on before choosing your platform:

• User Experience:
  • Does the platform feel intuitive and easy to use?
  • Is the design customizable, and can you make your community space feel like a unique home for your members?
  • Does it service the business purpose of the community, helping members take the “ROI action” that will drive results (e.g., if your community objective is “Support,” will the platform make it easy for members to answer questions for each other and efficiently find the right answers to their technical questions?)
• Data and Integrations:
  • Will you be able to tie community data to customer data?
  • Will you be able to integrate the platform with other tools you're using, and set up single sign-on (SSO)?
  • How does the platform protect user data and have they gotten an external audit of their security practices?
• User Habits and Engagement
  • Are members already engaged on the platform (Facebook, Slack, email) or will they have to start using a new tool?
  • How are members notified of activity and brought back into the community?
  • Where will the community live? (e.g., onsite, mobile app, subdomain)
• Information Architecture
  • How important is it for your members to find existing questions and answers?
  • Do you need to convert conversations into knowledge-base articles?
  • Do you want to optimize for conversational format or a structured Q&A format?
• Budget
  • How much are you willing to spend on the software?
  • How much will it cost to build or customize the community?
  • How does the platform determine pricing and how much do you expect the cost to grow over time?

Those are just some of the questions you can ask as you do a full vendor review of community software platforms. I've seen much longer lists of questions. Just make sure you're asking the right questions that will help you feel confident that your platform will serve both your members' and your business's needs.

For a full review of the community platforms out there, take a look at the CMX Guide to Community Platforms, which is available for free online (https://cmxhub.com/cmx-guide-to-community-platforms/).¹

Should You Host Your Community on a Free Social Network?

There's a common debate on whether companies should build community using tools and spaces that they control, where they can optimize the experience and own the data, or build the community on an existing platform (like Facebook, Reddit, Slack, or LinkedIn) where people are already engaged, but they don't have control of the experience or access to member data.

For a brand new community, it's wise to tap into the existing networks. Go to where your customers are spending time. Make it easy for them to connect, to get support, and participate in the community.

You can host spaces on both social platforms and on your own, owned platform. Some companies use social platforms to host their “interest-based” communities, and host their customer-support communities on their own site. Then when someone asks a more technical question in the social platform, they can direct them to their forums.

Yes, you won't have the data if you host your community on Facebook. You can't measure everything. That doesn't mean it's not valuable. CMX has more than 10,000 people interacting in its Facebook Group. We don't know exactly who's in there, but it's such an engaged space that whenever we announce a new product, or want to drive people to an event, we know we can reach a lot of members in that space.

We can also track how traffic from the Facebook Group leads members to sign up for products and spaces where we do own the data. So the group serves as a good “top-of-the-funnel” space that engages members until they're ready to make a bigger commitment.

There's a good chance, if you have a popular brand, that you won't have a choice. Your community members will self-organize their own communities on existing social platforms. The kneejerk reaction a lot of companies have to this is to freak out and send a legal-sounding email to the organizers that they have to shut the group down. I highly recommend not taking that approach. It's a really good thing that your members want to organize around your brand. Embrace it. Empower those leaders. Support them. Show up in a positive, friendly light in those spaces.

Your community is not your software platform. Your community is your people. You can explore lots of different ways to bring together the people in your community. Some will want to participate in your owned forum. Others will prefer to join a subreddit or a Facebook group started by another customer. You can't control where your people gather. You can suggest, and nudge them, but they're going to go where they're going to go.

Having access to community data and being able to connect it back to your CRM is *very* important, especially for businesses who are working to connect community activity back to revenue data. But don't overrotate on controlling everything. The most important thing is that you're creating relationships, connections, and engagement amongst your community.

Connect your customers wherever they want to connect.

Designing Spaces That Make People Feel Seen

Getting specific about who you're gathering and why you're gathering them will help educate the many small decisions you make when you design your community spaces and platforms. With intention, you can create a space that makes your members feel like this was a place made just for them.

In a physical space, there are a great deal of opportunities to communicate who your community is for. At Ethel's Club, Naj Austin brought a ton of intention when she designed the coworking space. “People of color aren't used to seeing themselves in corporate settings and coworking spaces. So we wanted to design everything in the space to make our members feel like it was created just for them,” says Austin.

