Phase 3: The Carnival
“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” – H.E. Luccock
Communities that don’t die in the desert usually die in the valley. And the ones that die in neither see their persistence rewarded by reaching the carnival. It is fun and exciting, to say the least. A welcome change.
Your narrative has found its audience, however small that may be. There is a regular pace at which your community is adding more members. You may even see a spike in your social media engagement.
Now, the mindset that sustained you in the desert and the valley is of little use. This is because the carnival is a phase of abundance. Opportunities that seemed scarce — like those to recruit people or fill your treasury — are available in plenty.
Let’s take a closer look.
Setting the Stage
It is tempting to overindulge in the carnival. Your community might want to spend more money and do more things. At the same time, things move faster than ever. More members join by the day, which brings the risk of diluting your community’s atmosphere.
Sticking to the plan is the key to making the most of the carnival. This does not mean not trying new things, but in a space full of distractions, it always helps to remember what you initially set out to do.
Encouraging participation
Today, the lines between a customer, a contributor, and a community member are more blurred than ever. Customers who come for the product or service may join the community and contribute to its mission. People that participate as contributors may become customers.
Your job as the community leader now is facilitating an environment where people easily drift between being customers, contributors, and community members. This means your leadership must feel like a party host instead of a troop leader.
Leadership as hospitality is all about making people comfortable and included. In this regard, you must ensure that people have ample opportunities to add to the conversation or contribute to a project with little to no friction.
Acknowledging outliers
Power laws apply everywhere, and they apply to your community too.
As you grow, you need to develop the skill to discern members with an outsized impact on things. This need not necessarily be in terms of output.
Some people might be great at shipping — which is easy to notice — but others are great at uplifting the community or keeping things glued together. Observing these people is an acquired skill. After finding these people, make sure you do everything you can to make them feel acknowledged and appreciated.
Demonstrating progress
Visible progress is a key driver of motivation. Besides making your community seem lively, it makes it fun and keeps morale high.
Demonstrating progress can also go beyond communicating output. It can be done in many ways. A regular cadence of meetings open to the broader public is a great way to do so.
The best communities also spend a lot of time documenting and articulating themselves — whether in video or text form — and putting it out there for the world to see.
Time to Perform!
Activity 14: Create functional teams.
Not having a tall hierarchy does not mean not having a structure. As your community grows, it is vital to structure yourself for maximum productivity.
- Identify members from your early members to lead these functional teams.
- The type of functional teams you have depends on what your community intends to do. This is clear by seeing what your early members spend time on when engaging with your community.
- Regardless of what you do, having a marketing and a governance team is highly advisable. Then, depending on your goals, you could have an engineering team, a design team, a growth team, etc.
- Cultivate these leaders by helping them run their teams.
- Leading a functional team is just another version of leading a community. Share your early lessons with team leaders and inform them of any roadblocks they may face.
Activity 15: Create a check-in ritual.
Leadership as hospitality means you must ensure everyone is having a good time.
- Encourage pod leaders to view their role as party hosts.
- Without asking, how can they know whether a member is enjoying themself or not? What is the equivalent of sitting alone in a corner and using your phone in your community?
- This could be someone suddenly stopping their daily gm’s. Or someone that is thorough and thoughtful in their responses gradually losing interest. Or it could be this person not reacting to the same number of messages as before, or not sharing the same volume of memes or music recs. Such vibe shifts manifest itself in many ways.
- Look for patterns and try to notice if people break them. While we all have our bouts of not feeling up to the mark, if you see someone withdrawing from your community, checking in with them is probably a good idea.
Activity 16: Who are the pillars of your community?
ℹ️ Identifying outliers
Community members with an outsized impact are the engine of sustenance. Acknowledging them goes a long way.
- You need to look hard at your community to identify these outliers.
- Who are the people that take the most amount of initiative? Who are the people that have the highest and most visible impact on community output?
- There might be a developer that pumps out PR after PR or a contributor that always has new content ideas.
- Others seem unproductive and more “behind the scenes,” yet they command the most respect or power in your community.
- Some outliers could also look like people whose presence lights up the whole space. This could be due to their nature or just how they conduct themselves. They always have something to say and leave the chat buzzing with action.
Activity 17: Appreciate and acknowledge the effort of your outliers.
There are several ways of appreciating and acknowledging your members.
- Publicly recognize your members, but be careful not to overdo it.
- There is a particular influence early members have in any community. As community founders, even though you may not have much power on paper, what you say holds a lot of weight in your community.
- Use this to your benefit. Publicly recognize the outstanding effort of your community members. But be sparing in your appreciation. Too much, and you risk reducing its impact.
- Having said that, don’t shy away from individually appreciating members. Do this as much as you can. It will make them feel good and make your members more open to critical feedback.
- If possible, create a compensation strategy to reward members monetarily.
- When possible, you should always use rewards that intrinsically motivate people. But some people are more extrinsically motivated. For them, earning money is more valuable than a sense of belonging.
- This is also fine. Monetarily rewarding members makes them take participation more seriously, and may even bump your community up in the list of projects they are involved with.
- Create a proposal to earmark a portion of your treasury for member contributions. Then, work with team leaders to create and maintain open task boards and processes to evaluate work and disburse payments.
Activity 18: Articulate your learnings from growing your community.
ℹ️ Demonstrating progress
Don’t be afraid to get meta when demonstrating progress.
One of the best ways of demonstrating progress is to articulate your learnings. People are more intrigued with the backstage details of what you do instead of the things that you actually do.[1]
Sharing your learnings is an excellent tactic to market your community to newer audiences subtly. * Create a personal blog commenting on your process as a community steward/founder. * Try to go as specific as you can in these posts. People may not be interested in your community, but they will surely be interested in how they could grow one.
Activity 19: Create a regular cadence of progress updates.
Make it a point to share anything your community accomplishes or completes at regular, predictable intervals.
- Post weekly updates.
- The best manifestation of demonstrating progress is weekly updates. There is something about a community that shares its challenges and what they’ve been up to.
- Try to open your communication channels to the world.
- Nothing demonstrates progress like letting the world peep into your office. You may open up the channel where you discuss and execute proposals. Or you can have some of your internal discussions open to the public. This might only be possible for some communities, but there is undoubtedly a version of this that you can implement.
Common Roadblocks
While the valley challenges your commitment, the carnival will question your sanity. All your processes and rituals get battle-tested and reveal interesting things. Your job here is to acknowledge the facts revealed with time and take action if necessary.
For example, you may realize that some rituals that worked well in earlier phases don’t scale or that your workflow requires specific changes.
Whatever this may be, consciously analyzing it and thinking about what you can do (and if you should do anything about it) is much better than simply ignoring it.
Conclusion
While you enter the carnival with two small teams of five to six people, you leave with ten or more such small teams. In a short period, your community has not only doubled but grown manifold.
Your treasury has some money in it, no matter the amount. Lively discourse populates your forums. You have a dependable governance process. You have self-managing teams in your community; most importantly, your power as a community founder has diminished.
These are all signs of a healthy community.
Things have somewhat stabilized — dare you say, even plateaued — and now you must focus on maintaining and guarding the castle you built.
[1] For example, the first thing one wonders when they meet a startup founder is not some specific detail of their company, but rather the backstage or the meta details of how they got started, what issues they faced, etc. The same goes for your community. Sharing your learnings is a great introduction to your community.