Working with so many community builders, I still see the majority of people talking about their community like it’s a membership site:
- “I’ll provide weekly workshops for our members”
- “I’ll critique member’s work regularly”
- “I’ll offer discounts and resources”
Of course community events and resources are important, but they’re still generally you, the community leader, providing all the value for your members.
The truest form of value within community is members creating value between themselves.
Therefore, it’s our job as community leaders to focus less on creating endless value ourselves, and more to create spaces where our members can derive value from one another.
For example, last week, I organised a live call inside Learn.Community. Many times on the call, I would sit back and let our members chat, connect and create moments of serendipity.
During a one hour call, members created partnerships between themselves, supported each other’s mental health, created a chat group to work towards a collective launch sprint and sparked a collaboration for Instagram.
Now here’s the beauty of this… None of that value came from me. It was all our members. I simply created the space for them to connect, then sat back and let the magic happen.
I feel like we’re all stuck in ‘audience mode’, in that we’re inherently used to jumping on the hamster wheel of cranking out content relentlessly for our followers.
This isn’t how community works.
It’s a real mindset shift to think more about enabling connection, and less about churning out content/resources.
I realise I may sound like a broken record when I go on about this point, but when 99% of community builders I work with are stuck in ‘creating’ mode, rather than ‘connecting’ mode, something needs to be said!
I hope you’ll take this as motivation to go bring some of your members together today.
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