She wanted Ethel's Club to be a place where members felt seen for who they are. Every book on the bookshelf was written by a person of color. All the art was created by artists from underrepresented groups. And my favorite part: the mirrors. She intentionally put mirrors all around the space, explaining, “I wanted them to literally see themselves in a space that was specifically designed for them.”

That attention to detail translated into their website and online community as well. Everything you see on the Ethel's Club website communicates who the community is for and the culture you can expect when you join. All the pictures are of people of color in the creative industry. And when you scroll to the bottom of the website, you'll find a spinning record and a link to Ethel Club's Virtual Vibes, a Spotify playlist of tunes curated for the community. Everything is designed to make members feel seen.

What do you want your community space to feel like?

• Do you want a space that feels modern and innovative because that's the identity of your community members?
• Or do you want it to be cozy and safe, so you can host more intimate discussions?
• Do you want people to feel relaxed in your space or energized?
• Do you want them to be productive or do you want them to just chill?

Take the time to really think about who you're gathering and why you're gathering them. Let that inspire how you want your space to feel.

Starting with a BANG!

There are two ways that communities generally get started.

Some start with a small group, and then grow gradually, organically from there. Others kick off with a bang, with a large event that gives the community a big initial burst of energy, like a jolt to get the engine going.

I spent years working on community teams, writing about my learnings, and developing a network of community professionals before starting CMX. And I cofounded TheCommunityManager.com where we built a strong reputation and audience. So in some ways, I was already building the CMX community long before we ever hosted our first event. But when we did start CMX, we kicked it off with CMX Summit, a big premium conference with speakers, sponsors, catering, networking events … the works.

I can't claim to have known what I was doing at the time, but the effect that this had is clear looking back. By bringing together 250+ community professionals for a big, first-of-its-kind event that people loved, it lit a fire that has been burning ever since.

Attendees felt energized by the experience, motivated to work in the field and to continue to connect and learn. The first CMX digital community was the Facebook Group that we created for attendees to talk to each other. It had so much energy and engagement in the weeks leading up to the event and at the event because of the build-up that big events create. After the event, we decided to keep the group going, and open it up to other community professionals who weren't at the event. This became CMX Hub, the digital home for our community to connect, growing to thousands of members over the next six years.

If we started CMX with another small online group, or a smaller meetup, I don't think it would have worked. It's not what the people in the industry needed at the time. There were some great events out there, but none in the United States that went as high production with speakers and content as we did. The industry needed a big boost of energy, and the conference did that.

Companies use this technique when launching or increasing engagement in online communities as well. The asynchronous nature of forums makes it hard to feel like there's a lot of energy pulsing through the space in the early days. So they host big events on the forum to get everyone to sign on at the same time and participate in a big shared experience. It could be as simple as a series of Ask Me Anythings (AMAs) where you invite experts to show up in the community and answer questions for an hour. Or it can be a week-long content series like the “Love Our Lurkers Week” that Suzi Nelson organized for the Digital Marketer community.

These kinds of bigger swings can kick off a new community with a bang, or amp up the engagement and energy in an existing community.

Creating Peak Moments

It turns out that you only need one really impactful moment for a member to look back fondly at their community experience.

Think back to the last big, exciting experience you had. It could be a music festival you attended, a wedding, a vacation you took. What do you remember?

Chances are, you don't remember every little detail of the experience; you only retained the most exciting, most scary, most energized, or most surprising moments. You only remember the “peak” moments.

In their book The Power of Moments,² Dan and Chip Heath teaches us that when people think back to experiences they have, it's only these peak moments that they retain.

If you go to Disney World, they explained, the memories of waiting in long lines and spending a lot of money on food isn't what pops into your head months and years later. The moments you remember are the high points, watching the fireworks, flying through Space Mountain, meeting Mickey Mouse, seeing the parade go by.

This is a critical lesson for community builders. When you're creating your online community experience or hosting a big event, 99 percent of the details that you're sweating over will not be what people will remember. They'll only remember the absolute best and absolute worst experiences they have.

How can you build positive peak moments into your community?

A lot of communities stay relatively consistent in their experience. Online, there are questions and answers, discussions, and knowledge sharing. When members think about their experience in a forum, it's mostly unremarkable.

