The 5 Tenets of Community

When steering a community team to develop a community of people, it’s helpful to outline what the key focus areas are. This can inform strategy, shape your efforts and gives us something to measure in our community adventures.

Here we outline what the 5 core tenets of community are for our Tribes team.

5 — Rituals

Ritual are such a key part of any community, and every community has them. Things that are sacred and bond the community members together in their joint understanding and contribution to these rituals. It can be as simple as gathering everyone to sing happy birthday to whoever’s birthday it is that day, weekly Friday night drinks, or gathering members for events like Thanksgiving or a New Years party.

Rituals operate at different levels, from more formal rituals like the above, to informal rituals such as greeting new members with a smile, and maintaining that smile each time you greet them.

4 — Stories

Communities are all about people, and people love hearing, telling and sharing stories. Stories are one of the most effective ways of communicating, educating and inspiring members of your community. The medium of storytelling provides a natural and powerful way to transfer information and knowledge, and create understanding throughout your member-base.

You can tell stories about accomplishments of members, about things that people have learnt and about how your community has grown over the years.

Cultivating a culture of storytelling can be one of the most giving efforts you do as a community management team.

3 — Connections

When you’re dealing with a community, whether it be a coworking community, customer community, interest group community or whatever form it takes, one of the biggest values in being a part of the community is the connections that are facilitated. Fostering connections inside of your community is a way of tapping into unrealised value, amplifying potential and opening up people’s minds to new and exciting opportunities. From collaborations to introductions, expanding networks and creating connections can have a huge positive impact.

Often times the mere act of bringing people together to facilitate connection is enough to provide value. If you’ve ever serendipitously met someone at a meetup and really hit it off, you’ll understand how amazing those connections can be.

2 — Engagement

Engaging with your community and facilitating engagement is key to good community health. You can engage your members through community-based software, like Tribes, newsletters, workshops and meetups, community surveys and using your community managers. The key here is fostering an environment where your community members feel engaged, and where they have the opportunity to be engaged with by other members. Kicking off member engagement with something small, like introducing themselves, can get the ball rolling. Creating a rhythm of regular engagement will have your members be happier, make the most of their time in the community and stick around for longer.

It’s also ultimately important for your team to be engaged with your community to be able to adapt to change, listen and respond to their needs and know if you’re doing a good job.

1 — Community Leadership

The single biggest factor for success within a community is leadership. There are so many nuances to each community and explosive opportunities for amazing things to happen, but these things don’t happen on their own. They require leadership.

Community leadership is super important for creating a healthy community environment, devoid of biases, discrimination, and isolating behaviour. It plays a pivotal role in member growth, instilling community values, and creating a positive community environment. And your community team can affect leadership at all levels:

At a team level
Leading by example within your community management team;

At a member level
Cultivating leadership qualities within members;

At a network level
Wider leadership initiatives such as establishing community values and a community manifesto.

Does your community have these tenets? How do you see these tenets of community play out?

We’ve love to hear from you — send us a tweet with the hashtag #tribesapp and include the things that work for your community. And don’t forget to comment below!