Falling in Love With a Community
‘We’re time poor, spread across the globe, relying on online tools to connect us and craving meaningful conversation and connection’ — Georgie Nightingall
Marc and I have been friends since middle school. We studied similar subjects, we shared the same hobbies (board games) and we also have a lot of mutual friends. We used to meet every month or so to share a beer or dinner, and a story; but we had never been particularly close. He was not the kind of person I would call out of the blue when I needed emotional support.
However, our dynamic recently changed.
We were going down a dark street with no sidewalk two hours south of Hamburg in the middle of the night and the stories just poured out of our hearts into the lonely streets with no other ears listening, apart from our own. Marc told me something he had never told me before: that he suffers from depressive thoughts.
Up until that moment the most intimate conversations we ever had was about our drinking sprees back in highschool. He didn’t even trust his partner with expressing these thoughts; yet, one day he opened up to me. It made me feel grateful and it was a precious moment. What made that happen? How did we move from a casual friendship to bonding on a much more meaningful level so that we felt able to share our innermost truths?
The answer to that starts with asking the right question and setting the right intention.
Before we went on our walk we decided to let our conversation be guided by a set of questions, which my friend Georgie had provided. I had often experienced the power of asking the ‘right’ questions when meeting and bonding with strangers in Sandbox and was excited to also try it with people I already knew. The intention we set, before we started: Let us be truthful and show vulnerability during our conversation for the next hour. The question that really kicked things off for us, has been: What was a time when someone provided you with incredible emotional support?
And that was it.
Why did we not do this earlier? It felt so good, so honest, so intimate, real and right.
In our contemporary society where independence and freedom are prime values to strive for, vulnerability and honesty often feel like a weakness, and deep conversation at times feels like a waste of time. ‘They will slow you down on your path, they will distract you from your goals.’, whispers a voice in your head. ‘ It is my life, my playlist, my story, my goals’. Or so it seems… But focusing too much on that voice often leads to ‘My loneliness, my inability to open up and my isolation’.
If we don’t have these kinds of meaningful conversations in our day-to-day life, we are more prone to feel isolated, lonely and misunderstood. We miss out on feeling connected and we forget to reflect deeply and honestly about our own journey and our social life. It is no accident that the best available scientific evidence (longitudinal study of 268 Harvard sophomores) concludes that the existence (and quality) of close relationships are a key predictor of health and happiness.
So the question to ask is: How can we engineer spaces for more authentic and intimate interactions, with the right intentions and right questions?
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Recently, a group of friends (Georgie, Patricia and me) got together to try out a social experiment in connection and tackle above question: how to foster new and deep connections via the lost art of meaningful conversations inside a large global community. Or to put it simply: how to fall a little bit in love every month.
12 months on, we want to share what happened and what we learned from the experiment.
The Community: Sandbox
Georgie, Patricia and I belong to a global community named Sandbox. Inside this community, I have often experienced the privilege to experience authentic connection and relating with people from around the world like never before in my life. These experiences culminated for me in a transformational global summit in Khelifi in 2018. After that I felt the urge to create similar closeness and connectedness more regularly.
The idea that authentic connections and vulnerable conversations emerge by asking amazing questions is very embedded in this community. In fact, if you asked me how to best describe people from Sandbox it is that they are often very good at asking astounding questions. Questions that you don’t know the answer to — questions that make you reflect and in so do discover something novel and fresh about yourself and the world. Questions that change the way you see the world.
I remember sitting in a car to a global summit in Kenya with a few other community members who didn’t know each other and within two minutes questions like this floated around: ‘What has been the most important thing that you have learned from raising a child?’ But this question in itself would be worth nothing, if there wouldn’t be a safe space. The feeling that you can open up and show yourself especially when vulnerable, that is the magic of Sandbox.
It is a global community of more than 1400 people in more than 100 countries. Ranging from entrepreneurs, journalists, academics, politicians, artists and indomitable misfits to nomads the community is scattered around strong individual hubs in capitals and a lot of whatsapp groups. Like all humans, most Sandbox members are longing for deeper connections and the feeling to be part of something bigger.
This made Sandbox the perfect starting place for a social experiment.
Ideation or how to fall in love with an idea
A project to connect Sandboxers across the globe already existed and had successfully brought people together. The Sandbox Buddy system was created by Gillian, Werner and Benjamin Nunes in 2016. The system matched you via email with a random Sandboxer from around the globe to meet, catch up and get to know each other virtually in an unstructured fashion. However, due to time constraints Werner was looking to let other people take over the leadership of the program. It was time for a love revolution.