Sometimes it's out of your control. Serendipity has a way of pulling peak experiences out of thin air: a spontaneous run-in with someone that ends up becoming a close friend; the right conversation that leads to a new job.

I remember at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival one year, I was walking by myself to a networking event when I passed by a bar that had a blackboard sign that said “Local Natives Live @ 7:30!” Local Natives was one of my favorite bands but still relatively unknown at the time (+1 hipster point for me). I looked at my watch and it was 7:00 p.m. The bar was still empty. I walked in and asked the bartender, “Are the Local Natives actually playing here in 30 minutes?” and she said “yes!” I ordered a beer and posted up next to the stage as the place filled up behind me over 30 minutes until the band came out and I was treated to one of the best shows I've ever seen live in my life. Completely spontaneous! I can't tell you which speakers I saw that year, who I met, or really much of anything else I did at SXSW that year. But I'll never forget that serendipitous peak moment, and it's given SXSW a special place in my heart forever.

SXSW is famous for that kind of serendipity that happens when you put thousands of musicians, technologists, and leaders in a small city filled with great bars and music venues. I've been to the festival several times now, and every time, there was a random peak moment that kept me coming back next year.

Peak moments can take many different forms. They fall into a few different categories, laid out by the Heath brothers:

• Elevation: that top of the roller coaster, standing ovation, high-energy moment.
• Pride: the feeling of accomplishment, getting the spotlight, accomplishing a big goal.
• Insight: learning something new, getting that ah-ha! moment.
• Connection: meeting someone new or forming a deeper relationship with someone.

At CMX Summit, we try to create opportunities for all four:

• Elevation. Every speaker at CMX Summit gets a standing ovation when they get on the stage. We make the audience practice at the start of the day. These high energy moments make the event the speakers never forget and puts the audience in a great mood.
• Pride. We aim to use the CMX Summit stage to give a platform to underrepresented voices and up-and-coming professionals in the industry. For some, it's their first time publicly speaking and a huge moment of pride. We also spotlight our community leaders throughout the event.
• Insight. With all the amazing content at our event, it's rare that someone will leave without at least one really big ah-ha! moment for something they can apply to their own community.
• Connection. We create a range of different networking opportunities from speed networking to discussion groups to parties to increase the odds of new relationships forming. But let's face it, most relationships form at the bars and restaurants after the conference finishes.

Think about how you can design your community experiences to increase the odds that someone will have one of these peak moments. They'll never forget it.

Facilitating Small-Group Discussions

Small-group discussions are one of my favorite kinds community experiences to organize. They give you an opportunity to connect with people at a depth you just can't reach in larger or more public spaces.

One of the best community experiences I've ever had was a weekly lunch hosted at a small indie coworking space called Fabric, where I was a member.

Every Wednesday, we'd sit down for lunch and have a 90-minute discussion facilitated by the founders Chad Hamre and Brendan Baker. The format was simple: we'd go around and each share a high and low from our week for the first 45 minutes, then switch to a shared discussion on a single topic. It was a highlight of my week. It was a space I came to rely on, to reflect on my week, and it made me feel much more connected with my fellow coworkers. I've worked in many different coworking spaces in my career, and most of them just hope that members will get to know each other by being in the same building. Fabric made sure of it.

One week I invited my friend Ivan Cash, an artist, to participate in a Fabric lunch. He loved the format so much, he decided that he needed to start a discussion group for his network of creative founders. Since everyone lived in different cities, he decided to host virtual discussion groups. They decided on a monthly format and to focus on sharing highs and lows, giving each member a chance to ask for feedback on a challenge. The group has now been running for over a year and became another staple in my life.

That's why small discussion groups have become one of my favorite formats for building community. Hosted regularly, they become a deep and meaningful part of people's lives. They're genuine, and intimate. Something about having a small group of people listening makes people feel like they can be more open and vulnerable. Small groups allow for “real” conversations to happen, and ensures that everyone has a chance to have their voice heard. And the networking value is huge. I've met so many high-quality humans, and formed lasting relationships, through discussion groups.

These are things you just don't get in a big conference or webinar, or in an online group or forum. People are more reserved in those settings. They never know who's in the audience listening. In a small group, you know exactly who's there.

