Designing for Community — Part 1: Why Design for Community?
This post is an exploration into something that’s talked about as if it’s the gold bullion of social currency: Community.
My aim is to understand what I’m talking about when I throw around the term community, and why it’s something we regard as so valuable.
In another post I’ll lay out some borrowed insights into how community can be nurtured online, because a pandemic has teamed up with what’s being called an epidemic of loneliness, and is making our need for connection more prominent than ever, whilst also making older conceptions of community basically redundant.
A bit of context:
I’m a product manager at Kooth.com. We offer young people anonymous therapeutic chat and messaging support. That’s the core of our service, and it’s the reason we attract many, many people every day.
Or is it?
Well, not exclusively…
Certainly, the overwhelmingly kind feedback we received is solid evidence that our therapists are doing something pretty remarkable, but a significant proportion of our feedback centres around something quite different: peer support and community.
This website is amazing I have been able to help others a well as others have been able to help me. I think everyone should come on here for support.
As a company, we value offering a range of support options, because we understand that there are many contributors to wellbeing, and we acknowledge the importance of choice in the face of diversity. For that reason, we offer specialised articles, self-help tools and user-led discussion boards alongside our chat and messaging support.
These ‘additional’ options have proven very popular. The vast majority of our users engage with these offerings either alongside chat and messaging support, or just in and for themselves. Of those, many are reading, writing or commenting on posts by other young people. This means our team is moderating tens of thousands of posts daily to keep our community safe.
So what’s the impact of this sort of engagement? Does it validate that we have a community on Kooth, and that it’s helping in some way? Does it even make sense to try and nurture community on an anonymous mental wellbeing platform?
Until recently I assumed we invested in community because it enables a sense of connection, which in turn contributes to wellbeing — our ultimate goal.
But enabling connection is not unique to community. As I’ve learnt from colleagues, opportunities for connection are very much present in our counselling offerings, within what’s called the therapeutic alliance. In fact the therapist Irvin D Yalom suggests “the patient’s view of helpful events in therapy are generally relational, often involving some act of the therapist that take place outside the frame of therapy”.
So I need to dig a bit deeper. Other than a sense of connection, what else might community help us achieve?
I’ll start in a very original manner, by looking at how community is defined.
What is community?
On Kooth we are seeking to nurture community and peer support. Until recently, I’d been using the two terms interchangeably, without being clear on what was meant by either. But they are not the same thing, as my colleague Charlotte has put it;
“Community is a supportive environment, whereas peer support is an intervention”.
This distinction suggests that community is about context. A group of individuals are connected by something that distinguishes them from others and (often but certainly not always) motivates them to support each other.
Peer support, however, is specifically about a type of interaction and the factors that enable or motivate it. By Charlotte’s definition, there has to be a focus on a shared lived experience which enables meaningful support.
By these definitions, peer support can and does occur within communities, as members may have a shared lived experience which enables and drives support.
Peer support can happen without community, however, as individuals can support each without considering themselves to be part of some shared community.
It seems communities can also form and thrive without much peer support. Instead they might work toward some common cause or goal, but without a shared experience underpinning their connection.
There are other interesting comparisons that help shine a light. The difference between communities and networks for example. The idea that a community implies a shared domain that becomes a source of identification and creates a sense of dedication to the community as a whole, not just a few select individuals.
Perhaps my favourite idea recently has been the suggestion from Apart of Me CEO Louis that “community is a mindset as much as it is anything else”, putting weight on the fact that community is really just a feeling, rather than anything physical or objective that we can appropriate with equal ease. If this is the case, what enables this powerful mindset?
I’ve not spent much time diving into diverse definitions, but it seems that a sense of shared identity or experience, a common goal and a sense of belonging are commonly discussed as attributes (though of course every community is different). In a sort of virtuous circle, these attributes then result in a tendency for individuals to connect and support each other more enthusiastically.
This understanding of community makes me both uneasy and optimistic. I’m not convinced that all Kooth users recognise a shared identity, a common goal or even a sense of belonging to a ‘Kooth community’. Therefore is it appropriate to call it a community, rather than ‘just’ a safe online space (which would still have its merits!)?
Still, I’m optimistic because it’s clear that many do consider themselves to be part of a Kooth community (89% according to a recent survey), and because intentional design can apparently help us enable more individuals to feel this way.
But before looking at ways we might design for a greater sense of community, I want to lay out why we’d want to bother.
Why community?
There are a number of reasons why one might seek to encourage community, from a service provider perspective. The most commonly talked about are engagement, wellbeing benefits and cost-effectiveness.
Encouraging community spaces in or around services has often proved an effective way of attracting interest and engaging individuals.
But engagement is never an end goal. As a service provider, you either want to engage because this helps generate revenue, or because the engagement helps achieve outcomes (and maybe someone is paying for these outcomes). As an individual too, you are drawn to engage because of what that engagement offers.
In the case of Kooth, which is free at the point of use and paid for by government funded CCGs, the outcome we’re seeking is improved and sustained mental wellbeing. So how can community contribute to that?
As I mentioned, the nature of community as a space where individuals connect through shared interest, experience or purpose is seen as a means of improving wellbeing. This is because community can feed into a number of our core human needs, such as safety, belonging, and even self-actualisation.
Being part of a community can help us feel safe because we feel other members have ‘got our back’ and will have the motivation to support us if, for example, we are targeted by bullies or hit by grief.
Community can also make us feel a powerful sense of belonging as we identify with others that share core aspects of ourselves. This can help us feel less alone in our struggles, or abnormal in our feelings. We see many young people on Kooth express powerful relief in finding others going through similar experiences as them. This often feeds into empowering expressions of solidarity.
This belonging also facilitates a level of intimacy which may not be achieved in other relationships. Sometimes, it seems, that intimacy can be greater than that achieved with family members and friends, and may facilitate some powerful moment of disclosure or vulnerability.
According to Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs these feelings of safety and belonging build the foundations for esteem to thrive. A strong community can help here too, by enabling users to feel recognised, respected and valued by members.
The community environment can then enable the individual to grow and thrive, empowered by self-esteem, support and safety. In many ways, this is where the value of community seeps out of just benefiting the individuals within it, and into benefiting the wider society.
All this to say that community can help us not just to feel better, but to stay well and even to thrive.
Community is also sought after because when individuals support each other and nurture their wellbeing in the process, there is less need for costly healthcare and services, like care workers and police presence. Many politicians have sought to leverage this side of things to take pressure off government services, and why not in my opinion!
The challenge then is designing those environments that enable communities to emerge, thrive and sustain themselves. This is no easy feat, though a number of weathered community builders have put forward some advice that sounds practical and incredibly rewarding. I’ll explore my favourite insights in a follow-up post, and map out some ideas to start trying them out.
