BeTech to FCS in London!
This post talks about the key takeaways of BeTech attending Facebook Communities Summit in London from 8–10th. February 2018, what we picked up, liked and missed, to conclude with the what’s next!
What is a community — what makes a community great?
Communities get various definitions; this one Facebook received after consulting many people that study about communities and academia, really nails it well to what we see BeTech is to many and how they identify themselves with it.
A Community is a collection of people, in which they receive a sense of belonging, connection, feeling of safety, and give trust and investment over time.
Strong, vibrant groups all depend on the extent that:
- Members of a group care about each other;
- They feel close to some of the people in the group;
- They identify themselves with the group;
- They care about the same topics as many other members in the group;
- They have strong ties with other members of the group;
- They get useful information from participating in the group.
- Strong community leadership, community builders driving the group’s culture and ambition.
Also Facebook loves communities
Facebook is going all in on groups. We created one of the leading groups in Belgium; this is what we think about the direction, after having been selected to attend Facebook’s first Communities Summit in Europe.
150 leading groups were selected from all over Europe (out of 3,500 candidacies), in Belgium, after a selection procedure, 4 groups were invited to attend, of which your own BeTech of course :). I did the selection procedure and when I was able to invite another group member as a guest, of course Kristoffer attended.
Facebook has introduced a new metric called “Time well spent” to guide their efforts in building what has become one of the largest companies in terms of market cap. Coinciding with introducing Time well spent, Facebook has started to ramp-up their efforts around groups — communities on the platform.
Firstly, mid 2017 Facebook changed their mission statement from Connecting People to Connecting Communities. https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/22/15855202/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-new-mission-statement-groups
At the time, about 100M people were active in groups worldwide, by the time FCS Europe was held this year; this had already doubled to 200M people.
Secondly, around the same period, Facebook launched a first Facebook Communities Summit edition in the US bringing groups together in order to interact directly about the evolution Facebook should take regarding groups. As screening new membership requests requires time and legwork for admins-particularly for groups built around focused passions or purpose, one of the key features that came out of the first summit is the ability to screen new members with a questionnaire to verify their genuine interest and fit with the group’s purpose.
The EU edition was held in London from 8–10 February 2018, where 300 group leaders from 150 communities were invited for a 2-day session incl. design sprints, workshops and keynote lead by Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA Facebook → Stream of the keynote: https://www.facebook.com/facebook/videos/10157088671466729/
The keynote started by telling her personal story on recent announcement (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/04/facebook-boss-reveals-has-incurable-cancer / and how she turned out to Facebook and has joined and helped to grow the group Living with Follicular Lymphoma, which now has 3,500 members who support each other.
Next, the Facebook Community Leadership Program was announced, allowing funding, training and support to help enable extraordinary leaders to end with the practical product announcements.
Specific product announcements during this summit:
- Admin tools hub.
- Personalization: more community identity within the groups. See our BeTech colour now appearing everywhere :)
- Facebook noticed the importance of rules for groups. Now, rules have their own place in a group, while group leaders have the ability to write specific rules for their Facebook groups.
- Group announcements.
Missing today in Facebook’s outlook for groups is a vision on the implementation of new technologies like blockchain (for the overall governance of the group, BeTech has been looking into this, i.e. https://einc.io) and AI for the automated moderation of groups, based on the implemented group rules.
The rest of the day was divided in attending specific workshops and networking with other group leaders.
3 different workshops were held on the following topics: Managing your community and handling conflict, Engaging your community and Growth and planning for your community’s future.
During the networking breaks, we were able to meet with other group leaders and share thoughts and ideas. Various types of groups were present, certainly not only based on entrepreneurship or innovation, but all initiated and build by passionate, vibrant people willing to share their point of interest or make people’s life easier in a specific area.
Discussing with other group builders goes from topics from what it’s like in day to day time spending to the various situations every admin already had to deal with, to the points on when to remove someone. What stroke us is how much the stories of other group leaders matched our own experiences, even in regards to the applied procedures and rules in managing their community that turned out identical.
A clear aspect that came back during the summit was when and how to make a community sustainable.
Monetization is required to achieve sustainability. This statement during the summit was for us clearly the strongest one, as also BeTech has been looking for sustainability beyond generations of entrepreneurs.
Aside from the announced Community Leadership Program, Facebook has its own fundraising tool (donations.fb.com); though that seems to be rather limited in possibilities to gain financial support for one’s community.
Community leaders easily spend 2–6 hours/day managing their group, with BeTech this represents 2–3 hours each day, aside from the 24/7 availability one needs to have to moderate the group effectively. In average a non-wanted post needs to be removed within a 10 minutes time frame.
Although Facebook touched the monetization aspect, many, including ourselves, were a bit disappointed on Facebook efforts on this aspect and asked more in depth questions on how Facebook could help / do more for admin’s ‘time well spend’ on the platform. Mostly they rely on building tools that reduce the time needed to manage the groups, groups fundraising themselves, maybe by learning from each other (via the announced Facebook Community Circles as an internal group for group admins) or, as requested by some admins, when Facebook would pay admins, that would probably be within a revenue share model between Facebook and group admins, though that would also mean allowing ads within groups, which is not the case today (though do we want that?).
Also with BeTech, we have been working hard on preparing the BeTech charter and fundraising campaign for the community ‘turning into a nationwide movement’.
→ The Entrepreneur First network BeTech is accelerating its ambition by launching the BeTech Movement → Read the BeTech charter here and join us in the BeTech Movement: https://medium.com/@BeTech_/betech-charter-ba777652904a
→ In November 2018 Nicolas Frenay is appointed as CLC Community Lead for Facebook in Brussels/Belgium.
More Pictures on the FCS event: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rszy954ztp8lhpc/AACsMNTWMuIHSHY_n07fc6Gfa?dl=0
