Introducing Community Discovery, again

This is a written version of a talk I did for Community Week.

I've been on a journey of exploring what Community Discovery is, or more exciting...what it could be. My understanding of the potential of what it could be is forever expanding.

It's led me down a path of questioning everything I know about community.

What if we've been doing it all wrong?

The deeper I went, the more uncomfortable I became with current practices. I went through a bit of an existential crisis, asking myself:

• What are our roles?
• What is all this exhausting engagement about?
• What even is community when everyone is a part of it?
• Why aren’t we creating more impact?
• Are we even needed?
• Why does it feel so hard to create real change?
• Why can’t we be more creative?

I practised making observations:

• Communities fail far more than they need to
• We lack understanding of how we can create impact
• Communities don’t have the impact that they could
• Our tooling is frustrating
• We’re letting the social networks have all the fun
• ROI? Let’s not go there
• The silos are still there, even when we try to pretend they don't

But it’s also led me to magical discoveries, in the most unlikely form of community discovery...

I’ve never been so excited at the community work I’m doing right now. My challenge is to make it work sustainably and in practice.

I hope you'll follow my journey as I've already been sharing (mostly in my paid content) my progress as it happens.

Community Discovery is...

I'm forever tweaking how I describe what Community Discovery is...

Or another way of looking at is...

For Community Discovery to happen it needs to be at the heart of our efforts. Community at the heart is somewhat synonymous with community-led, the difference for me is that it should be led by Community Discovery. Always.

When we ask how we start a community, the answer is always Community Discovery. Always. There is no other way, but of course, Community Discovery can happen in many ways. To confine you to a strict framework, I do not.

And when I say "Community is at the Heart", I literally visualise community being the connector of other parts of the business and further afield towards the ecosystem.

We can look at it like this: community feeds the business and ecosystem. The model below demonstrates it from the perspective of the business. The model below is visually empty, which means there are no community efforts happening.

Our daily community efforts then become about how we can provide data and insights to others across the business. We're a bridge. A connector. Our service is the data and insights we can bring—we gather them the community way.

The simple idea of needing to become aware that we need to collaborate and seek opportunities with other people within the business means we naturally need to observe, collaborate and focus on pain-led solutions—nobody is going listen or care if it doesn't help them move forward.

Of course, this doesn't mean we can support the whole business at once. We look for needs and opportunities. We focus on what is achievable. We'll likely always have a somewhat spikey looking Community Profile as a result.

Interesting things could evolve over time. One thing I've noticed is in elevating one business department with community efforts we find ways to cross over with other departments. Re-use of data, insights and relationships becomes a real thing.

Another thing I've noticed, is the more community-led one area becomes, it naturally lifts up the others. Partly, probably because of the natural cross over. This spikey profile will likely always be adapting as our business naturally evolves too.

We can also choose to break our efforts down into each department, this will help us focus on action and avoid the overwhelm of "ALL THE THINGS".

We can visualise it like a funnel, and we can then ask ourselves:

• how can community serve them?
• how can we make their life easier?
• what data would be useful to them?
• how can we be creative in creating that, with the help of the people?
• what will make them love us so much?
• what will make them go 'wow'?
• then later, how can we use what we've found for other parts of the business?

The below is an example of what the 'marketing department' might benefit from.

• Feedback: this could be customer feedback and ideas of any sort
• Trends: are you even marketing if you are not staying on top of trends?
• Content: ideas, words, phrases, testimonials, memes, whatever it is, it's better when it's people-led
• Lexicon: my new love, the words of the people, we should be studying it, and giving what we find to marketing
• Testimonials: the good, the bad, the ugly and the utter wonderful. These can be great, not just to use as surface level marketing testimonials, but also as relationship builders. How could a list of every testimonial ever received help create an authentic excuse to reach out?
• People: well what can I say? Marketing should know about the people that deserve to be paid attention to. They can then work their magic to elevate them. Team work is the dream work 'n' all that.

If we take the example of "marketing" is interested in "trends" then community can find ways to provide data for trends. We can go hunting. Have conversations. Create polls. Create or listen to podcasts...the options are endless.

We can also remember that other people in the business are interested in trends too. We can seek to create opportunities that will support them too.

In our current context, "trends" supports our efforts around marketing, education, events, conferences and publishing efforts. Nothing is silo'd. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Everything can be interconnected and built upon.

When we think about the "how" we can start to see the what the things we do can very much be seen as what we traditionally understand as community. Let's refer to this as "community things".

When we think about the "how" we also need to remember we are working as a system. Nothing in isolation. Everything is interconnected. We need to build upon what we have. We have to find ways to connect our work.

🚩 It's a red flag if there is no connection—it means we are working in a silo.

Community Discovery is ultimately about helping us make better decisions. As community people I fundamentally believe that data and insights are our biggest asset. And we are best placed to source this because we have the opportunity to interact across the business and ecosystem with authenticity and care.

There are no other roles out there that can do this. It is deep and intense work.

Two quick examples of Community Discovery in action

To finish up, I'll leave you with a couple of examples.

Good Quotes

We practice daily community note-taking (we use a tool called Tana). One thing we started logging early on were interesting quotes. Things we've heard. Things we like. Ideas. Snippets. From conversations, forum discussions, etc.

We tagged each quote with the person and the topic. We weren't quite sure how it would be useful, but over a year down the line we've used these quotes to help us with:

• Course creation: good quotes can help us explore whether we're including varying angles, they can also be great for remembering good and diverse people to invite into our course creation process.
• Talent spotting: good quotes is a broad indication that we may want to work with this person at some point, because they share good things.
• Trend spotting: because we tag by theme too, we use good quotes to help us spot trends, or lack of them.
• Publish in print: we even used some of the good quotes as footer snippets in a printed newspaper we published. It was a 1-2 hour job, instead of one that would've likely taken days.
• Newsletter content: always be re-using! Quotes are great for newsletters, people love reading them, people love their work being highlighted!
• Social media: Good quotes are also great for social media, often as simple graphics.

Slack Tracker

We feed interactions that happen in our community into our internal team Slack as automated notifications.

Why is this so good?

• It gives us a real sense of where the community being alive, or quiet
• The whole team has access
• We can emoji react to any update
• We can start a conversation with the team about any interaction, this could be fixing a problem, spotting a familiar name, or perhaps seeing an opportunity to create something together
• We can search a person's email address and see a complete journey of user interaction
• Internally, we use specific phrases when we notice something we had hoped to happen. One such phrase is "It's happening" and we can now do a search on our Slack to get a sense check of things that we have sensed are "happening". It's beautiful! (We also have "ThisIsSpam" as a phrase 🫠)

Resources:

• Everything I've written on Community Discovery
• Buy The Guide to Community Discovery

🐌