Step 2: Do Something Together
By: Bailey Richardson
Tags: Community Management, Community Development, Community, Community Engagement, Methodology

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?

In this public workshop with our friends at Stripe, we go *deep* into how to design a shared activity starting at ~14:45.

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.