Step 2: Do Something Together
Every community needs a shared activity. Develop one that’s right for your people.
Whether online or IRL, communities of all stripes form around shared activities.
No matter if you’re a community that comes together to test recipes, navigate personal finances, or celebrate the clouds, your members can only realize their community’s purpose through this thing they do together. In other words, kindred spirits operating in silos aren’t a community (yet!).
In this post we’ll guide you through developing a central shared activity for your community. Sometimes a shared activity is impossible to do alone. Other times a shared activity is fine solo but 10 times better when experienced with others.
So, what is something your people crave that would be better performed or experienced as a group?
Designing Your Shared Activity
There are three principles that any first community activity should incorporate if you want to start your group on a collaborative path:
1. Make Your Activity Purposeful.
Whether you decide to host the inaugural run for your club or launch a website for fellow superfans, the first thing you do to rally the group largely depends on the purpose of your community. (More on defining your purpose here.)
A purposeful activity brings to life why your community teamed up in the first place. What goal or outcome becomes possible only when this specific group of people gets together?
For example, when Gavin Pretor-Pinney set up a website for his new Cloud Appreciation Society, he included a gallery where people could submit their own photographs of the sky. Gavin facilitated a simple yet purposeful shared activity that tied back to celebrating clouds.
On top of that, he made sure that the site put the group’s purpose front and center. The society’s manifesto read, “We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.” Gavin explained, “The fact that we appreciate an underappreciated part of nature gives the society a reason to exist.” By making the society’s purpose clear and accessible, Gavin made it easy for potential members to find the society and understand whether they’d want to join.
Make this purpose clear to participants so that they can own it, too.
Tie the activity back to your community’s purpose. And communicate that purpose explicitly, as Gavin Pretor-Pinney did when he formed the Cloud Appreciation Society. (Photo courtesy of Gavin Pretor-Pinney)
2. Make it Participatory.
Don’t just talk at people. You gathered them because they’re passionate, just like you! Instead, give members the chance to contribute to the purpose you share.
In 2012, Ryan Fitzgibbon announced that he was making Hello Mr., a magazine “about men who date men.” After establishing the magazine’s name, mission statement, and visual characteristics, Ryan could have run full steam ahead and produced the magazine on his own. But instead of making something for the future readers of Hello Mr., he decided to team up with them to make Hello Mr. a reality.
Ryan worked with contributors to create 30% of the magazine’s content, before launching a Kickstarter campaign for funding to finish the rest. Those early contributors, many of whom were also queer, were crucial to spreading the word. “They were accountable for this thing happening and became our greatest ambassadors when it came to promoting [the Kickstarter campaign],” Ryan told us.
Don’t think about your community as just an audience. Treat members as participants.
Encourage people to participate from the start, as Ryan Fitzgibbon did when he worked with early contributors to launch the fundraiser for “Hello Mr.” (Photo courtesy of Ryan Fitzgibbon.)
3. Make it Repeatable.
For communities, one-off activities are the enemy. Relationships need time to flourish, and it’ll take a few cycles for some folks to warm up and begin actively contributing. So design the first activity with the intent to repeat it with your people over and over.
Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman got a small group of friends together to form an ad hoc choir in a real estate office in Toronto 10 years ago. “At the end of the evening, “people were so into what we did, which was very little, that they wanted us to do it again the next day.” Choir! Choir! Choir! was born. Nobu and Daveed were motivated by such a passionate reaction. “We ended up doing it every Tuesday for the next year,” Nobu says. By 2012, they were getting hundreds of people together to sing one iconic pop song each week.
Every thriving community organizes essential, repeating activities for its members. If communities are about people coming together, one of the most important things you can do is create ways for them to keep coming together.
Communities need time to take shape. Design the first activity with the intent to repeat it over and over, as Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman have succeeded in doing with their traveling Choir! Choir! Choir! format. (Photo by Kai Elmer Sotto.)
Some Shared Activities Are Better Than Others
If a community doesn’t catch fire with your first activity, we get it. We’ve been there. (Ask us about the time we hosted a super user happy hour and only two people showed up!) Just remember: big things often start small.
Many widespread, thriving communities started with just a handful of participants. Weight Watchers’s Jean Nidetch had six people at her first meeting. Today more than 30,000 meetings happen each week. Hec from WRU Crew went for the crew’s first run with just a few of his sister’s friends. Today, as many as 200 runners may come to a Monday night 5k. Surfrider Foundation started with three surfing buddies. Now there are more than 500,000 activists around the world. If you want to gain momentum, you’ll have to keep at it week after week like these folks.
The key to developing a shared activity that resonates with your people is to pay attention to feedback, and to gauge your people’s interest objectively. If no one wants to repeat this activity with you, that’s a red flag. It’s not a community if participants only show up once.
If your early attendees aren’t hungry for more, go back to the drawing board. Do you really understand your who, and why they’d want to come together? Is the design of your activity more interesting, more fun, or more meaningful to experience as a group?
The inescapable truth is that you’ll have to exceed expectations with your core activity if you want people to show up and keep showing up. This doesn’t mean that you need to invest lots of money in a flashy first experience. Instead, do your best to create an undeniably valuable shared experience.
If what you do as a group amplifies what members experience alone, you’re on your way to sparking a community.
We’re People & Company.
We published a book, host a podcast, and we work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
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