10 Tips for Building a Community Around Your Cause

In previous articles on community building, we covered the ways that community is changing in our culture and the 5 key pillars of healthy communities. The goal here is to build a community with intention and ensure that your community is set up for success. 

10 Tips for Building Community

Let’s look at some approaches to consider whether you’re building a new community or working towards improving a community that’s already in place.

Tip #1: Start Small

Rather than opening your community up to your entire network, it’s best to start with a small cohort of beta testers to work out the kinks. Find your top 10-20 ambassadors and invite them to help build your community. Introduce the idea and come to the table with some options, but be open to listening to how you can best serve your community rather than forcing them into predefined structures. If you can find a way to build something that works for your core audience, you can scale it up from there. 

Tip #2: Onboard with Intention

Being a newbie can be uncomfortable, and coming into a tight-knit community can feel awkward and overwhelming. So really nailing the on-boarding experience for new members is crucial. This requires more than a welcome email sequence or a membership card. Human curation and introductions are a great way to help newcomers feel instantly at home. You’ll need to take the time to get to know your new members so you can determine who would be best to connect them with. 

Tip #3: Foster Relationships

A huge value to joining a community is creating relationships with other community members. And this doesn’t end at onboarding. Ensure that your community is structured in a way that will create lasting relationships. This is one of the key differences between communities that stay surface level and communities that are truly special. 

Tip #4: Community is Co-Created

Communities cannot be forced. They are co-created by the community members and community organizers and curators. Think gardener vs. carpenter. A carpenter meticulously plans and crafts each element of his creation from start to finish, placing each piece with precision. 

A gardener focuses on creating the conditions for growth, and lets nature do the rest. You should approach your community-building like a gardener, providing the right conditions for a healthy community but willing to adjust based on how the community responds. 

Tip #5: Actively Gather Feedback

This one is crucial. Community members who feel unheard or unseen will not last. And the approach to organizing a community that worked early on might not work today. But you have to do more than just put out passive asks for feedback. Provide different options for your community members through surveys, discussions, 1-on-1 meetings, and more. Different members will be comfortable with different formats. 

Tip #6: Charge a Membership Fee

You want to build an active and engaged community. And people are more likely to perceive a community as being valuable if it’s not free. It’s a proven fact of human psychology. Again, you have to balance this with your goal of creating an inclusive community. The no-questions-asked free membership model is tried and true here. This also allows you to build a community experience that’s actually valuable and worthwhile to your members. You can create a tiered membership model based on different fee structures or member responsibilities.

Tip #7: Keep it Simple

When you’re designing your membership model, perks, and member benefits, it might be tempting to promise a lot. But you don’t want to overcomplicate this. Remember, people are busy and will only be able to commit so much time and energy to your community. You don’t need to overdo it. Like most things, it’s best to keep it simple, consistent, and focused. You want to create as little structure and format as possible, and let the rest happen organically. 

At Nextspace, the coworking space where Cosmic launched, a lot of the community structure came from Friday Happy Hours. Every Friday, members would gather and hang out informally. Much of the community value and networking happened at this informal event, even more than the formal and structured networking events. 

Tip #8: Make it Hybrid

If you’re in a position where in-person meetups and events are possible, there’s still nothing that can replace face-to-face human interaction. But virtual events, meetups, and communities are more popular and possible than ever before. 

A hybrid model, where virtual and real-world interactions are offered, will help strengthen and grow your community. Now that so much community happens exclusively online, it’s quickly become an expectation that there will at least be some sort of digital component to your community.  

Tip #9: Make it Flexible

You want the member experience to grow and scale with the interest and capacity of each member. Set a minimum expectation of engagement, and provide community members with clear options to grow and deepen their commitment to the community as it makes sense to them. If you create a community structure that’s too rigid, life will get in the way and you’ll start to lose valued members for no good reason. 

Tip #10: Appoint a Community Manager

Although you want to co-create your community with your members, communities always need curation and moderation. And this requires consistent monitoring, engagement, and conversations with your members. 

Even if it’s not possible from day one, having a community-manager that can take the lead on curating your community is critical. A community manager can help set and reinforce community norms and rules, and also sets the vibe for your community. So this role is one that shouldn’t be left to chance, or set up as someone’s second job or focus. 

Nourish Your Community

Of course, there are infinite ways to build community around your cause. The tips above should be thought of as a starting point, not a series of hardline rules that are set in stone. 

Ultimately, community is what happens when you aren’t looking. So be like the gardener and provide your community with the right conditions to help it grow and thrive. 

Build a Community and a Movement

As a social impact brand, you’re uniquely positioned to help create critical social infrastructure, build spaces for collective action, and provide a sense of purpose and belonging for your supporters. Building community for social movements has a rich and proven history. And, it’s becoming an increasingly important element for your broader social impact strategy. 

Healthy communities are built on a foundation of shared Interests, strong relationships, collective action, value creation, and member diversity. And when you create a healthy, thriving community around your social cause, it can unlock collective action and human connections that can set your mission and your organization apart. That can lead to transformational change. And that can create an impact on society and profoundly impact the lives of your individual supporters. 

As humans, we need to connect with each other. We need to feel like we belong. And we need purpose in our lives. 

Let’s leverage the power of social impact. Let’s expand our work and our missions to build stronger communities. Because transformational change happens when we work together, person to person, to create a brighter future for humanity, our planet, our communities, and ourselves.