CLUBS | Course for Creators

Introduction

This is a collection of tasks, recommendations, and checklists for community owners and community managers that will help not only to create the base of a community, but also to avoid those mistakes in its development that are long, difficult, and expensive to fix.

It includes knowledge about social connections, leadership in the community, common interests, and why people need the community, regardless of the format of communication, online or offline.

By going step-by-step through the exercises, you'll learn how to find like-minded people, build a leadership team, start and scale a community capable of self-development.

And, of course, you'll form a community story that will attract new members. Recommendations and assignments will be useful both for those who are just planning to create a community and for those who have been engaged in community development for a long time.

What is a community?

This is a group of people who have four attributes:

• Social relationships are exchanges of resources: financial, informational, help, or contacts. When you complain to a friend and ask for their support, you are also exchanging resources - in this case, emotional resources. In the training community, you can talk about exchanging resources, but the residents of the house and the listeners of the lectures have not yet developed a social relationship.
• Social norms. Within the group, its own norms and rules of behavior operate. For example, the community of gardeners decided that in their gardening community it is forbidden to play music outside after 10 p.m., and the training participants agreed on a playful fine for latecomers.
• Common Culture. As a result of the interaction, the group develops its own culture and communication style. For example, an IT company has its own slang and culture of informal pastime.
• Regularity of communication. Social norms and a common culture can only form when the interaction between group members takes place regularly. If you organize an event for chefs, they can exchange recipes and experiences, but a community will not form because their communication will be one-off. An example of a community is the employees of an IT company. All employees participate in training, they have their own professional slang and even jokes. In addition, they celebrate holidays and birthdays together, organize meetups, informal meetings, and cyber competitions.

Note: Not every community is able to self-organize and act together - that is, to what sociology calls subjectivity.

Our challenge is to form a community based on shared values, able to act together for common goals.

How do you create a community?

A community is seldom capable of acting on its own. It needs a catalyst, which is a community organizer.

It is important for the organizer to understand that there are four things that keep people coming together:

Fear. The strongest unifier of people. Being together to protect themselves from something: fear of loss, loss, or the appearance of an outside threat. The primitive communal system of several tribes in Africa vividly demonstrates the behavior of people when there is nothing in common between the members of the community except the need for protection.

A dream or a goal. Absolutely everyone plans and desires to achieve a certain level, status, and skill in their lives. But not all people are ready to be active and act in the direction of the goal. In such communities, there are always many observers behind the group of active leaders.

Space. A place in which a sustainable group of people often resides. A stadium or conference room where an event takes place. Google: all space and HR strategy is focused on forming a community with the ability to break into small "tribes" for common activities.

Collaborative experience. After achieving a goal, implementing a project, past training a group of people has experience and emotions about the experience at a certain period of time. This is how business clubs often arise around educational programs.

Attention: stable relations and connections in the community can arise only with common activity in addition to the factors influencing the emergence of the community.