“The bulk of what gets done is by a small set of fanatics.”

What we can learn about community building from Mariah Carey's fans.

One of the sharpest insights we’ve gleaned in our four years of research is that growing a community isn’t about management. It’s about cultivating leaders. 

In many communities, a small set of extra-passionate leaders tackle the big chunks of work that push their community forward.

As Sam Droege, a biologist, researcher, and veteran organizer of citizen scientists, remarks in Mary Ellen Hannibal’s book Citizen Scientist,

“The bulk of what gets done is by a small set of fanatics.”

For Sam, a citizen scientist coordinator, that means people like Jane Whittaker, a volunteer bee surveyor who, as Hannibal writes, “has more or less single-handedly inventoried the native bee population of West Virginia.” 

In the course of our own research, we’ve heard of many people like Jane. But no story has amazed us more than the story of Bree Nguyen who, at 16-years-old, was noticed and empowered by her idol, and ended up changing the course of Mariah Carey’s career. 

Bree Nguyen and Mariah Carey in the late 1990s. Today, they are still in touch and Mariah’s “Lamb” fan community is still actively gathering and organizing. 

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Bree Nguyen’s story is a one-in-a-billion kinda story. 

In the late 1990s, Mariah Carey made the bold decision to hire Bree Nguyen, a 16-year-old superfan, to join her team. 

Why hire a teenage fan?

Mariah knew she needed help. Unlike the team of music industry professionals already working for her, Bree was a kid of the internet and a regular in Mariah’s online fan community.

That meant Bree had connections to thousands of fellow fans, intuitively understood their motivations, and was savvy about navigating the online spaces where they spent time together. In short, Bree added digital know-how and direct relationships with fans to Mariah’s team. That would prove crucial in an era when musicians’ success was determined by fan voting on MTV’s Total Request Live (TRL). 

So, at just 16 years old, Bree went on the road with her idol. She taught herself to code and built an online TRL voting portal for Mariah’s fans, rewarding voters with what she knew they wanted most: access to Mariah (in the form of personal voice messages from the singer, surprises, and gifts).

Within a week of joining the team, Bree and the fans got Mariah her first ever TRL video debut in the top 10, helping the “Rainbow” album go triple platinum.

The Lamb’s organizing continues to this day. In 2018, for example Mariah’s fans led a #JusticeForGlitter hashtag campaign that put her soundtrack from the 2001 film “Glitter” at No. 1 on the iTunes Albums chart 17 years after its debut.

A community that is working together is more powerful than passionate, isolated individuals. By taking a chance and building her career with Bree and the fans, Mariah Carey has accomplished more than she ever could have without them.

Mariah’s shoutout to the fans as she wins Billboards 90s Artist of the Decade.

If we know working with others is so powerful, why don’t more people do it? Why aren’t there more Mariah & Brees? 

Identifying your hand-raisers can be challenging.

Mariah got lucky. She spotted Bree at a Tower Records in-store signing. After waiting in line for hours, Bree walked up nervously to Mariah with a binder that contained 6,000 letters from fellow superfans collected on an online message board. Mariah was moved, reading all of the letters one-by-one and even calling Bree to express her gratitude personally. 

Bree revealed herself to Mariah in-person, but not all of us will have that good fortune. We’ll have to get proactive to find our hand-raisers.  

Like Bree, these people are your most passionate community members, the hardcore of the hardcore. They always show up. They consistently invite friends. And most importantly, they’re raising their hands — eagerly contributing time and energy toward taking your community to the next level.

To identify hand-raisers, ask yourself: who seems to be raising their hand to take on bigger responsibilities?

To find them, you have a few avenues:

• Build signals into your software or use custom measurement tools (like Commsor) that identify folks who keep showing up and contributing.

• Get scrappy. Sift for hand-raisers on the platforms where your community spends their time.

• Explicitly solicit interest by asking other hand-raisers for recommendations. Or open an application or form. Some of your hand-raisers will reveal themselves and come to you.

If you have the ability to pinpoint your hand-raisers, you have the potential to turn them into homegrown leaders of your community, your most valuable collaborators.

And if you can empower these hand-raisers, they’ll ensure the growth of your community and its ability to stay vibrant.

Giving up control is scary.

Empowering others sounds easy enough, right?

But when you’re an original leader, a polished organization, or public figure, trusting others to take over is often a challenge. We get protective, controlling, even paranoid. We worry about people “not having the same standards” or “misrepresenting the brand.”

Remember: spreading out ownership is what makes communities so mighty. People can raise their hands to contribute in small ways (which add up!). And inevitably a few people, like Bree, may even become catalysts, accelerating an entire group’s ability to impact the world.

If you’re worried about giving up control, you can help ensure the quality of your community’s efforts by vetting hand-raisers to see if they are genuine and qualified. 

Let’s vet Bree as an example: 

1. Is Bree’s passion for Mariah Carey and the “Lamb” community genuine?

Bree was drawn to Mariah Carey early because, like her, Mariah is biracial. That affinity was powerful for Bree, especially in the 1990s when biracial public figures were rare. Mariah witnessed how sincere Bree’s fandom was when she waited in line for hours to meet her at Tower Records and printed out thousands of letters so fellow fans could also connect with the star. She was clearly passionate about driving forward Mariah’s career and showing up for fellow fans.

2. Is Bree qualified to cultivate Mariah’s online fan community?

As a kid of the internet in the late 1990s, Bree had skills and know-how that Mariah’s team of vets didn’t yet have. She demonstrated she knew how to find fellow fans online and connect with them. Plus, as a fan herself, she innately understood her fellow Lamb’s motivations. 

For each community, the exact expression of a genuine and qualified hand-raiser will differ. It’s your job as an original leader to define what you’re filtering for and establish a process that vets for those attributes.

A more collaborative way of building

Mariah Carey and Bree’s relationship shows us that even in the context of celebrity and fan relationships, a more collaborative way of building is possible.

Fortunately for our generation, collaborating and co-owning is easier than ever with the digital tools available to us. We saw this when we talked to Sebastian Betti, the most prolific TED Talk translator in the world. After translating many TED Talks himself, he built collaborative digital tools for others to translate. Today there are more than 33,000 TED translators who have completed over 140,000 talks. We saw this when we interviewed Elena Favilli about how she and her team sourced stories from their community for their Rebel Girls book series. We saw this in how The Dinner Party’s founders empowered hosts to replicate their monthly LA dinner party for discussing grief and loss. Today, there are more than 2,000 “The Dinner Party” tables around the world.

Mariah and Bree were in the early wave of using the internet to find and collaborate with passionate people, but the fundamentals that Bree shares with us in our interview can be applied it to the communities in your lives.

Just remember that although communities feel magical, they won’t come together by magic. You can build with other passionate people if you follow the process of pinpointing, vetting, and supercharging them. The steps are clear. What remains is the action.

This case study was produced by the team at 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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