One sunny day in June, I sat in a bustling downtown San Francisco taqueria with Kevin Lin, a cofounder and chief operating officer of Twitch. Kevin oversees a billion-dollar online gaming brand that each month attracts tens of millions of visitors. Over a tostada and iced tea, he told me how his user numbers continue to explode. In just three years, his brand had almost accidentally created a meeting place for people who love video games.
To Kevin, it had become clear that users desperately wanted to be part of a community that represented their identity, values, and shared interests. The company had recently invited one thousand of these users to “partner” with the brand. They were extended privileges to work with the company in a special way that gave them a higher profile. Kevin shared that some people were so moved by the invitation that they cried. He knew that it had little to do with the financial opportunity—these users had already shown that they would provide content for free. What moved them was the sense that they were being welcomed somewhere and appreciated for who they were.
Many Twitch users felt misunderstood, unappreciated, and disconnected from the offline world, Kevin said, referring to the stigma of being a video game enthusiast. Just by the hours spent online at Twitch, they had already demonstrated how much they appreciated finding one another. But Kevin didn’t know how to transform the group into a strong community: all he really knew to do was to invite them to visit and use the website. In fact, no one in his company knew time-tested principles for building a robust community endowed with a rich feeling of connection. Moreover, Twitch’s leadership was reluctant to take risky steps to organize the users, lest such decisions ruin whatever was currently working. There were so many ideas I wanted to share with Kevin right away so that he and his team could better serve millions worldwide and make them feel more connected. He shared his vision for bigger live events around the world and a more harmonious global community.
This book is my offering to Kevin* and all the other community builders who are creating spaces where we can learn to be connected, defeat loneliness, and enrich lives by understanding where and how we belong. In short, this book is a tool for bringing friendship and support where there has been loneliness, fear, and separation. May your communities serve members in all the ways they are hungry to experience.
You probably already understand that it’s important to belong to strong communities. They make us more effective in reaching goals and overcoming challenges large and small. Communities are created when at least two people begin to feel concern for each other’s welfare. If others join this tiny caring flame, the community fire grows. This is as true for neighbors as for global activists and coworkers (or even competitors) taking on a big challenge. I designed this book to help current and future leaders working either in person or online to understand how to make their communities feel more connected, durable, and fulfilling. If it’s successful, then your communities will do at least four things better. First, it’ll help members grow in the ways they hope to. This growth can be technical, social, or internal. Second, it’ll cause members to feel more connected, welcome, proud, and excited to be a part of the group. Third, it’ll help members work together toward making the difference that you envision. Fourth, it’ll make membership more fun.
For the purposes of this book, tribes are people who share certain values even if they’re in different places or aren’t connected yet. These values may show up in shared interests, activities, or life choices. Tribes want to be connected. They want to be around people who understand them. For example, there are many people in the world who value building confidence and courage in girls and are willing to take action. They create a tribe even if they haven’t come together in a formal community like the Girl Scouts organization. The people who bring a tribe together to create a community are tribal leaders. Since you’re reading this book, you’re likely a tribal leader. Or maybe you’re a tribal leader but haven’t realized it yet. If so, you may be far more important to other people than you know.
Your community may be very small; in fact, it might not even have begun yet. You may notice that your community uses almost none of the principles discussed in this book. There’s nothing wrong with this. Small, informal communities can offer a lot of value with very little structure or consideration of what makes the community work. It’s also possible that the principles are there, but you haven’t been looking for them. Chances are, you’re taking on one of two challenges. The first possibility is that you want to build or grow a community. This could consist of a group of students, tech workers, teachers, healers, advisers, or any other tribe with an interest in connecting with and caring about those around them. Communities can be formal, with official membership and administration (like Doctors Without Borders), or informal, tied by shared values and commitments (such as jungle bush pilots).
The second possibility is that you believe an existing community has the potential to become more connected or effective. The current community might look successful on the outside. You might even have lots of members, events, and funding. But communities that look strong and healthy are sometimes poorly organized. Many do not have a clear vision about what they do or where they’re headed. They don’t know how to make their activities more sophisticated, effective, or rewarding. They may not know how to connect newer members in a meaningful way with current members. And they may have trouble finding the right prospective members and helping them get involved. Right now, I’m working with a famous legacy church in San Francisco. More than two thousand people attend services there on Sundays. It looks strong, but I know that it’s a real challenge to get younger members involved and to give visitors a clear way to connect with active members. While there’s a lot happening at this church, its long-term sustainability is far from certain.
If you’re not facing either of these challenges, don’t worry: there’s plenty for you to get from reading this book now. It can help you understand your current communities and the leadership style within them. You may be outside a community trying to understand it, either because you think you want to join it or because you’re sure that you don’t. Or maybe you’re a leader who hasn’t known that you’ve been waiting for these insights, and it may make your efforts far more powerful.
I titled this book The Art of Community because the best community building is an art. There’s no single formula. What works for you and your members will not work for everyone. Success will reflect your values, priorities, and growth. Just as in art, there are forms and skills you can build on, but copying someone else won’t create something truly inspiring. You have to bring your own creativity and experience to the work. And while you must craft your own community, once you finish this book you’ll see that there are seven core principles to community building that have served people for millennia. Even when an organization considers itself informal and unstructured, as it matures, these principles will appear—whether the members notice or not.
To create something that others want to join and support, we have to remember a core tenet: communities function best and are most durable when they’re helping members to be more successful in some way in a connected and dynamic world. If you forget this, or even worse, if you never understand this, then your efforts will be misplaced. The communities I’m encouraging you to build should make people (including you) stronger, happier, and full of well-being. Simply gathering people on your block together can do this. So can connecting millions of people around the world. If we fail to get members excited about committing their time and effort, they’ll leave.
One word of caution before we begin. You’ve probably been part of an exclusive group in which someone (or several someones) believed that, since they belonged to this particular group, they had permission to bask in their own achievements and mistreat more junior members. I hope that you saw how quickly that attitude erodes respect and influence. We will discuss “inner rings” in great detail in chapter 8. Leaders must set an example for senior members to respect and serve new members. Without this, some will certainly build up their own egos by disrespecting new members. They’ll forget that the community is strongest when it attracts and supports like-valued people. Abusing new members will show that the community is a self-serving, self-aggrandizing, and potentially dangerous organization. It’ll be dangerous because it’ll be far more committed to serving its own needs than to serving as a supportive part of a healthy world.
Lastly, you may have visited or joined a community (formal or informal) that seemed great in the beginning, and then your interest waned. Maybe you got upset by the way it was run. Was it because it stopped helping you be who you wanted to be? Did it become just another chore or responsibility? Perhaps the community did a bad job of explaining what its true purpose was. You joined thinking that you would find help to achieve X, only to discover that the community was really focused on helping members achieve Y. If you had understood that at the outset, you would never have joined. Sometimes, as leaders bringing people together, we find it easy to become convinced of our own greatness. We can help avoid this by remembering that we can lead for the long term only when we’re serving others.
Let’s begin the cool stuff.
* To protect identities, I’ve changed the names and identifying details about other people in this book. They are all real people.