Now, small-group discussions have been happening in-person since the first time humans gathered around a fire. But now we have virtual discussion groups. They're IN the computer. No matter how much you optimize the experience, a virtual discussion group won't be the same as an in-person group. But, BUT!, you'll find that when done correctly, they're not all that different either and can have some unique advantages.

Whether you're gathering online or in-person, there are a number of formats you can use to make your discussion group really engaging and impactful.

First, for any event I host (big or small), I like to have everyone “arrive” in the space. Everyone's coming from another meeting, another task, a day of work, a different place, and then suddenly they're all in one room with a new group of people. By having everyone “arrive,” they can feel present in the new space together, and leave the rest of their day behind them. You'll have more present, more focused attendees as a result.

There are lots of ways to have people arrive in your space. Scott Shigeoka, EIR at GoDaddy, likes to use breathing and mindfulness exercises. “Noticing your breath or another mindfulness exercise like imagining the little details in your day from the moment you woke up to getting to the meeting helps people feel more present.” You can start by simply asking everyone to take three deep breaths together, and counting them out. “If you present it well, it doesn't have to feel woo woo,” says Shigeoka. “I've done this even in more conservative spaces. It helps people feel more present and mindful, which is helpful for anyone in any moment of gathering.”

For virtual events I like to kick off with a “ceremonial closing of tabs.” I hit a singing bowl a few times while asking everyone to close their email, close out of their tabs, and remove any distractions.

You can also have people arrive in the space by asking members to say hello to a neighbor, all making a sound together, or anything else that makes everyone feel aware of their current environment and takes their mind away from whatever they were doing before.

Once everyone is engaged, there are a lot of different formats for kicking off and facilitating small-group discussions. Here are a few ideas I've used with success:

• Round of intros: Kick off with a round of intros. Spice it up with a “fun” question like, “What cartoon character do you most identify with?”
• Whip-around: An initial question that everyone answers to get everyone involved in the conversation early. A lot of these formats can be considered whip-arounds. They're usually quick answers to a question like, “What is your goal for this discussion?” or, “What is one thing you're grateful for?”
• Traffic light: Ask everyone to share how they're feeling at that moment, “red, yellow, green.”
• High-and-low: Have each person share a high and a low from their life/work. This is also called “a rose and a thorn.”
• Presentation: Have one or multiple members share their screen and give a short presentation, then open up to discussion.
• Share a challenge: Each person has a chance to share a challenge that they want feedback on and then gets time for other participants to give them feedback.
• Topic-based discussion: Have a topic or theme for the call, and leave it open to participants to jump in with their thoughts and opinions.
• Commitment and next steps: Finish the discussion by asking each participant to share one commitment they will make as a result of the discussion, or a next action they will take.

I've found it's important to model the behavior you want your participants to bring to the discussion. If you want them to be vulnerable, then you should kick off with a vulnerable story. If you want them to ask a more technical question, give them an example with your own question.

I'd recommend keeping small-group discussions to 10 people or less and make sure to give people enough time. When someone invites me to a 30-minute discussion group with 15 people in it, you can count on me not coming. I know it's not going to work. Introductions take about 2 minutes per person. If you have a group of 15, you'll barely finish remembering everyone's favorite movie before the call is over. 90 minutes has become my sweet spot.

Tell Your Members How to Participate

Too often, we host an event, or post in an online community, and just hope that people will interact in a quality way without much guidance. There's a tendency a lot of community organizers have to be very hands off in their community spaces. They feel that it's important to give members the freedom to participate in the community however they want.

To some extent, this is true. You do want to give your members a fair amount of autonomy and creative freedom, because they'll come up with ways of interacting that you never would have thought of.

That said, the majority of members are looking for your guidance on how to contribute thoughtfully to the space. Ambiguity is stressful for someone who's new to an established community. All of those rituals and expressions of identity we spoke about earlier are new to them. They want someone to hold their hand through it. When someone shows up at an event, it can be incredibly intimidating. They don't know anyone yet, haven't gotten their lay of the land yet, and in a really big event there's an overwhelming amount of things to do.

Give them a map, tell them what to do first. Maybe you can connect every attendee with one other person when they enter to break the networking ice. If they arrive in time for breakfast, guide them to the breakfast table where they can ease into the event, grab a snack, and pick up casual conversations. If you want people in the audience to network with each other, give them questions to ask each other so they don't have to come up with topics themselves.