This was the chance for us to envision something new and brainstorm ideas on how to revive the Buddy System which had not been very active recently.
Inspired by the infamous ‘36 Questions to Fall in Love with a Stranger’, we realised the power of great questions, but we also knew that coming up with a great question isn’t always easy.
The idea was to help people really connect with someone else through a set of curated questions around a certain topic. Despite the enticing name, ‘love’ in this context, does not necessarily mean romantic ‘love’ but rather a genuine interest in and connection with the story of another person. The initial idea was to e-meet one specific person for a series of conversations to really facilitate deep connections.
A first prototype emerged and we invited Georgie Nightingall, a Sandboxer from London, to participate in the process as she was already doing groundbreaking work on conversation and deep connections with her organisation ‘Trigger Conversations’. Serendipity emerged. Georgie introduced the framework of the ‘conversation menu’ a concept she had already developed and tested in over 100 events with strangers and organisations. The Sandbox Team Love was complete: Patricia, Georgie and Moritz.
The conversation menu is a playful way to spark interesting, novel and authentic conversation — using insightful questions that genuinely make you think. The menu is a metaphor — each ‘course’ of conversation becoming deeper in intensity or topic. Starters are light. Mains are heavier and participants are invited to self-select their options: meat (deep and thoughtful), fish (controversial) or vegetarian (nourishing). Then comes something light and delightful — dessert, and finally coffee — (warm and reflective) to complete the menu. Each course is an invitation to gradually open up emotionally to another person. Each question an invitational nudge to go to a new space of previously unchartered territory.
Each month we delved into a new subject, and designed a custom menu around that topic: themes from community to love, the environment, and ‘finding your edge,’ each topic exploring a different part of what it is to be human.
Implementation
The initial framework was a bit of an experiment.
We wanted to keep people engaged in the project each month and to really commit to the process, by using the questions as a dive deep into conversation. So we agreed that 1 hour each month was reasonable for 4 questions.
The commitment was made very clear in order to provide clear expectations and avoid drop-outs. We rather wanted to create a great experience for 50 people than an annoying one for 500. Quality over quantity. So we asked for the following commitment of all members:
The commitment:
In order to make this an extraordinary experience for those who sign-up, we need to ensure that everyone is on board with our vision, follows our guidelines for meaningful conversations, provides feedback (5 mins/month) and commits to 1 call each month (1hr) with a new buddy.’
We reached out to the community using the global facebook group (2 posts) and individually to each hub ambassador so that they could share the project with their members via whatsapp.
We asked the original members of the buddy program re-sign up for the program as the most urgent feedback had been that some people didn’t respond so we only wanted to include people who were still committed.
The invitation was simple.
‘Fall In Love With a Sandboxer in 2019: A Deep Connections Sandbox Project’
We shared the problem behind the project: ‘We’re time poor, spread across the globe, relying on online tools to connect us and craving meaningful conversation and connection.
The greater why: ‘Our vision is to create an extraordinary human experience for the Sandbox community, helping us build and foster new and deep connections across the globe.’
And the smaller whys to join, that help bring to life the power of a monthly meaningful conversation with a fellow Sandboxer: SPARK REAL OFFLINE CONNECTIONS. GET CURIOUS AND DISCOVER ANOTHER. GROW. MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION. ENGINEER SERENDIPITY.
And We Asked Everyone For Their Individual Why (they wanted to join).
Here are some examples:
I want to….’fall in love with beautiful souls’….
’Build meaningful relationships — learn more about myself and others’…
’Find Serendipity, flow’…
’To create magical moments’….
’Find new adventures’ and ‘Spark new light’…
’Learn, explore and be curious’…
’Meet new folks; and go deep!’…’ To strengthen the sandbox community and deepen bonds…
‘LOVE’… ‘to share and witness’… ‘and Fall in love with humanity again’
How did we get off the ground? We built a prototype of a matching system with Google sheets so that we had a semi-automatic sending process that works quite stable.
The Result?
The response was wonderfully positive — resulting in 150 sign-ups. People were hungry for connection.
The Feedback from the Community
We collected feedback from participants via a google form (48 responses out of 150 — which is a decent ratio for such a high-intense commitment) and 30 minute zoom conversations (8 responses?).
It was beautifully heart-warming to hear about the impact of the project — both on individuals and the community as a whole.
1.Strengthening the connections between members would help members feel like they were part of a bigger community and thus strengthen the community.
‘It felt personal and intimate! I really got to know the person I was paired with….One on one connections are incredibly powerful, since we are such a virtual community — spread out throughout various places…..
