The Curious Case of Dead Communities and How to Reignite them — with Richard Millington
Ever since I can remember I have wondered if it is possible for every community to thrive and be a big success? Some of them will thrive and others may not.
But the question that comes up is, what causes them to die? What happened that they stopped working?
It’s not like the leaders didn’t try, or did so intentionally. Then, why?
While looking for my answer, I stumbled across this gem that I’m about to share with you.
In 2019, Paras Pundir, founder of Community Folks, interviewed Richard Millington about his journey into community building. You can watch the recorded interview here. Who is Richard Millington? Well if you are into community building, you have already come across his name multiple times and if you are hearing it for the first time, he is one of those people who should be known in the field. Richard’s the founder of FeverBee and has created over 120 thriving communities. He has worked with multiple government organizations and the United Nations. In Richard’s own words -
“I got into community space through gaming in 2001. I was initially kind of an introvert but loved the idea of connecting with people around the world, and I got the first taste of that through the discord gaming community that I was in.”
Anyway, coming back, yours truly being a curious button went through Richard’s interview and tried to summarise it to the best of my understanding for everyone.
Was Millington always a Community Person?
I got into community space through gaming in 2001. I was initially kind of an introvert but loved the idea of connecting with people around the world, and I got the first taste of that through the discord gaming community that I was in.
When was the first time Richard was introduced to Community Management as a profession?
I got my first job as a community manager when I was around 16 and it was in IGUK(Interactive Gaming UK). Which was all these gaming centers around the UK, used to organize events against one another. And this was the first time I got to know the term Community management.
Earlier I was first hired by a PC gamer magazine, which would send me around the world to the events like World Cyber Games, eSports. That was just starting to blow up. Through that, I also started running a community for a website called UKterrorist.com for a game called Counter-Strike.
In 2010 he officially registered FeverBee. It went from school companies to the giants of today’s world.
How do you reignite an existing community which has 100s of members but is dead?
Now according to Richard, there are two ways of thinking about this,
- The community was a good idea but it was managed so badly that no one felt like participating.
- The community itself didn’t have a strong hook.
As Richard likes to say, there’s lots of low-hanging fruit. There are lots of small things that you can do to engage people. You can reach out and try and bring people back. But the better way would be to figure out the W’s of it. Like,
- What is the community about?
- Who’s it for?
- why this community wasn’t interesting enough to participate in?
- What’s the edge that the community is going to push?
To get the answer to those W’s, start reaching out to a few members or ex-members of the group and try and get a sense of,
- why they don’t participate?
- What communities do they participate in?
- Who are they, what challenges do they have in their life today?
And then build the community around that and make some immediate win i.e. start with small goals and build on them.
Some strong points to make it thrive could be
- How do you welcome new members and what platform do you provide for them to open up?
- How do you make people feel they are experts in that group?
- How do you make people feel that they can make a unique useful contribution to the group?
So, to sum it up I’d say, There is a very simple fact that if the community is not doing anything unique to connect the members if people aren’t excited about the idea of it and are not feeling special, then no matter what you do, people aren’t gonna participate.
According to Richard, how can one fill the gap between old and new members?
This is a question that I have seen many times and every time I get new ideas. But one thing that they all have in common is to make the new members feel included, help them ease into the community. Make a ritual of some kind to welcome new members and get them bonding with the old members. When asked to Richard he gave a brilliant idea that could be very useful,
Having a newcomer-specific area where they can ask questions that they feel is very basic. And there could be a mentor who would guide them, who would help them. Like, in discord when a new member joins in, you can give them access to a certain channel(till they are like 1 month old in the community). Where they can ask anything they want and a few chosen ones who are very well versed in the field will be there to guide them.
Most of the communities that exist today have realized that, if a new member has made more than 3 contributions in the 1st month, there’s a high probability that they will continue engaging.
How can we incentivize our community members?
Some communities tend to die because there is nothing that’s encouraging the members to engage, and one of the ways to do that is to incentivize the community.
Gamification is one of the innovative ways to incentivize a community. The way it works is, you take an action and get some points and you earn a badge, once or twice but the impact of that gets boring quite fast. So it has to lead to something else, like a reputation that people will want to maintain over time by taking actions. But he doesn’t mean prizes, competition. It’s best to stay away from them, it makes people take one action and never another action.
A more general way to keep people hooked is, to let them feel more competent, more harmonious in the group, or better connected. In simple words,
The more genuine relationships someone makes in the group, the more they are to stay around in the community.
After going through Richard’s Interview, I realized that I also got my taste of community from the discord gaming community for WOW.
And another thing that I realized is that when I was part of the wow community, there were many other communities like that one, but none thrived like the one I was part of. And the reason was they all lacked a personal touch, the members were just a number to the community leaders/builders.
I’d like to finish this with what I feel to be true:
Community Builders are the Unsung Superheroes who don’t wear capes.
If you have more questions that you want to get answered. Join us at Community Folks.
Hello community people, I’m Akash and I write about the growth strategies and the working of communities around the globe. If you like my style of nonchalant writing, then follow me to stay ahead of the normies(people who don’t follow me). Would love to hear back from you, how did you like the article.
