How to Build a Successful Community in 10 Steps
The Hague Tech (THT) best describes itself as a community, a place for collaboration and co-working between parties as varied as governments, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and corporations. But beyond that, THT is a general community that helps foster and connect a variety of communities both within THT and externally. The communities that have grown from within THT aren’t proposed by the organization but by the driven members who have a passion to share knowledge and foster learning. We sat down with THT’s most active community builder, Bobby Bahov, to learn how other members and anyone interested can build a successful and scalable community!
Bobby is part of helping create some of the largest communities not only at THT but in the entire Hague area. Starting in university, Bobby has always been a community organizer and a true go-getter. He’s helped found SpaceExplorersNL, Blockbar, Vierde Vrijdag, and AI Lab. His efforts haven’t stopped there as he is helping grow our new communities, IOT Lab and QuantumLab. Here’s Bobby’s 10 Step Guide to build a community:
1. Find Partners
The easiest way to start something is if you don’t have to start it alone. Bobby suggests reaching out to parties that are already part of the ecosystem, from academics to corporates to governments. Having an in-built network can help immediately boost a community’s success. A community can be the go-between for members of an already existing ecosystem that might not be collaborating or doing so in a way that benefits the interested public.
2. Find a Need
It’s important to find what’s missing in the “market”, just like a business would. The best place to find what’s needed is by asking yourself what you’re looking for in building a community. If you’re passionate enough to want to start a community, you’re fulfilling a need for yourself, so identify and state that need. This is Bobby’s main factor for starting a community. He was missing AI events happening at least every month, so he started it!
3. Find the best way to deliver on that need
What’s the best way to go about fulfilling that need? Is it an expert talk? Is it a workshop? Is it a round-table session? Each community is different and its success depends on meeting its demands.
4. Set a Goal
Not in the sense of “50 members by next week” but in what the community accomplishes. What is the goal of the community? Is it to share knowledge? Is it to collaborate on projects? Setting a goal for the community helps build a mission and strategy for a successful community.
5. Find the right channel
There are so many different channels you can use nowadays to start building your community. Bobby puts an emphasis on finding the channel that best matches with your target group. Is your target audience students? Facebook might be the right place. Is your target audience professionals? Then LinkedIn might be the better choice.
6. Start a conversation
Once you’ve created a channel to interact with your target audience, start creating dialogues. As Bobby put it, “most importantly, it shouldn’t be you talking to them, it should be them talking to each other. That’s when you have a community, otherwise, you have an audience.”
7 Get People There
This is the part that most people focus on first, and the one they struggle regularly. But if you’ve done the first six steps, it should be easy! Now it’s all about creating events for the community to attend. Bobby’s #1 tip for this is to invite people from existing communities that would have shared interests to what you are offering.
8. Constantly Reassess Value and Diversify
Keeping people coming back continuously is another challenge within itself. The value proposition of the community needs to be challenged, again and again in order to innovate and add value on an ongoing basis. If you want the community to scale, you need to diversify. With a larger community comes a wider range of interests and the best way to keep people engaged is to cater to those diverse interests.
9. Make it a community
Bobby points out that it’s not about people coming together to get value from the community organizers, creating this transactional relationship. It’s about the community coming together and creating value together, as a group. It’s not about the organizers creating something, it’s about the community working together to create! Give opportunities to proactive community members to add to the community, to create their own events and initiatives.
10. Have fun!
The last but the most important point is to have fun! A community should be a place to share, learn, laugh, meet new people, and above all else, create an environment where everyone can have fun!
Thanks again to Bobby for taking the time and if you haven’t done so yet, join one of the many communities and events at The Hague Tech.