‘Very natural, open, vulnerable and understanding, like we were friends for a long time…We met each other 5 years ago so we were so thrilled and surprised to see each other again!
2. By engineering spaces for meaningful dialogue we would create safe spaces where every person in the community has the feeling they can open up in a trustful atmosphere.
“I think we both came into the conversation open to be vulnerable so we continued asking deeper and deeper questions.
“I think we were both quite open and ready to show our vulnerability, but the questions amplified this effect. The idea of a conversation menu really adds something ;)’
It helped me feel comfortable to go beyond the surface without any fear of judgment
3. Designing questions that introduced challenging but important personal and worldly topics would help members broaden their horizons, grow and discover new perspectives from diverse individuals across the world.
‘The three prompts for falling in love with a sandboxer were great not because they gave us content to talk about but more that they triggered a style of thinking for the conversation.’
‘It (the menu) was a great guide! led to a diverse discussion, and timing cues were great to help keep us on track… it helped me feel comfortable to go beyond the surface without any fear of judgment.’
‘The menu was AMAZING! Well balanced, allowed for flow of conversation and helped us CONNECT… Our conversation mostly focused on cross-cultural differences (a big interest of mine), but also on topics as wide as country attitudes towards immigrants, Costco, trains, science as magic, and female-led RPGs’.
4. Helping members feel more connected in their everyday life through a 1 hour real meaningful conversation.
‘Felt like being drawn to the sun.’
‘Like talking to an old friend you met for the first time.’
‘It reminded me how powerful the internet can be in bringing people together, despite all the less pleasant and somewhat frightening impacts of digitalization & co’
’We fell in love :-)…’
5.Planting the seeds of serendipity by inviting members to share personal experiences, challenges and desires with another so they could be able to help each other.
When she was describing herself it felt like she is describing me! …So beautiful how you can run into each other and feel so similar. We helped each other look at some of the points from a different angle, which opened a whole other perspective and gave me thoughts for the whole following week… It’s incredible that we are both reading the same stuff focusing on the same problems.
Naturally, we were delighted to hear that the project had brought so many insights and so much joy to the community and it encouraged us to explore our depth of impact further.
Learnings & Pain Points:
As with any project, we identified a number of areas that could be improved. The biggest challenge was:
Non-responders. Nothing is more frustrating then not to hear back from your match.
‘Super disappointing. Didn’t connect. Buddy didn’t reply to my email’
‘Never heard back :(…It was impossible, sadly. After the initial contact, he never replied to mails or messages’
‘Did not reply. I tried reaching out to her several times and in different ways (FB, email, LinkedIn).’
How We Managed This:
- Asking Why People Wanted to Sign-Up. When signing up, we asked them why they want to participate and what their hopes and expectations with regards to the program were.
- Re-Matching. We offer a rematching service if your partner does not respond after a week. This process is not automated and still time-consuming to handle.
- Sharing Feedback on Non-Responding and Inviting Opt-Outs. We shared real feedback on the impact of not-responding and created a short google form inviting project members who hadn’t or couldn’t commit to opt out of the project. Overall we had 17 people drop out of the programme.
- Adding Whatsapp numbers and Hub Location to Emails. By increasing the number of channels people could contact each other and moving away from email (which is easy to forget or ignore) to whatsapp, we experienced increased response rates.
- Whatsapp Group Posts. When match emails were delivered, we posted on the whatsapp group to remind members to check their emails and reply to their buddy.
Where Next? The Future of Falling in Love with a Sandboxer
To date (12 months in) we have engineered 1600+ meaningful conversations for 150 Sandboxers across 100 cities globally.
The Virtual Summit
Thanks to Yvonne Leow, we were able to join forces and create a ‘Fall in Love Experience’ for Virtual Summit attendees to connect meaningfully online. We create menus around the summit themes: gratitude, sustainability and co-creation.
We Re-Opened Our Doors
We started a new batch in September where we onboarded 30 new members from the Sandbox community. This makes a total of 180 members.
Automation Desires
Although we use applications like mail merge, much of our matching and re-matching process is manual and therefore requires monthly and weekly work, which we do onside of our jobs. We would love to automate the system even more and see how to make it more accessible for other communities as well.
Expansion To Other Communities
Leaders of other communities approached us because they would love to implement a similar system and they are struggling to facilitate real-world-connections in their own communities.
We believe that almost every organisation / community could benefit from helping their members to “fall in love” with their stories and maybe even with each other;)
If you’re part of a community that wants to be better connected — then get in touch!
Want To Connect? Meet Team Love — Patricia, Moritz & Georgie
Contact the Team here > Sandboxglobalbuddies@gmail.com
