How to Build a Virtual Community
This summer, Anne Raheem and I co-founded the Tech x Social Impact cohort of the Franklin Fellowship. Our interview process and 10-week fellowship were entirely online. This was my first time building a community and I thought to share our format + lessons learned and will discuss crafting a virtual interview process, weekly sessions, and community bonding.
How to structure an entirely virtual interview process
Part I&II: Tell us about yourself
We wanted to offer a low barrier to entry for our applicants. In previous application processes, I’ve noticed that applicants tend to have more buy-in the more rounds they go through. Obviously, there’s a balance between overwhelming candidates, but we wanted to run a fair and rigorous process.
Therefore, Part I was simple + straightforward:
We Asked:
- What is your technical background?
- Why do you want to join the Franklin Fellowship? Why would you be committed to this group? (Please keep your answer to under 150 words)
- What do you look for in a community? What do you think you would add to the Franklin Fellowship community? (Please keep your answer to under 150 words)
In Part II, we asked more probing questions:
We Asked:
inspired by the Harvard Franklin Fellowship and Princeton Tiger Trek
- What year did you graduate from college? If you are a current student, please state your estimated graduation year.
- What area of Tech x Social Impact are you most engaged in or excited about?
- Tell us your story! (200 words or less)
- We’re looking for people who build and create outside of the confines of what already exists. Tell us about a time you hacked the system in a non-technical way. (100 words or less)
- The Franklin Fellowship focuses on the development of its members as individuals. What is one facet of yourself or your life that you hope to develop within the fellowship, and how would you go about doing so? (100 words or less)
- Tell us about the project or accomplishment (entrepreneurial or technical) you’re most proud of. (100 words or less)
- How will being a part of this will enable your goals & interests? What do you hope to take away from this? (100 words or less)
- What keeps you up at night? What gets you riled up with passion? (100 words or less)
- Tell us about how you overcome seemingly impossible barriers? (100 words or less)
- What is your most unique characteristic? (50 words or less)
- You have a blank check — what are you building? (50 words or less)
- What have you done to change the world around you to make it better? (100 words or less)
- How would you share your learning experiences and self-improvement with your larger community? In what ways (formal or informal) do you support others (students on campus, friends, colleagues)? (100 words or less)
- How does your identity drive you? (100 words or less)
Name-Blind Application: To reduce bias in our selection process, we instituted a name-blind reviewal process.
Power of referrals: While we actively recruited from people outside of our personal networks, we did invite applicants and non-applicants to refer a friend. Apart from asking basic contact information of both the referee and referer, we focused on:
Why is this individual a great fit for Tech x Social Impact?
Part III: Group Interview
We considered asking interviewees to turn off video in the spirit of the name-blind application process. However, we noticed that visual cues are often important in realizing when there’s a pause to jump in or when it seems like the other person is talking. Additionally, we wanted to run a mock of what we imagined the discussion section of each weekly session to be.
We asked each candidate to read two opposing articles about Samasource and to discuss the question: Is Samasource tech for social good?
How we evaluated candidates
We looked for the following:
- Collaborative: did the interviewee build onto other participants points
- Unique perspective: did the interviewee bring a unique perspective
- WOW factor: does this person think out of the box? Not necessarily contrarian but definitely not a sycophant
- Critical thinking: do they take the article at face value or look for nuance?
- Communication: red flag if they cut people off
Part IV: Interview Reflection Form
Inspired by the Harvard Business School Post-Interview Reflection Form, we offered applicants to reflect on their group interview and application thus far by asking:
Thanks for being a part of our group interview today. If you’d like, please share your post-interview reflection with us within 24 hours of your interview.
We proposed the constraint of 24 hours in hopes of better understanding the person behind the screen. This doesn’t give candidates a whole bunch of time to revise their work and only one in the interview can write about this experience.
Please share your post-interview reflections with us. The Post-Interview Reflection is not intended to be another formal essay. Think of it instead as an email you might write to a colleague or supervisor after a meeting. No word limit.
Additionally, we wanted to understand the interviewees’ experiences with other candidates. Since we were optimizing for a cohesive group, we asked:
If you could start a company with another interviewee in the tech X social impact space, who would it be and why?
Which interviewee would you wanna follow up with and get coffee with? (Name will suffice)
We were also looking for intellectually curious group members, and thus asked:
What speaker, if any, would you want on the Tech x Social Impact program and why?
Finally, we are all about feedback. Therefore, we concluded with:
Please share any feedback on the interview process, communication, and other relevant program-related information thus far. What could we have done better? What part of the interview process did you resonate with? Any responses in this section will be kept anonymous
Part V: Individual Interviews
We were cognizant that extroverted people tended to perform better during the group interviews and wanted candidates to have the opportunity to better share their narrative with us so we could put their story into context.
