This week in community building - Issue 36

Community builders! How does it feel when Barack Obama endorses our work? 🙌

✍️ Blogs, Articles, Resources and News

On how Indy Hall is maintaining its community remotely:

Open Hall @Home

One of the biggest aspects of work life lost right now is the casualness and serendipity of interactions with other people, the founder said. So, to mirror its IRL open-house style first Friday events where anyone from the community is welcomed in to the space to meet others and cowork, Indy Hall is trying a virtual Open Hall @Home. It’s essentially a daylong virtual event where people can come in and out of sessions all day using different platforms or digital tools, if they’re looking for some casual conversation, to share a cup of coffee through a screen or just to have folks there to keep them motivated.

Anyone have a spare $3500 to spend on a global online community management software market 2020-2026 report? Me neither. 🤷🏽‍♀️


COVID-19 is forcing brands to think outside the box - a great example of community action Phylwheel.

One of my favorite brand stories out of the pandemic so far has to be from DoubleTree, an American hotel chain owned by Hilton. On top of free changes and cancellations for new, individual reservations made through June 30, 2020, they’ve also embraced their community in a very sweet way. DoubleTree is well known for its chocolate chip cookies they serve guests at check-in, which have since have developed a cult following, as fans try (and fail) to replicate them with their own recipes. In a stroke of genius, DoubleTree decided to reveal its chocolate chip cookie recipe to the world during the pandemic. The video containing the recipe has been viewed more than 500,000 times. Since the cookies are not part of their primary business model, it doesn’t harm the brand to reveal the recipe. Although, I still imagine that stuffier companies would worry too much about ‘protecting the brand’ to reveal recipes like this.

COVID-19 Aftermath: Rise of communities and office productivity - jaack.me

As people are learning how to interact in virtual communities, we’re starting to see a growth of communities that combine multiple approaches, using multiple tools and platforms to maintain the engagement. A community is not a meeting place anymore, it’s a way of being. What one does defines which communities s/he’s in, not the other way around. Community interests are shared across all platforms, that are just a means of best expressing different types of content.

A framework for planning a harvest - Chris Corrigan

Basically the way you use this is in the design process of a gathering. The framework assumes that every conversation, interaction or process will produce outputs and results in all four of these quadrants. If you are not intentional about naming these things, you run the risk of over-focusing on one particular quadrant (usually from the tangible side of the framework). It is entirely possible to do good quality work as a group and destroy group cohesion, trust, and individual commitment. So I have found that supporting a planning team to name outputs in all the quadrants helps them to focus on choosing tools and processes that will be conscious of the effect of their work on the intangibles.

🎙️ Podcasts

• Episode 021 - Michael Sandoval starts a new job and is over all of Digital - How important is on-ramping? - Peers Over Beers
• How the “Singaporean voice of youth” found cognitive clarity as a community builder 🧠 Kuik Shiao-Yin, The Thought Collective - GetTogether
• David Finkel on Work/Life Balance and Staying Focused - Conversations with Bacon
• Engagement That Scales – Episode #9: Sahana Chattopadhyay on Leadership as a Quest - The Community Roundtable

🗓️ Events

Upcoming events, let me know if I’ve missed any…

• Decoded: How a travel community pivoted to virtual experiences - Code Control
• CommChat Virtual Summit – Comm.Chat

🐦 Twitter