Onboarding is a great opportunity to be explicit in guiding members on how to participate in online spaces as well. When we welcome new members to the CMX online community, we don't just tell them to introduce themselves, we tell them how to introduce themselves and give them three specific questions to answer:

• Where are you from?
• What community are you building?
• What's one challenge that you're working through right now?

We'll mix up the questions sometimes and try different things, but we always give new members that guidance on how to participate.

Teach your members how to successfully ask the community for help. There's a tendency in online forums to ask very brief questions without a lot of guidance on how to answer the question. As a result, the member gets a whole range of different kinds of answers and all levels of quality.

For example, one of the most common questions in the CMX community is “What platform should we host our community on?” Without more guidance, there are a whole range of answers that people get that probably isn't exactly what the member was looking for. There's a good chance they'll get a lot of people answering and just saying, “We use X platform, it's great!” Not very helpful.

Instead, they could have provided more guidance to the rest of the community on how to participate in that thread. They could have said:

• We're launching a new community and looking for a platform to host it on. I'd love to hear:
• What platform you use.
• What other platforms you considered.
• Why you chose your current platform.
• What do you like most about the platform?
• What are your biggest issues with the platform?

Now I know how to answer their question more specifically. I don't have to guess what it is they were looking to learn. They were explicit about what quality participation looked like.

That's the power of communicating thoughtful guidelines on how to participate. Guidelines have the power to create an experience that's totally unique from anything else we experience in the world. They help us feel comfortable in an experience because we know how to participate in a valuable way. It's not left to us to figure it out. It teaches members how to work together more efficiently.

Before you invite your members into a space, whether it's a thread in a forum or an event you're organizing, be explicit about how you'd like people to participate in the space.

How to Get Members to Be Open and Vulnerable

Some of the most valuable community experiences a person will have is one where they have a chance to be truly open and vulnerable. We walk around most of our lives keeping things close to the chest. We often lack spaces where we can truly share how we're feeling, talk through personal challenges, and still feel supported and accepted. So when we finally do open up, it can be a true peak moment that we never forget, and we form a much deeper trust with the people we shared it with.

In the business world, we tend to avoid emotion as much as possible. “It's just business” rings true when you look at most community spaces hosted by organizations. Conversations are very product focused and surface level. But your customers, and everyone else in your community, is human. And there are absolutely challenges that are deep and personal that they're dealing with. Maybe they're struggling with something in their work or career and they haven't had a space to process it yet. You can create those spaces for them.

Intimacy is a requirement for opening up vulnerability amongst a group of people. It's very rare people will be truly open in a large group, or in a space that they aren't confident is private. To facilitate vulnerable interaction, you must have a small, private space.

Then, like we discussed in the previous section, you need to provide very specific rules and guidelines to make members confident that they're in a safe space.

One of my favorite examples of facilitating vulnerability is in the spaces hosted by the Inside Circle Foundation. A maximum security prison might be the last place you'd expect to find a group of men sitting in a circle, sharing their feelings, crying and supporting each other. But that's exactly what happens in these spaces.

The goal is to give the inmates a safe space to share openly in a way that they could not anywhere else in their lives. These men spend most of their life keeping their emotions to themselves. Weakness will result in a loss of status, or worse, loss of physical safety. Yet, they've all had serious trauma in their lives that they haven't been able to process. The Inside Circle Foundation gives them a safe space to process that trauma.

The results have been incredible. Members of the community have turned their lives around, gotten reduced sentences, and became volunteers in the program so they could help others.

How do you make men like this feel safe being open and vulnerable? Well, you need an incredible facilitator, first of all. When I spoke to Inside Circle Foundation's CEO James McLeary, I immediately felt a sense of trust and safety in his presence. He has a kind, yet strong demeanor, the kind of person you feel like you can share anything with and he'll listen without judgment.

When I asked him what the key has been for motivating the inmates participating in the program to be so open and vulnerable, he spoke about the rituals and rules that they put in place for every circle.

When every person enters the room, they stop, “take off their armor,” and set it aside. The armor is imaginary of course, but the effect it has is very real. It lets everyone in that room know that they and every other person is there to be open, to be vulnerable, to share…

Then, of course, there's what I like to call the “Vegas” rule: what's said here stays here. This is an extremely important rule, because the men will share things that could get them killed out in the yard. It's an important rule for any space where you want people to go deep. They want to know that only the people in the room will know about the things they share.

