Share your favourite books 📚. Here is mine on community building.

Get Together gives concrete steps on how to build a community. Here's a quick 3 minute actionable summary for you.

1. Figure out who your people are by asking these 2 questions:

• Who do I want to get together?
• Why are we coming together?

2. Design an activity that members can do together that would be better experienced as a group.

• What is something that can be greater experienced if done or shared in a group?
• Is that activity purposeful? (How does it add value to your people?)
• Is that activity participatory? (Does the activity turn your people into contributors rather than merely being an audience? Give your users responsibility.)
• And the crucial one: Is that activity repeatable? (The greater the frequency of activity, the greater the engagement and hence, a stronger community)

3. Communicate your origin story

• The story of self - what made you care about solving the problem that you and your people face?
• The story of us - what are your people's shared purpose?
• The story of now - Why should new members join NOW?

4. Track

• Who are the people that keep showing up? If only a handful remains active users that's good enough. Categorise them into personas, and focus your outreach on these personas.
• Who are the people that churn? It is equally useful to figure out why people don't stay. You might instinctively think that they are not your target users at all, but if so, why would they sign up in the first place? Study the reason for the churn, and fix it.

5. Empower and delegate

• Once you figure out your power users and they start begetting more power users, pass the torch to them to allow them to build micro-communities. Delegating community building not only takes some growth work off your shoulders, but it is exponential, organic, and authentic.

Communities are extremely hard to build, but the resultant authenticity and experience is worth it. I too, am trying to build a community of readers to share notes on books they've read at Bard. You can check out my other book notes on my profile. It's my first serious project after learning code and it would also be amazing to get some feedback on it!

Also, do share your favourite books in the comments below. I'd appreciate some great book recommendations. Cheers!