✨ Should every business build a community?

Oh hey there. A big welcome to my new series, Pazazz, a newsletter to help you build mind blowing communities, written by yours truly, Paz Pisarski.

So… who am I? I live in Australia and I’m obsessed with building impactful communities, especially for businesses.

And why the name Pazazz? Well, ‘Pazazz’ stems from the word ‘pizazz’ which means to be exciting, impressive and lively. It’s the perfect word to explain a community that has the X Factor. Because when a community has pizazz, it’s memorable, impactful and becomes something people can’t live without.

But when a community lacks pizazz, it’s dull, forgettable and needs something to bring back that game-changing flair.

That’s where I come in 👋 I’m here to share the secret ingredients to help you build mind blowing communities that have that magnetic and pazazz energy.

So what’s the focus today?

For this edition, we’ll be unpacking the question: How can a business determine whether to build a community or not?

I’ll also share my answers (and deepest darkest secrets) to:

• Why the hype around building a community for a business?

• What’s the difference between an audience and a community?

• What does a successful community look like?

• What questions do I need to ask myself before building a community?

And so much more. Now grab a tea, play this music and let’s dive in.

Why the hype around building a community for a business?

More and more businesses are beginning to realize that building a highly engaged community can be an effective way to connect with customers, build loyalty, drive sales, strengthen retention, increase referrals and serve as a platform for customer support and product development.

Combined with the rise of community-built platforms and demand for real human connection (not just robot interactions), it can be enticing to launch a community for customers to engage and ultimately drive business growth.

But building a highly engaged community can be tough and takes time. Do it well, and you’ll be on top of the world having created an impactful business with a dedicated community around it. Do it poorly, and you may waste your precious time, resources, money and god forbid, repel customers.

How can a business determine whether to build a community or not?

To ensure you’re going down the right path, it’s important (and fun!) to understand the difference between an audience and a community.

What’s the difference between an audience and a community?

An audience is a group of people who follow a business and consume their content. It’s a passive involvement with a one-to-many communication style, where businesses typically communicate solely with their customers (or potential customers).

An example of this would be the monthly newsletter I send out for my music business, Paz Sounds, using Mailchimp. It’s a one-way channel where people read about new music releases, upcoming events and curated playlists. They can reply and interact with me, but there’s no way for them to actually connect with one another and chat about music. It’s a cost-effective and simple way to grow my potential customer base and increase the amount of people who listen to my music.

A community on the other hand, is a group of people connected by a shared purpose or location who connect regularly to support one another. It’s an active involvement with a many-to-many communication style, where people can engage with each other and feel a sense of belonging.

An example of this would be the free meetup community that we launched for my business, The Community Collective, using Airtable and Butter. We welcome community builders from the Australian and New Zealand startup space into our community by application, they become ‘CC’ians’ and we connect them regularly through monthly meetups, both online and in person. Members can connect with one another, share their insights on specific topics and offer support to overcome challenges. There is a shared sense of belonging and it’s a great way to demonstrate the value we can offer people and grow our potential customer base.

Remember, one approach is not better than the other. It just depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

What does a successful community look like?

If you do decide to build a community (I’ll be here to help you if you do!), it’s important to understand what success looks like. Success will look different to everyone and depend on the business goals.

However for the purpose of this question, a successful community typically has 4 mind-blowing characteristics; deep engagement, valuable impact, consistent growth and a strong sense of belonging.

Let’s unpack that:

1. Deep engagement: Members are highly engaged, show up often and stay long term.

2. Valuable impact: Members experience real value in their lives as a result of the community.

3. Consistent growth: New members join regularly through word of mouth and referrals from existing members.

4. A strong sense of belonging: Regular rituals and norms begin to form and there is this intangible feeling of belonging. People feel so connected with your community that it becomes a part of their identity!

An example of a successful community would be the People Geek community for Culture Amp, an employee engagement platform. The People Geek community is for anyone that cares about culture in the workplace. They have Chapter Hosts all over the world running meetups and events to connect and support culture enthusiasts. They dive into specific topics, help each other with their challenges and continue to grow consistently.

This community is beneficial to Culture Amp as they have a large community around the world who feel a strong affiliation to their brand, trust them, share ideas to improve the product and refer the platform to relevant HR managers. It’s a great way for them to field insights, understand their customers and reach new customers at scale (plus have a lot of impact whilst doing it!).

What questions do I need to ask myself before building a community?