They start off every circle by reminding everyone of the rules and how to participate in the space. Those rules create the container for real deep conversations.

I got to experience this effect first hand in a workshop run by one of the best facilitators I've ever met, Ashanti Branch. Branch primarily works with young men of color to develop emotional maturity and live a life of intention. He leads a workshop called “Taking Off the Mask,” which I had the opportunity to participate in. To kick things off, we all had a piece of paper where we drew our masks. We then had to write three words or phrases on the front that described the mask we show to the world, and three words on the back that described what we choose not to show the world.

We crumpled up our papers and had a “snowball fight,” throwing the crumpled balls around the room, playing like kids.

After a few minutes, we were told to pick up a piece of paper and sit back down. Ashanti then asked for volunteers to stand up if something written on the paper they were holding resonated with them. We went around the room reading those messages out loud.

On the front, common words were “happy,” “smart,” “kind,” “people pleaser.” On the back, “fear,” “stress,” “death”…

The energy in the room shifted, and suddenly felt heavy.

This is where Ashanti started setting the container for the next part of the experience.

He told us we're going to be sitting down in circles in groups of eight, and we'd go in order, each sharing our conclusion to the sentence, “You wouldn't know this by looking at me but…”

He shared a few guiding statements: “Don't laugh. Don't respond. You can share anything you want, it doesn't have to be deep. It's okay to skip.”

These rules were critical. They told us how to participate, what's okay or not okay. If someone made a joke, we knew we weren't supposed to laugh. We knew we weren't supposed to respond even when we feel compelled to comfort or add on. These rules resulted in an entirely unique experience from the norm.

The results were profound. It started off with people sharing fairly surface level things about themselves. “You wouldn't know this by looking at me, but I play basketball … I cook … I'm from Spain… etc.” But within a couple minutes, people started sharing some very personal things. “You wouldn't know this by looking at me, but I lost my father when I was five years old … I have a lifelong illness … I wake up hating myself every day…”

I shared things with this group of strangers that I've never told anyone. We showed up in that space with an intention to learn more about ourselves, and be open with each other. The rules and guidelines provided by Branch gave us the roadmap for getting there.

Keep Your Rules Short and Simple to Start

Whether your goal is to drive vulnerability, or you just want to ensure that members have a quality experience in your community, you always want to have a clear policy with rules and guidelines for your community.

Keep your list of rules short and simple so that they're easy to remember. I recommend having no more than 10 rules and offer more detailed guidelines in your code of conduct. We have six rules in the CMX community. Start small and you'll likely add more organically over time as needed. Usually, you'll see something in your community that isn't very safe or high quality, realize you don't have a rule to account for it, and add it in.

Reddit had just three rules for the longest time, even as their community grew to millions of users. Only recently have they expanded their rules in order to fight growing toxicity on the platform. Now Reddit has eight rules:³

• Rule 1

  Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.

• Rule 2

  Abide by community rules. Post authentic content into communities where you have a personal interest, and do not cheat or engage in content manipulation (including spamming, vote manipulation, ban evasion, or subscriber fraud) or otherwise interfere with or disrupt Reddit communities.

• Rule 3

  Respect the privacy of others. Instigating harassment, for example by revealing someone's personal or confidential information, is not allowed. Never post or threaten to post intimate or sexually explicit media of someone without their consent.

• Rule 4

  Do not post or encourage the posting of sexual or suggestive content involving minors.

• Rule 5

  You don't have to use your real name to use Reddit, but don't impersonate an individual or an entity in a misleading or deceptive manner.

• Rule 6

  Ensure people have predictable experiences on Reddit by properly labeling content and communities, particularly content that is graphic, sexually explicit, or offensive.

• Rule 7

  Keep it legal, and avoid posting illegal content or soliciting or facilitating illegal or prohibited transactions.

• Rule 8

  Don't break the site or do anything that interferes with normal use of Reddit.

That's it. Pretty simple for the largest online community in the world.

Make your policy visible and easily accessible, and incorporate it into your onboarding experience. No one is going to read your terms of service unless they have a specific problem, so don't bury them in there. For live events, kick off by reviewing the rules and guidelines with your attendees. It shows your members that you're bringing intention to the event.