Part VI: Our Selection Criteria,
Inspired by Princeton’s Tiger Trek, we were looking for the following in each candidate:
- Change Factor: Why does the candidate need to participate? How much potential does the trip have to shape the trajectory of the candidate’s
life? Will the candidate buy into the program & mission? - Entrepreneurial Spirit, Resourcefulness, & Skills: Entrepreneurial Spirit, Resourcefulness, & Skills: The candidate shows legitimate passion for entrepreneurship/creating/making/doing new things. They demonstrate resourcefulness, perseverance, and/or initiative in the projects they pursue. Examples in venture: founded companies, won competitions, raised capital, hired teams, generated revenue, venture investing experience, Examples in leadership: managed large-scale events, recruited & led teams, raised significant $ funding, spearheaded executionally-complex events / projects.
- Superpower/ Unique Factor: Does the candidate have a distinct interest
or strength that gives them the ability to broaden the perspectives of the 12 other students on Weekly? - Peer Supporter: Does the candidate care genuinely for
others? Will they take time to build friendships with others on the trip, both in a professional and a personal context? - Technical Excellence: Is the candidate able to demonstrate
analytical and/or technical excellence? After all, this is the Tech X Social Impact cohort. - Dedication to Social Impact: Does the candidate have strong pull for social impact? What they want to build, what they are passionate about?
Part VII: Congratulating our Fellows!
In a virtual world, we found it imperative to convey our enthusiasm about this program and that we had hand-picked every member of the community. Therefore, instead of the traditional “congratulation” email, we both called each fellow to congratulate them! Merging calls is a game-changer :) We even sent a video message to our member from Dubai due to differences in time-zone.
How to structure virtual weekly sessions
Check-In
This is a one-sentence check-in at the beginning of each call where we briefly check-in and see how everyone is doing, including our speaker! We did this popcorn style, meaning that after you did a check-in, you call on (thus popcorn because there’s no order) another community member. Using the “raise hand” feature in zoom helped to keep track of who had yet to go and prevent #awkward silences.
Background Presentation
We asked all fellows to pair up and give a brief background presentation on each speaker. This way, all community members didn’t need to do a ton of research each week. These presentations lasted for 10 minutes right before the speaker joined our zoom and consisted of:
- speaker summary
- organization company
- key articles
- question themes
Q&A
Since getting these speaker’s time was already a big ask, we didn’t want them to worry about preparing anything! Therefore, we did an open Q&A. As a thank you, we offered the two fellows who presented the background slides to ask the first two questions. We noticed that the first question can really frame the rest of the conversation and that it was often good to start with a milder, more general, and open-ended question and then lead into the more specific and critical questions.
Reflection
Think of this like precept/class discussion, except everyone wants to be there and really cares. We experimented with different sizes, asking probing questions, asking fellows to lead, supporting free-flowing conversation.
We developed these questions to inspire the reflection discussion as well as the Medium posts:
- What surprised you?
- How did this speaker change your world view?
- What wasn’t compelling/convincing?
- How did this speaker think about decision points in their leadership role?
- What drives this person?
- Would you invest in this speaker?
- What does this speaker get about this space that others just don’t see/get?
Community Building Activity
We concluded each session with a community-building activity. See below + Anne Raheem’s article for more details :)
Other notes!
Inspired by the Weeklings and John Danner
- Keep the video on. This is so important in building a cohesive online community. Once, I was even eating dinner during a meeting and another time my dad stepped into the frame which could have been awkward in any other case. However, I think it humanized me a bit (hopefully!).
- Use the chat! This gave the fellows a chance to joke around while keeping questions more formal. Also, we used this to encourage individual members to ask questions.
- Give kudos and shoutouts on slack and in the chat :)
How to build a community entirely virtually
We held hour-long community bonding activities in addition to 30-minute bonding activities at the conclusion of every session (e.g. 10–10:30 pm EST on Thursdays and then 9:30–10:30 pm EST during another weekday night, and we rotated the day of the week)
Here are our favorite community bonding activities:
- New York Times 36 Questions of Love
- Hot seat
- Pairwise Introductions
- Group storytelling
We also invited community members to share their passions (personal and professional)
- Virtual Yoga
- How to go Viral on Twitter
- Data Science 101
- Improv Workshop
- K-Drama Watch Party
More ideas:
- Icebreaker: Online events that build community
How to build connections between community members
Reciprocity Rings
Inspired by Vinent Po, Warmly (Push, Pull), Contrary Capital’s home(work), we started a reciprocity ring.
How it works:
How to Request:
How to Help:
We asked everyone to contribute to both sheets the first week! People got REALLY into this and set up a bunch of 1:1s :) Highly recommend! Plus, this sort of community building tools appears to scale ;)
Donuts
Slack has an excellent inbuilt app called Donut, which automatically and randomly schedules coffee chats between community members. To make scheduling easier, you can even connect your calendar! Additionally, donut offers fun ice breaker questions.
I hope this overview gave some insight into our process for crafting a virtual community! Let us know what you loved, want to hear more of, and think we may have missed.
Big shoutout to the Weeklys, our mentors Stephen and Michael, and Jeongmin for inspiration.