Alrighty. So we’re sold on the community dream huh? Well to ensure your wildest community dreams come true, we need to ask ourselves 4 questions across 4 key categories:

1. Business goals

2. Audience demand

3. Sufficient resources

4. Landscape mapping

Shall we jump into the first ingredient? 100% YES 🕺🏽

1) Business goals

• Vision: What is the long-term vision for the business’ future impact?

• Mission: What is the business trying to achieve in the short-term?

• Goals: What are the specific outcomes the business is trying to achieve this year?

• Value: What value is the business aiming to offer people?

For example, at The Community Collective;

• Our vision is to empower the world to build impactful communities.

• Our mission is to support community builders to build stronger communities and create a space where they belong.

• Our goals are to offer world-class support, create engaging programs, build a well-known brand and generate $120k in annual revenue.

• Our value is to ensure we offer community builders a way to up-skill, connect with others and receive feedback to continuously grow within their role and build impactful communities.

For us, we now know exactly what our business is trying to achieve which is key to understanding whether a community is a viable way to reach our goals.

Now it’s time to unpack whether there is an overlap between our business goals and audience needs, as well as whether there is a strong demand for a community (AKA the sweet spot for a community).

2) Audience demand

• Engagement: How is your audience currently engaging with your business?

• Needs: What is your audience trying to achieve when they interact with your business?

• Demand: Is there an obvious demand from your audience to engage with one another?

• Value: What value would they derive from a community?

If you have an audience that is asking for ways to connect with one another and the business on a deeper level (e.g. you receive emails from your audience asking whether there is a place for them to connect with others, you observe your audience creating their own private spaces to interact outside of the business), this is a great sign that there is demand for a community.

For example, before we launched The Community Collective’s meetup community, I reached out to 50 community builders and had phone calls to understand what they were trying to achieve in their roles, what their challenges were and if they wanted to connect with other community builders.

If they did, I sent them a link to sign up to hear about our first meetup. If they didn’t, I sent them a link to join our newsletter. Once we had 50 sign ups, we organised our first meetup and asked them what they wanted to get out of this group and how often they wanted to meet (they said weekly! But weekly was too much for us… so we landed with monthly). This group has since grown from 50 to 480 members over 1.5 years, predominantly through word of mouth referrals.

However, if those 50 people had simply explained they wanted support on their goals and challenges, but didn’t want to actually connect with other people, then I would’ve explored other ways to support them and not built a community as there was no demand for the connection.

Now that we have identified our business goals and whether there is a demand from the audience to connect, it’s time to determine whether there are sufficient resources to launch, build and sustain a community.

3) Sufficient Resources

• Resources: What resources do you need to build a community?

• Time: Do you have enough time and patience to build a community?

• Budget: Do you have enough money to build a community?

• Team: Do you have someone to manage a community?

Building a community requires time and patience. If you have short term business goals that you need to achieve fast, beware that it may take longer than you think to get a community off the ground (we’re talking months to years here!).

If you have outlined that you have the time, patience, budget and team to build and sustain a community, then good news my friend, a community may be the right decision!

But before we open the flood gates, we need to reveal the last ingredient (drum roll please)... landscape mapping to see whether similar communities already exist or not.

4) Landscape mapping

• Research: Do similar communities already exist?

• Evaluation: What has worked well and not so well for them?

• Involvement: Is your audience already a part of similar communities?

• Differentiation: What would set your community apart from existing ones?

Doing thorough research (e.g. surveying your audience, researching the internet, interviewing your network) to see whether similar communities have been established is important to ensure that you’re not adding to the noise and building something that already exists. This would make it very difficult to provide something unique as you would be competing for people’s time and energy.

If similar communities already exist, you should consider whether you’re better off saving your resources and collaborating with similar communities to achieve your business goals.

Or if you have found that there are no similar communities (woohoo!), you have sufficient resources and there is a strong audience demand and overlap between your business goals and their needs, then that is a strong signal that building a community could be a great path for your business. Hooray 🎉

In Summary

We’ve now outlined that there are 4 key ingredients to building a community for a business. If all 4 align, then that’s a green light!

However if you are missing 1 of the 3 key ingredients, a community might not be the best path forward. Here’s a diagram below to illustrate this point:

And if you do find that community sweet spot… well damn that’s exciting! But now what? How do you even launch a community? What are the different types of communities? How do you ensure members stay engaged?

Now now young grasshopper. All shall be revealed soon. I’m here to guide you along the way, to infinity and beyond (just like Buzz Lightyear).

So stay tuned for the next edition answering your most pressing questions about what’s next to build a mind blowing community, in true pazzaz style.

Until then,
Paz Pisarski

Co-Founder @ The Community Collective

The Community Collective’s 1st Birthday Party