BUILDING A COLLECTIVE OF CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY TALENTS.
Building a community can quickly get overwhelming here is story of how I am trying to navigate the challenge.
This is our social first ever social media week event, It was an awesome experience for me and was a real opportunity to bring the community together. Being around members of the community, and listening to them express their dreams and passions has been a real pleasure and it made me realize how much potential is yet to tapped from our community.
Last year our community got a name “SENPAI COLLECTIVE” and a slack group was created and 300+ creative minds signed up, but the channel quickly lost engagement and was filled with ghost account. In the end I had to mentally abandon that model as it introduced too many people to the brand at such a quick rate that it diluted the impact of the experience and culture of SENPAI. But I learnt recently that build a community like SENPAI has to undergo a very manual process of impacting a small group of peoples lives, one at a time.
“How do I build a sustainable and structured community?”
I think the answer to this question is very simple and clear to me now. Focus on the people who are the most passionate to be in your community.
Why?
Because the best way to grow an awesome community in the beginning is by word of mouth and the people that are most likely to do that are the enthusiast. The goal is to engage them the most and create structures that allow them to be valuable to themselves and their surrounding, most times this is what they really want.
SENPAI COLLECTIVE OPS
The senpai collective ops or Co Ops for short is a newly created part of the senpai collective that has “active” members who work hand in hand with the team to drive our vision:
To be the largest creative tech community with the greatest social impact on the world.
Everyone one building a community should take time to separated the die hard evangelist from the regular members, recognize that you need to keep track and reward the members of you community that are willing to help grow it. You also need to create a structure that enables then to make things happen.
So this is what I am currently experimenting with. The Co Ops we have gone through a list of applications and have pick 10 people to join the first set of the senpai collective. This is still and ongoing experiment but I guess we will see how it goes.
WITHIN THE CO OPS
While design the new Co, I thought about different way the active members could be utilized by the brand and it lead to two new sub segments of the Co.
COLLECTIVE TALENTS — These are highly skilled/trained members of our community that we outsource to work with our clients on a contract bases
COLLECTIVE FREELANCERS- These are skilled members that are available for freelance work.
COLLECTIVE FOUNDERS- These are member of the community that are building business and would get support from the community.
The goal is to build a community that is a able to grow and sustain itself.
When building a community you are automatically in the human resource game and the members of your community is your biggest asset so begin to think if ways you can create a system that generates income and creates value for them and you are sure to build a thriving community.
Another key tip I learnt while having a conversation with Ben Blumenfeld is that you can charge the community for membership and you can also get support from companies like Google Developers who would pay to sustain the community because it would be in their best interest.
This is just the beginning. The senpai collective is rising to the top. Think BIG, Think SENPAI.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-ikoh-22a8b3109/
