Cheap and simple — a counterintuitive yet powerful community design principle
When we started Sandbox in 2007, we aimed to organize a yearly, impressive conference that would bring together leading young change makers from across the globe. We were scouting locations, talking to potential sponsors and dreaming up what an amazing event would look like. An inspiring conference felt like a smart way of getting prospective members excited. It felt like something people would take seriously. Plus, it was what our role models like TED were doing. And then the 2008 economic crisis hit. Lehman Brothers went down, and our conference idea with it. As budgets were tightening, we simply couldn’t find any organization that was willing to support the project.
So instead of putting on a fancy gathering, we were forced to operate on a minimal budget and had to figure out a cheap and simple way of connecting our members. That’s how we started organizing small, local dinners in every city we lived or went to, often hosted at people’s apartment, often in the form of potlucks to keep costs down for everyone.
And that original limitation — of keeping things cheap and simple — became the best thing that ever happened to us.
Designing for simplicity
By accident we had found a powerful, but counter-intuitive design principle for communities: less is often more. While bigger, fancier events in grandiose locations and amazing programming, more sophisticated digital tools and all-paid scholarships seem on the outside like a great tool for community building, I would argue that they often can be counter productive.
The power of cheap and simple
This approach turned out to be powerful, because:
- Simple and cheap experiences are easy to organize and can be organized by volunteer members, they don’t have to be organized top-down. That makes the community more co-created and distributed, further strengthening the sense of belonging. Sophisticated, bigger events usually take significant money and resources to organize, absorbing a whole team for weeks or months.
- As a result, simple and cheap experiences can easily be replicated in other places and they therefore allow a community to scale.
- It’s much easier to create a consistent rhythm with simple formats, which stabilizes the group.
- Simple and cheap experiences are often much more informal, and humans connect more deeply in informal environments. If you could choose between connecting to a stranger at a 500 person conference or in someone’s living room with 7 other people around, which one would you prefer?
- Simple and cheap experiences are a good platform for members to bring in their own creativity. While the core of Sandbox dinners has always stayed the same, people have come up with numerous ways to change them up: they hosted them in parks, in castles, on beaches. One hub in Washington DC developed a format where one person from the hub tells their life story over dinner. Another hub has been cooking the dinners together. Top-down we could never have come up with all these ideas or executed in such a creative and diverse way.
- Simple and cheap experiences make a community more resilient. If the group runs out of money or has messy leadership transitions (both things we encountered at Sandbox), the experiences are more likely to continue, because they are not a big lift. This creates consistency and long-term stability.
What about bigger experiences?
This isn’t to say that there is no role for more sophisticated experiences in communities. They play an important emotional and symbolic role, often a way for the group to create a sense of whole. It took 5 years for the first Global Summit at Sandbox to eventually happen, and once it did, it added another layer of meaning, another dimension to “we’re all in this together”.
I also see how — psychologically — for early communities bigger gatherings have stronger draw. They make the community look more legitimate, more substantial. They are a great marketing tool and differentiator to attract new people.
But I would argue that it’s dangerous to rely on these bigger experiences to be the main backbone of the community, because they are often such a big lift. Instead, I think the core of a community should be as simple and cheap as possible. And then, if resources allow, the community can decide to put on bigger experiences from time to time. But ideally, the cheap and simple core experiences continue, no matter what.
What do you think about the “cheap and simple” approach? And what other powerful design principles have you found?
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