Community Engineers take the Lead
Knowing the early problems that community encounter as a stepping stone in getting started in Community Engineering👷
In the previous blog, we discussed the very roles of community builders, managers, and moderators, and that community management is more than just banning members, approving posts, or deleting memes in the general chat. If you haven’t been able to check out the first part of the series of writings regarding Community Engineering, feel free to do so (here).
We also have some questions left unanswered from the last blog, and one of those is how we could be able to build a strong relationship with community members and still have a steady growth in their numbers. I believe that understanding these very foundations of communities is a stepping stone in Community Engineering. So how do we really do that?
Before we move forward in knowing how we could solve these two problems, we need to understand that building relationships with community members while growing their numbers is important and is the foundation for a long-lasting community. We see that most communities now either focus only on building relationships and tend to remain stagnant, which halts their overall growth, or they focus only on building their numbers and member count, which makes their community inactive with only 5-10 members engaging in the chat even if they have 100k+ members in their Discord server. And I believe that community builders and managers fall into either of these traps.
Relationship Building Trap
We all know that building a strong relationship and connection with your community is very important, as it is a way to make sure that the community is aligned with whatever beliefs, values, or goals your project or company have. So community builders tend to fall into the trap thinking that relationship with the community should be the only focus and that the number or growth of the community will just follow. Well, this could be true to some degree, but the growth in terms of new community members is just very limited. Why is that?
As we focus all of our efforts on building the relationship, it is more likely to be harder for us to grow the numbers and member count of our community, as it is much easier to build a strong relationship with a small number of individuals rather than a larger one. It's definitely easier to build a strong relationship and connections in a classroom with 5 students than in one with 30. This is the reason why community builders who fall into this trap tend to sacrifice the opportunity to expand and scale their community.
Number Building Trap
We also know that the number of members and the community member count are also very important aspects of your community, especially since great numbers tend to align with the business goals and motivations of a project and a company. That is why we can see a much larger contingent of community managers and builders fall into this trap and set their focus solely on growing their numbers and member count, leaving the community members themselves to create relationships and connections with one another, which we really see doesn't work in the long run. Why is that?
In my long journey of building communities, I would say that I have most often fallen into the "Number Building Trap," because this is the metric that employers and company executives most often focus on, and it is far more visually appealing to see 100k+ members rather than 100 members. I thought way back then that the bigger the number = successful community. I believed that numbers and member count were everything and it is the definition of success in community building, but soon I realized that it was far from the truth. I've realized that the size of the community is actually inversely proportional to the quality of its members' relationships. which means that the bigger the community gets, the harder it is to build strong relationships and connections with it.
You might be thinking, "Zab, c'mon, bro, you might be making this all up."
Actually this is something that we could also reference to sociology and how the size of a group impacts the group dynamics.
“In general, we conclude that larger groups are associated with decreased performance of individual students, poorer and less diverse social interactions. A high group size led to a less cohesive group, with less efficient communication and less information exchange among members.”
Reference: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-29736-7_35
And it's also the same the other way around, in which we touch on the "Relationship Building Trap" and why focusing only on building relationships could affect growth in numbers as it brings fear that the strong relationships already built within the community will be sacrificed when we put effort into scaling the community.
"Small groups of two to ten are thought to be more effective because each member has ample opportunity to participate and become actively involved in the group."
Reference: https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/management/Gr-Int/Group-Dynamics.html
Maybe some of the community managers and builders reading this have also fallen into this trap, and we are calling it a "trap" for a reason because, at a later time in your community, you will soon be wondering how you could increase engagements and why only 5-10 community members are engaging and active out of your 100k+ Discord members.
Some of us will try different varieties of events and initiatives in our community to increase engagements once more but most of the time it will fail because members will not give much value to a community in which they don’t have any connection in. At this time, most community managers and builders will point out their ineffective event ideas and strategies but fail to point out their failure in building a relationship with their community members in the early days of their community falling into what I call the "Valley of Disappointment in Community Building."
We are not saying that you shouldn’t grow the numbers of your community, but building the numbers and relationships should be done at the same time. Well, at the end of the day, you should be guided by your goals for building the community in the first place. If your goal is to hype up a certain project or product by growing your community member count from 0 to 100,000 in a month, then good for you on hitting your goal, but don’t expect that the community will last long-term or that the engagement level in the early days will last long.
So how do we solve it?
So we now know why doing both is hard because of their inversely proportional relationship and why solving both in your community are important. Now you might be asking, "Zab, how can we solve both problems if we shouldn’t focus only on one of them?"
What I want you to do now is wear your hard hat and start solving this problem with me as a Community Engineer!
Imagine being in an early-stage start-up company with 5 team members, and you are one of them. I am 100% sure that you have a great and strong relationship with the other 4 team members, as you have already known each other for almost a year. But when the company grows its team from 5 to 100 employees in just a span of a month, it's more than likely that you will not know every single one of them or at least have the opportunity to create a strong relationship with all of the company's employees.
This is pretty much the same with communities. We tend to rush the growth of our numbers and member count, which prevents us from having the opportunity to at least give enough time for the community members to know each other and create relationships and connections in the community. We tend to focus only on growing the numbers and wonder why our community is not engaging or active.
You might ask, "Zab, what are you trying to say?" I believe that building communities that are aimed for the long-term should be built in a gradual and steady approach. Being able to find the balance between relationship building and community expansion and scaling is key to building a community that will last.
But you might say, "Zab, I am building a community for an NFT/Web3 project, and a gradual and steady approach is not aligned with our business goals." What I could suggest is to make sure that you and your team are able to plan out your phasing and roadmap and, if possible, allot a significant amount of time to building the community around your project or product. Building a community takes time, and just like any other thing, it's not something that you could do successfully overnight. As Community Builders It is within our power to craft strategies and ideas for our community while making sure that we uphold the very principles and foundation of community building. Use your power and let’s build better communities.
Lets take the lead!
This blog's goal is to emphasize and demonstrate that community management and building entails more than just creating a Facebook group or a Discord server; it also includes systematic engineering approaches and methodologies that community builders can use.
I believe that communities differ from one another, and that strategies and effective ideas may vary from one industry or category to the next, but there are unquestionably guiding principles, foundations, and philosophies in community building. The goal of this blog is not to suggest effective ideas and strategies but to provide a north star for community managers and aspiring community builders who are looking to start their journey in Community Engineering.
Why is Community Engineering important?
Why is thinking like a community engineer instead important, and why do a lot of companies and brands now give importance to communities? These and other related questions will be addressed in our next blog, which will focus on the importance of Community Engineering in the digital space.
If you are interested in learning more about Community Engineering, feel free to subscribe to my substack channel and reach out to me (here) so we can discuss further how we could better build and manage communities. If you are already a community builder and you find this article helpful in some way, feel free to share it with other community managers and builders you know. Feel free to leave your feedback and insights about this blog. Thanks a lot, GM!
Images and graphics used is generated through the power of DALL-E https://labs.openai.com/