“Collaborate, Novice Community Lead, Collaborate!” or how to survive your first collaboration request.
Hi there, novice or experienced community leader; welcome to the #leadinsights kitchen. Our recipes are always about how to cook challenging community leadership problems as easy as possible. With “tips and tricks” sauce and a pinch of real-life examples.
On today’s main menu:
- “Why do we need to collaborate at all?”;
- Do’s and ‘don’ts of collaboration strategies;
For the dessert, we will have tips on where to search for partners and how to prepare your first collaboration request with an сhocolatte chip of surviving the first “no” on top of it. Yummy.
Off-topic: Please check here for more information if you haven’t heard about the GDSC initiative yet. Maybe it will be the perfect match for you.
More from #leadinsights:
Motivation
So, collaboration, right?
Usually, novice leads tend to either: underestimate cooperation as fact with the “Lonely Ranger” ideology in mind; or devalue the community they run with the motto: “No one would want to collaborate with us, ’cause we are…” (small, basic, plain, immature, novice …pick any); or even consider collaboration as something that should happen naturally, without additional actions from leader’s side. But those approaches don’t have much in common with reality. Moreover, they lead to the loss of valuable and powerful tools for community development.
Trying to run a community isolated is similar to driving a car with duct tape over your speedometer and wondering why you keep getting speeding tickets.
Collaboration helps to grow the audience, bring new ideas to the routine and vary content topics. Let’s keep this nice and sorted to explain why.
Collaborate or not collaborate. What for?
Get Your Community Out of The Box
Communities aren’t cats; they don’t fit into boxes! Get yours out of it and give some space to grow!
Jokes aside. No matter how good you and your core team members are at your speciality, people still have favourite approaches and technologies, tend to bring particular ideas, etc. No one knows everything, and no one could be interested in everything. So you cannot get a guarantee that you didn’t miss something important. Creativity equals variability; evolution is movement and mutation. New connections could bring a fresh blood audience, new branches for developing your content, and alternative directions for improvement!
Magic Number Delusion
There is the perception that there is some entry point to find, a rubicon to pass, or a number to achieve that guarantees a resounding yes to all your collaboration requests and affirmations.
It could be 1k followers on social media, 10 successful events, 50 posts… or some location-based boundaries like “oh, this speaker lives in another timezone, impossible!” and success-discrimination with “you kidding, they would never ever answer on our cooperation request. Not worth trying…”
There would always be many reasons why the community isn’t ready for such a big step as collaboration. However, all of them, hashtag don’t-want-to-sound-typical-but-still, exist only in people’s minds.
It could be hard to take, but even after 500, 1k or even more … offers wouldn’t fall from the sky on your community, and you would still need to make requests yourself. Of course, more followers, more impact. The community looks more mature and established; however, getting those possible only via cooperation with others.
Ok, collaboration is essential, but…
How are you supposed to make the first move?
The answer is: request it.
“How do you think it could make our life easier?” you may ask with minor annoyance in your voice, and you would have all right to be annoyed and confused because nothing is evident here. Not at all. And it’s OK because requesting cooperation is not the task we run into daily. So… let’s figure this out together.
Firstly, let’s split this task into a set of smaller ones. Usually, it makes things feel much better than they are, and here is mine:
- Find a partner
- Request Collaboration
- Survive Response
Looks pretty good for now. Let’s solve them one by one.
How-to: search for partners
Locals are your best friends
Such fancy things as zoom, google meets, or discord put a whole new spin on the term “local”.
Now “locals” stands for companies and communities that: speak the same language as you; are based in the same city, country, time zone etc. Сouple this with social networking, and you will get a pretty long potential partners list.
Google Devs Initiatives Local Representations
GDSC, GDG, GDE and WTM Ambassadors. All these Global Google Developers Initiatives are excellent partners to start with. Enthusiastic, active students, skilled speakers and mentors, community managers and organizers. Sounds impressive, isn’t it? The cherry on top of it — is it’s pretty easy to contact them. Each initiative has a web page, interactive maps to search on location and lists of local representations:
- Contact information of GDSC chapters is listed on the official website
- Google Developer Experts Directory provides an interactive map where you can search for skilled speakers on locations and technologies
- WTM Ambassadors Directory gives an overview of each ambassador, her location, social and skills
- Google Developer Groups interactive map is also available
Start with chapters in your city/country. It would be an excellent opportunity to get experience and valuable connections and increase your audience!
Other Global Communities
There are plenty of programs besides Google willing to provide speakers, teaching materials and tools to bring the tech community together. The list below is my own hot list to reach out to. But there are more, much more opportunities for you to discover!
- Women Who Code: provides mentors and learning materials
- GitHub Campus Experts: community learning program to become an expert on your campus
- JetBrains Event Partnership Program: provide learning resources, sponsorships for events, hackathons and dev fests
- Geekle: organizers of tech conferences and media partnerships.
✅Search advice: Stay tuned
The keys to simplified search are networking and social media connections. Don’t be shy to connect with people you are interested in on LinkedIn, follow tech highlights on Twitter, spend some time reading Reddit threads and… voila!
