Community Hacked

Hey all :wave: ! We are starting specific 'help' channels, focused on the most common challenge areas listed by our members.

I have added each of you because I wanted to test this out with a small selection of you who have joined the slack and listed questions/challenges related to engagement on your application/registration

To kick things off, my background has been heavily centered around events and in person engagement. Translating to a virtual and very globally distributed community at a new role has been challenging. Does anyone have best practices starting off virtual engagement in channels? Slack, groups, etc.

Hey <@U03V7KDD4VA> - I'm by no means an expert in this space, and you probably are aware of these. That said, here are a few things I've done or read about in the past to boost engagement on digital platforms:

1. Content Strategy: have a clearly defined vision and process around bringing your audience engaging content. Ideally, you've gathered feedback from members that gives you confidence the content you're delivering aligns with what your audience is looking for. For me, this has been a combination of sharing articles or videos + producing some content myself. If you are running digital events, recording uploads or posts prompting follow-up discussions aren't too difficult to implement.
2. MVP's: The best engagement is member-to-member engagement. A lot of the best communities I've seen have at least a handful of member volunteers who are bought into the mission and are willing to  post on a consistent basis.
3. Discoverability: Building your channels into other workstreams where you already have engagement. An example I mentioned above is posting event recording links in your channels. People will hopefully come for the recording but stay for the discussion threads. Another example is having any presenters you work with engage in the channel before or after their presentation. 

This is really amazing feedback, thank you <@U03ULQ2THL1>! I definitely need to lean more heavily into discoverability.. this is super helpful thank you!

Hey everyone- I'm sure many people deal with this, so I wanted to throw this question out there for discussion:

*What are some nontraditional ways you've facilitated connections within your communities?*

In the communities I'm a part of, people want connection, and they have tools available (e.g.- member directory, slack channels, digital events), but those haven't fully addressed the connections goals of members. How have you either reduced friction to start connecting or subtly pulled members in to connection opportunities.

Thanks for sharing <@U03ULQ2THL1>!

At Startup Grind we did *one-to-one founder matchmaking*, which worked really well. Similar to lunchclub, people opted in based on a set of criteria, and we used those to match people for meetings on a weekly/monthly basis.

Another thing we did was work with *partners/sponsors who were willing to do different things to engage our founders and build relationships*. For example, a couple years back we worked with a large sponsor to select 10 top founders we thought would benefit from knowing and supporting each other to go to watch an NBA game (GSW) in the partner's corporate box. They loved it and built really strong connections both with the representatives of our partner and with the other founders.

Finally, we have also had success *pulling in some of our top-tier speakers (those one wouldnt normally get to speak to in such close proximity) to run roundtables with vetted founders*; e.g. I facilitated one with Dylan Field from Figma, and 6 of our top founders

Adding <@U04APA93BJA> to this group after our 1-1 yesterday :smile:

Does anyone here write a newsletter? Is Friday a bad day to send it?