Building communities — advice from Tech for Good.

A couple of weeks ago, Tech for Good Dublin held its latest meetup, Using Tech to Build Community, where two amazing speakers, Elva Carri and Sharon Tighe gave advice on how to build communities, that made sense for pretty much any company or product. A quick review:

Sharon, from Everymum (Ireland’s largest parenting community, with 300,000 members) spoke about the difference between building a community, as oppose to an audience. A community participates and is interactive, and audience is less so.

She advised listening to your community, and working with them when making changes:

• Do nothing without input from your community
• If you’re not actually listening to your community to take action on what they say, what’s the point?

and also advised on the tech side:

• Find tech that compliments the experience and doesn’t create friction points.

She mentioned how Everymum’s users wanted to use Facebook groups, so they went with those, even if they would have preferred they used their own forums. Understanding what your community (or customers, users, whatever) likes to do, and how/where they like to do it, is key.

Elva, co-founder of Girl Crew — a social network / app to allow women to find other women to be friends with, gave one of the best talks I’ve seen in a while — both funny and insightful. Girl Crew is an example of a community that built up from Elva and her friends’ actual needs — one night Elva wanted to go out, but none of her friends did, so she created a male account on Tinder with a picture that said:

“I’m female, totally straight. My friends don’t want to go out dancing. I want to go out dancing. Want to be friends and go dancing? Remember when going out used to be fun? Let’s do that. And meet guys there instead.”

When Elva got over 100 replies, she knew she had something, and soon after, founded Girl Crew with Aine Mulloy and Pamela Newenham, which has since raised $1 million in startup funding and a community of over 150,000.

Girl Crew moved its community onto its apps from Facebook as they wanted greater control over their community and the experience, along with improved monetisation options, and also “her ego”, which I agree is a great reason! Elva also talked about the importance of offline elements to Girl Crew — organising meetups, events etc for their members.

Elva had some interesting technical advice — they had a webapp and wanted to create some native ones; they first went down the route of paying for them to be built, but when that didn’t work out, they used a service https://gonative.io/ that cost converts webapps to native ones, at a very small price. Apple can reject apps made via services, but they’ve had all their updates accepted. Getting apps built is expensive, but services like this could help startups manage costs and getting things out the door quicker.

To find out more about Tech for Good Dublin, check out their website. Organised by Ellen Ward and Máirín Murray as usual!