And whenever you share the rules, remind your members that they exist FOR them. The goal is to create a safe, high-quality experience for all of your members. Whenever I enforce a rule, I always close with “Thanks for helping us keep the community awesome,” a reminder that the rules aren't personal, they're there for the community as a whole.

My Three Go-To Community Rules

There are a number of rules that I find myself using in most communities that I've launched or worked on. Three tend to show up the most:

Using Metrics to Optimize Community Spaces and Experiences

When looking at measurement on the tactical level of your strategy, the goal is to identify metrics that will help you identify opportunities to improve your community spaces and experiences over time.

The three levels of your community strategy are all tied together. You create experiences and spaces, which will result in a more healthy and engaged community, which will drive business impact. This is how you can get a better grasp of how your day-to-day work building community is impacting the bottom line.

On the community and business levels of your community strategy, your measures are mostly looking backward, measuring the success and impact of the tactics and initiatives you worked on.

On the tactical level, measurement is all about action. It's predictive in that you should feel confident that the tactics you're working on will impact the health and engagement of your community. You're looking to get insights about what you can do to improve results in the future. It's all about asking the right questions, and using data and member feedback to get the answers.

For example, going back to Google's G2G program, a big question they wanted to answer is, “How can we improve instructor engagement?” They wanted more Googlers to volunteer to teach a class.

I recommended they look at a few different kinds of metrics and follow up with interviews:

• Look at the total number of classes taught per instructor. Interview instructors at different activity levels to find out what motivates their most active instructors.
• Survey instructors and ask them if they're getting value. Interview instructors who rate it highly and poorly to understand who the program is most and least valuable to, and why.
• Look at how many instructors taught one class then dropped. Interview them and find out how you can improve the instructor onboarding experience.

The insights from that data analysis and those interviews gave them a spread of specific tactics and initiatives they could focus on to address instructor objections and improve the instructor experience. They'd find ways to improve their instructor onboarding process and proactively address their biggest concerns and objectives. They'll get a better idea of what instructors' motivations are and can add in rewards and validation mechanisms to make sure they get that value. They'll also get a more clear idea of who an ideal candidate is to become an instructor so they can focus their outreach efforts.

By using the data to help them identify people to talk to, and using those conversations to identify tactics they can focus on for their community, they'll increase instructor engagement, improve the overall health and engagement of the community, and impact their organizational goals.

Another question we explored was, “How can we improve the quality of classes hosted by instructors?” All the classes are volunteer led, and the quality of those courses have a big impact on the overall experience in the community.

To answer that question, there were a few things they could do:

• Look at event ratings to identify which classes did well. Interview students who attended those classes to learn more about what they liked about their experience. They could then add those insights to the instructor guide.
• Look at total classes attended per student. Interview the most active and least active students to identify any themes in what made their classes so valuable, or what made them drop off.
• Sit in on classes and personally identify opportunities to improve.

This research provided the team with a range of specific tactics and initiatives they could focus on to improve the quality of classes and improve overall engagement in the community. They found that instructors weren't always clear on what makes a class great, and were able to provide them with more guidance and training. They got a better idea of who their ideal students were for the program, and focus their outreach on the right people. And they discovered some great ideas that they can make part of their standard format across all classes in the program. They'd then implement those changes and improvements, track the impact on overall community health and engagement, and measure the impact on their business outcomes.

You can take the same approach for any kind of community, online or offline, synchronous or asynchronous, to identify opportunities to improve engagement in your spaces and experiences.

Say you want to improve engagement in your online community. Use your analytics to tell you who your most active members are so you can interview them and get deeper insights into what motivates them to keep showing up.

You can identify the members who joined the community, took one action and never came back, and set up interviews with them, too. That'll give you great insights into how you can improve your onboarding process and engage your new members more effectively.

Running a support forum and want to increase the number of members who answer questions? Look at your member data to find your most active experts and survey them to find out more about their favorite and least favorite parts of the community. Identify people who have answered just three questions and see what you can learn about why they haven't answered more questions.

Whoever your contributors are in your community, and whatever kind of community you're organizing, you can take the same approach to figure out what you should be focusing on for the next month or quarter in order to improve engagement in your community and increase your impact on your business goals.