Let recommendation engines do some job for you.
Local Communities and Companies
Writing this section made me realise there is no difference between collaboration with local and global companies/communities. A good collaboration request template (see section how-to: collaboration request), LinkedIn search filters, and a bit of courage will win that game.
❗Important notice:
Please, remember to prettify your LinkedIn profile. You social media is your brand, face, advertisement and CV. All in one. Keep this in mind and keep your profile nice and updated
Students Initiatives
Connect with organizers of students’ initiatives at your local universities. With their support, you may find your first members, gather a core team and get inspiration for ideas that would matter to the tech community. University is full-on enthusiastic people who want to make an impact and bring value, so provide this opportunity to them!
Students could be excellent mentors and speakers in workshops. Because they know another side of the lectern pretty well and speak the same language as auditory.
How-to: write a collaboration request
✅Go Prepared.
When writing a collaboration request, your offer should be as transparent as possible. Consider variants of collaboration; write them down; provide those options to collaborators with instructions on how they could participate.
For example, your offer could be represented as a document, where the first section answers the questions: “How to collaborate with you?” and “What do you offer?”
You may organize it as a list of activities: info partnership, hosting speaker sessions, sponsorship at the hackathon, etc. Each of them should be described exhaustively (what you offer and expect from the collaborator).
Example: Info Partnership. (suitable for organizations that host local or global conferences)
What we offer: Posting all announcements about upcoming events on community media platform
What we expect: Mention (our logo on organization webpage) and discount for our subscribers. Optionally — free tickets (1 or 2) to give away among the followers, (conditions to-discuss).
If you wanna get a speaker for an event you host, the best practice is to provide topics lists for events, categorized according to the field of interest (Soft Skills & Hard Skills, FrontEnd & BackEnd & DevOps etc.) You may organize the sections above as a table with “Topic” and “Agenda” columns.
Why so complicated?
- Consistency. That way, you will show a mature approach to the organization process. It’s easier to get respect from future collaborators when you have a straight vision and treat their and your time respectfully in the first place.
- Reusability. Do it right once, and there will be no need to do it again. You can keep this structure updated and scale it pretty easy. Also, as it has a transparent pattern, documents could be shared within your core team to manage without additional onboarding.
✅ Use Template
Collaboration requests are routine, daily routine. And if you won’t consider getting yourself some pretty template to use… you may find yourself one day writing the exact text to 5 organizations and wondering why you decided to get into that monkey job.
However, your templates should still be nicely personalized and adapted to messaging clients. What looks good in mail letters would never suit LinkedIn personal messages and vice versa. Also, remember that your template shouldn’t be too obvious.
For example, you shouldn’t copy some dummy text from the first link on “10 Best Templates For Collaboration Letters” and paste it to your request. People who would read it know all those tricks too well. Moreover, they earn money on such stuff, so… just don’t play out of your league. Honesty works much better than this.
Be friendly and respectful; present yourself and the community clearly; provide links to your offer source, community webpage, media, etc.
A small example of Collaboration Request Intro:
Hi Anna, *(greetings)
* (who you are and what community you represent)
My name is Kate, I’m representer of Google Developer Student Club Kpi, we are Google Devs Initiative, aimed to connect practice and theory by hosting events on tech topics. Here are the links on our media to check: <link>, <link>.
* (what you offer + smalltalk)
We’re following your progress for a long time, and will be happy to have you as a speaker on one of our tech sessions! If it sounds interesting to you, here is <link> topics we plan to host, maybe you would like take one of them. Also, if you have some ideas in mind, please share with us, we’d like to host them for you too!
Have a nice day,
Kate
How-to: survive your response
✅ Write often
In this case: the more is, the better. With more practice, you will gain confidence. It would be difficult to treat each response personally when there would be 5 or 6 of them per week. So instead of focusing on one specific partnership and nervously checking your email for an answer, you will explore other offers and opportunities
✅ It’s not personal; it’s strictly collaboration
It isn’t easy, but try not to take it to heart. Expect “no” as the default answer, and your life will become much easier. Make requests that will give you a 1/100 chance, and you will be surprised how much “yes” you will receive.
Summary
Please, take it easier on yourself. It’s OK if you are scared to request collaboration for the first, second… millionth time. It’s 100% natural that you are confused about how to start, where to search for offers etc. Partnership development is a tough topic: a lot has been written and said to cover it, but still, there are even more questions left. I hope this article will bring some clarity to you.
Keep in mind and say it all loud every morning: courage matters!
If you think that speakers would be perfect match for your next event — reach out to them.
If you found a local company that impacts the community — suggest a meeting.
It’s ok to be enthusiastic! It’s amazing when you desire to bring some value to the world. Don’t be afraid to seem intrusive, needy or too loud.
“It’s like football, y’know. You should run after the ball, even if there is 1/100 that you will catch it. It’s never 0-chance here. But if we fail… well, we still have to run; maybe next time would be different”
