8 Building Blocks for Strong Community
Building community is the hot new thing. Everywhere you turn, brands are trying to get you to join their communities of like-minded individuals.
But, most will fail. Why?
Because community can’t be used to further the goals of the organization before it furthers the goals of the people.
Many organizations start a community with their goals in mind (up-selling, new product announcements, etc.) rather than first focusing on the goals of the community members (connection, idea sharing, problem solving, etc.).
Only after meeting the community’s goals can an organization then move on to achieve their own. However, in the best communities both sets of goals are the same. When this happens, community growth will explode.
As we continue to invest in the community for Rock RMS, we’ve found the ingredients below to be key building blocks for community success.
1. Shared Interest
Defining the shared interest of the community might seem like a simple step, but it’s much more complex than you might think. Take our Rock community for example. You might think that our shared interest is the product, but it’s not. That shared interest would be too narrow for our goal.
So maybe it’s technology in churches? Still too narrow. We see our shared interest as ministry innovation and best practices.
Nothing excites us more than community interaction around ministry topics that have nothing to do with the product.
Why? Because product discussions are easy and natural. Getting people to discuss more abstract concepts is harder to encourage.
At the end of the day individuals in the Rock community don’t want to become better at Rock, they want to become better at doing ministry.
2. Defined Culture
After defining the interest of the community, it’s important look at the type of culture that would attract who you are trying to reach. In the beginning at Rock, we didn’t do this very well. We let culture just happen. Now, we’re attempting to adjust that culture to make sure that we’re inclusive to a wider spectrum of individuals.
As you can imagine when you start a community related to a new open-source tool, you mainly attract very technical individuals. As growth occurred in the community and product, we realized that some of those we wanted to attract were intimidated by the culture.
To solve this, we encouraged technical discussions into separate spaces. The goal wasn’t to discourage the current community, but to provide communication and clarity to the wider audience we wanted to reach, and to create space for their conversations, which is the next important thing a community needs.
3. Places to Gather
Community needs spaces to meet. The obvious first space is online. Like most communities, Rock has an online chat tool. We use Rocket Chat. (Why we chose this is another post all on its own.) While real-time community tools are important, a strong community also needs tools to curate shared knowledge. Our community relies heavily on the tools on our community website (recipes, idea sharing, contact info, etc.)
Here’s a sampling of the Rock online community tools:
Meeting in person is also critical to building strong community. Our annual Rock Experience (RX) conference is the yearly family meet-up that is the highlight of the community’s year. RX is just one of the opportunities to meet other community members in person—we also host regional meet-ups several times a year. These events are coordinated and planned by the community.
4. Steps for Growth
Community membership isn’t measured by a count of individuals. Instead, it needs to be measured by the depth of involvement. This can only be achieved by having growth paths to foster engagement. For instance, in the Rock community we currently have three levels of engagement:
- Community Member — The starting place for community members.
- Rock Stars — Community members who have engaged deeply with the community. More on this below.
- Rock Hall of Fame — Each year we pick one individual who epitomizes what it means to be a community member. We celebrate them at that year’s conference by giving them an orange Fender Guitar (orange is our brand color).
On top of these three levels we also acknowledge other growth factors like attendance at our yearly conference and taking additional training like our Master Class.
5. Create Rewards for Right Behaviors
If you reward good behavior in the community, you’ll see more of it. For instance, in our chat tool people can reward each other for helping by providing points (as simple as @chip ++). These points are nothing more than records in a database, but they are a huge motivator for right behavior. As of the writing of this post we have two community members with over 1,000 points and several not far behind. Think a bit about that level of effort—that’s an involved community member!
Community members also receive points for helping us with things like confirming Rock RMS issues that are reported and answering Q&A questions.
We’re currently working on even more gamification strategies for the community that will strategically promote right behaviors, which increase engagement and meet the needs of the group.
6. Address Off Behaviors
It’s also important to address wrong behaviors. We’re very lucky in this area as it’s not often needed in our Rock community. When it is needed, it’s usually for things like tone.
While not as important, we also work to ensure alignment in small behaviors like:
- Posting content or questions in the correct place.
- Having an avatar—a photo of yourself. This may seem small but it makes a difference when creating community, especially when people meet in person.
- Encouraging people to complete their community profiles and work hard to keep metrics on the organizations they are a part of.
7. Create Moments
Throughout the year we intentionally create moments to provide value and appreciate the community. Some examples of these moments include:
- Secretly shipping custom t-shirts to co-workers to hand to community members the moment they join the 1000+ Point Club.
- Planning a 12 Days of Christmas event where we give the community 12 gifts like stickers, desktop wallpapers, new releases of Rock, new community tools, and more.
8. Swag
Once you’ve built a strong community, people will want to identify as a part of it. Creating custom t-shirts and other products helps them show their enthusiasm for the community. This not only helps to attract others to the community, but it also strengthens their connection to the group. If you’d like to see some of the promo items, we provide check-out our Shopify store.
Another tool to help build community enthusiasm is to create a community mascot. Our mascot Chip (a Rock Lobster) has taken on a personality all his own. In fact, he’s so popular in the community we created a website just for him.
Hopefully these tips on how we’ve built the Rock RMS community have helped. We’re still learning as we go and have several plans to take it to the next level. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about community, it’s that it is never finished because the goals and needs our community are always evolving and changing.
