Launch a Room on WONDR — Connect as people, not followers 📆

As humans, we connect best as people and get sh*t done when we come together.

On WONDR we do this through Rooms & Spaces.

What’s in this article:

1. How to use Spaces and Rooms to have a chat
2. Templates for running a great conversation for learning and action
3. Ideas for what your Rooms can be about
4. Keeping Rooms low energy and less time for you
5. Start a subscription to fund your creativity

We’re constantly refining Rooms so that it feels as easy and relaxed as talking in person. These aren’t events, they aren’t big moments in the calendar that need loads of preparation and consideration…

Rooms are simply a way to just ask and discuss questions — as a group of likeminded people.

Community is about building relationships; Rooms help you host talks and get-togethers as a perfect way to get to know each other.

And don’t underestimate the power that 30 loyal fans can have — they are the greatest force for growing towards goals of impact and revenue 🌱

It all starts with a question 💭

Imagine creating an experience on WONDR as if you were running a book or movie club.

Typically books and movies are shared and read/watched before people get together. The simplicity and ease of running community rooms on WONDR is exactly the same.

It’s so simple, it’s probably what you do on a daily basis — we just want to help you do it in a way that drives you and others towards their ambitions.

Use your Spaces to share links, articles, videos, podcasts as bitesize chunks of ideas and info. Then, instead of Chapters in books and scenes in movies, with your Rooms you can talk about ideas, concepts, research, observations, models and general support.

Book clubs are great because communities of likeminded people go away to learn and come back to discuss their learning together.

It’s that simple.

The first Room we recommend you host:

“A Get-Together with Founding Members”

As easy as 1,2,3

1. Start a Room
   Schedule it for in the next 2 weeks or go live today and invite people for a chat
2. Set a topic for the convo
   “What makes for a great butterfly conservationist community?”
3. Invite 10 people to co-create the culture with you
   Invite from your WONDR network or from your own social networks, newsletters and blogs.

Template for the Discussion: A loose agenda to host a great conversation that makes your attendees feel included and safe. It’s all geared towards helping people participate 😊

Template for inviting: How you can position your invite to your community.

Now we’re cooking! 🤘

Set the mood and help people feel at ease

We’ve created an experience that’s so much more than the event — it’s about collaboration.

Visit your spaces to start a room

1) Set the mood for mindful interaction

• Let’s show faces 🙂
• Audio only 🎙
• We need your input 💡
• Chill & relax 🛋

2) Connect in a group messenger after the event

3) Share and crowdsource knowledge in spaces — don’t lose the links you share

Ideas for how you can use Rooms

• Have a small gathering together around a topic you care about
• Organise guest speakers to bring expert advice to your premium members
• Start a book club and talk about the things you’ve learned in the week from a new piece of research or a Ted Talk
• Go live as a podcast (audio only) and have a chat for people to tune into
• Launch workshops to upskill and learn as a group
• Create a room for mindful debate — set the agenda and give the mic to each other 🎤
• Share your clubhouse links to have the talk and then use your spaces to reconnect after and share resources/links
• The opportunities are unlimited…

We’ve built this experience with the end of the pandemic in mind too 🙏 so we’re designing the experience for when we can all meet in person (how it should be)!

Meet people and grow relationships when you’re together and then stay connected, collaborating and supporting each other whilst you’re apart.

Reducing high energy

We know planning & running rooms can be high energy and making loads of organic content is time consuming. Social Learning can reduce this burden for you as a creator by building a following in a more sustainable way for your time and income.

• Creating Content — Find or create a piece of content you have created and break it into bitesize chunks. This can turn into an agenda for multiple rooms together.
• Running Rooms (Events) — By sharing your content upfront, people come to rooms prepared. They are ready with questions and discussion points from your content. You play the role of the facilitator and not the lecturer. Answer questions, steer conversations, deep dive further into topics to help the learning amongst the group.

The energy from you as a creator can then shift to “facilitating” a great discussion and learning experience about the topic opposed to having to run high energy lectures or content creation.

How Rooms can help you Earn Cash

You’re building a community around learning!

Create a subscription that drives this social learning experience. You create regular, weekly or bi-weekly rooms to bring your community together. Your community will get access to exclusive content produced by yourself to learn from.

You can produce this content in any form, written, video, whatever your learners like the most. You will share this upfront to your community and when they come together, you will facilitate a discussion about a subject you are an expert in.

On each room you can hear more and more about what your community wants to learn about. This will give you the information you need to shape a more long term and beneficial learning schedule for them.

Read — How to bake in your community values

Read — Where to start with your subscriptions

Running a “Room”

Meeting Format

1. Allow 60–90mins

• 5 min — Introduce/remind people of your rituals. Use emojis to celebrate others. Raise your hand to speak etc.
• 10–15 min — Social time, use breakout rooms to help with this
• 5 mins — Bring everyone back together and you introduce the topic
• 5 mins — upcoming community rooms and admin
• 60 min — Discuss the topic, you use the content you shared as an agenda. (Beforehand ask people to come with things to discuss)
• In the end — What do people want to learn next, schedule the room! Run a vote in the chat to help decide.

2. Establish a format. Find what works for everyone and stick with it.

Holding the Discussion

• You as the creator — leading all discussions and managing the convo.
• Invite an outsider or another expert to help you
• Invite WONDR’s team to help you
• Work over time to get people to volunteer to do this so you can run more sessions without you to reduce your energy

Think of the content of Rooms like a Book Club

Some Do’s & Don’ts

1. Don’t — read favourites. Reading a book someone “just loves” can lead to hurt feelings — like inviting people into your living room to critique your decor. Ouch. Best to stay on neutral territory.
2. Don’t — plan for more than a month. You don’t want a rigid schedule that leaves no room for exciting new ideas or conversations. Keep it fluid and flexible to save time and energy whilst keeping it relevant for all.
3. Do — mix genres. A steady diet of one thing can be dull, dull, dull. Like in a book club, try interspersing fiction — current and classic — with nonfiction: poetry, history, or biography.
4. Do — explore themes. Focus on a specific author, travel journals, childhood memoirs, books on food, or a literary issue (family, loss, working of fate).
5. Do — choose 2 or 3 at a time. This allows members to read at their own pace. It’s especially helpful for those who travel or miss a meeting or two.

We’re building WONDR to support the impact-driven creators of the world. The future educators and the community builders who want to create a positive change for people and planet 🌎🤘

If you’d like to create a Community on WONDR — click here

My team and I are on hand every step of the way:
- Direct Message me on WONDR here
- Hop on a 15min call in with me here