Launch your community (it's less hard than you think)
When the word community drops the image of sweat investment and hard work always causes shudders. I’ve been involved in community-building long enough to say: that image needs to go.
The number one source of hard work is people overthinking the work. Thinking that something big is needed to get started, which is way bigger than is actually necessary.
Years ago I was doing some research for an article into how the famous multidisciplinary research center Santa Fe Institute came into being. Its founders were accomplished scientists. They assumed that they needed a couple of 100 million dollars in endowments to get the ball rolling for the institute. Yet despite their reputation, the founders got only a fraction of what they were hoping for; a couple of 10’s of thousands of dollars.
Fortunately for them, they didn’t consider that a failure. Instead they used the money to organize workshops, bringing people together to talk about what the Institute would need to be about. The conversations were wonderful. They created so much momentum that they became the foundation for what the institute is about today: A unique place for scientific disciplines to meet to tackle complex problems.
Imagine if the founders would have stuck to their big expectations. Nothing would have happened at all.
A recipe for starting your community, small
What Santa Fe shows us is this: community starts with conversation. And conversation is way less work than most people assume.
After the first conversation, the second question is inevitable: “What do we do next?”
These two moments are the core of any lasting community. Let’s take them one by one
1. Convene all hands with the unconference
A great way to starting a commununity conversation is through an unconference. In a nutshell the unconference is a break-out session programme, where the participants decide what sessions they want to host. Not the central committee.
The unconference reveals what interesting challenges and lessons reside within a particular group of people. It is also great for discovering who is interested in what, as participants vote with their feet during the unconference, walking into the session that speak to them.
The biggest win for participants is that they meet their like minds from amongst people with different backgrounds. New relationships are started during the event, which turn into collaborations that carry forward for a long time. I have met many of the people that I have worked with at unconference occasions.
2. Turn demand for knowledge into supply of support
Here’s the thing: unconference sessions aren’t just content. They’re signals—windows into what people need next. The sessions that participants proposed reflect the learning opportunities that reside within the group.
Imagine a startup founder asking about agile team dynamics, or a community initiative wrestling with board governance. These aren’t throwaway session titles. They’re clues.
By listening closely, you gather real-time intelligence on what your community is hungry for. That becomes the roadmap for future support.
This order of first getting overview of what questions live within a group avoids the common pitfall of frontloading the community program with activities that no one is really asking for (and yes, I say it again, of creating too much work!).
No more impact measurement workshops when the issue is pricing.
No more fundraising training when the real need is customer traction.
Both of these steps form the core cycle of a peer learning programme. Do the process in loops. Start first with the unconference. Then sprinkle specific support over the calender with ideas that came from the unconference. Then, 4 months later, host the second unconference. Play with that one by including new and interesting perspectives. Rinse and repeat.
3. Build on the basics
That is the core of it. And when you’ve built that core, you’ll find opportunity to add more.
Participants always ask for a chat channel to stay in touch with others. So give it to them. They are also curious about discussions and thoughts of others during the unconference. Add content about that on a discussion forum and you take the community online. Feed the flame of discussion as the moderator or curator and use that to fire up new events.
Community is as simple as it sounds. The energy is already there. It just needs to get done.
Are you thinking of starting small?