How to Build a Thriving Community With David Spinks  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Marketing Millennials]] - Full Title: How to Build a Thriving Community With David Spinks - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2cfac47d-1e94-4545-b04a-1efc7809dcb8 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Early Start in Community Gaming** - David Spinks got into community building early through gaming by starting an online forum in middle school. - This experience taught him managing conversations, handling trolls, and creating engagement rules fundamentally. Transcript: David Spinks I kind of think everybody's in this space of community building in some way. We all have our experiences with community, being part of community, starting communities. First, a lot of the work I do today is in digital community, and I got introduced to digital communities at a really young age through gaming. I was big into video games in middle school and ended up starting a forum for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. It was my game of choice, and that kind of introduced me to the world of building online forums and online communities. I was only in middle school at the time, so I got a very early education in all the things that you do to build community, managing conversations, dealing with trolls, creating rules And guidelines, holding contests and competitions. And so then that became kind of a fascination for me, how the internet would connect people and how communities conform online. I struggled with finding community in person. So I really relied on the internet to find connection and belonging early on. And at that time, that wasn't a very normal thing to do. And so I could kind of see that this is the way that things would go. And then, of course, it did. And social media blew up. And social media and the internet became such a big part of how people would connect. And when I got into college, I went to school for business administration. I started connecting the world of business to online communities and businesses can build communities in a way to achieve their goals. And that became my career. My first job out of college was a community manager, which wasn't really a job at the time. But I was writing about community and business on my blog. And a startup found my blog. They wanted to hire someone to manage their community. And so they hired me for three months for an internship and kind of just went from there. And I've spent the last 15 years or so either building communities, starting companies. ([Time 0:01:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cbe25343-3534-4055-b98a-82eff2f5c479)) - **What Defines a Community** - Community is defined by human connection and a feeling of belonging between people. - Unlike marketing that helps people, community helps people help each other through collaboration. Transcript: Daniel Murray And I think some people have community and they don't know that they have community. David Spinks Yes, the definition question is a big one because everyone's calling everything a community these days. And the truth is it is everything. It's human connection. If people feel a sense of belonging to each other, if they feel a sense of community with each other, then it's a community. So it's really something that people experience. In the world of business and comparing it to marketing is in general marketing, you're aiming to help people, right? You create content, you create experiences, you create education, you create things that bring value to people and help them. When you're building community, you're looking for opportunities to help people help each other. So instead of you creating the article that answers a question, how do you connect the person with a question to someone else in the community who has an answer? How do you help them collaborate? How do you help them teach each other? How do you help them build things together? ([Time 0:04:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/57fef3cc-306d-4d84-a9a8-bed9d01a1bf0)) - **Start Community Organically** - Start community building organically by nurturing trust with early customers before launching a conversational space. - Testing with events first helps iterate before committing to long-term forums or chat channels. Transcript: Daniel Murray For like, so you've helped a lot of businesses. When do you think is the time to start formalizing the process of community? Because I know there's like, you have a community of just people talking, but like in a place where people can't, you can control the engagement. David Spinks You can help people like a forum or some sort of things like that i mean i think you should start very organically i think communities emerge uh they're not something that you can just Force into existence you're going to create a space and if you tap into something that people actually want to talk about and connect around then they will fill that space with their Energy, with their actions, with their contributions. And you can start that on day one. And frankly, there's no company that doesn't start that very early because that early adopter group of customers is essentially your first community. Now, you may not have a conversational space for them to talk to each other yet. And that's okay. Starting to build community starts with building trust with those people so that in the future, you could bring them together. But for now, it might just be you building relationships with each of those customers and listening to them and understanding their needs. And organically, that sense of identity will start to form. When should you actually launch a conversational space? Which, by the way, community could be events. So it could be an event you host in person or online, something with a beginning and an end, something that's asynchronous. Or you can do the asynchronous where it's like a forum or a chat channel, something that's ongoing and doesn't necessarily have a beginning and an end. So you can do those events. I like doing events first, actually, because they have a beginning and an end, so they're very easy to test and iterate. You're not making this really long-term commitment. Whereas if you're launching a forum or a Slack channel or a Discord or a Circle or something like that, that's a really long-term commitment. It's going to take a long time for that community to really take form within that conversational space. And so I wouldn't launch that until, for one, you have somebody who's going to be able to dedicate themselves to leading that community space, to facilitating it, to driving engagement. If you don't have the capacity to have someone dedicate at least half of their time, if you're very early stage, but eventually it should be at least a full-time job to facilitate in that Community. You're probably not ready for it yet. But what you can do again is start really simple. So I wouldn't start with like a really complex forum and ecosystem with lots of channels and spaces and structures and logins. ([Time 0:06:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8c931dc9-1cbd-48cf-b83a-e7c0529a5951)) - **Power of In-Person Engagement** - In-person community interactions create immersive experiences engaging all senses and lasting memories. - Online spaces work best as complementary tools to maintain connections between offline events. Transcript: David Spinks Are really craving, especially in person right now. People are hungry for it. They're over COVID, even though it's spreading like wildfire. I'm sick right now from it. But everyone wants to get together in person, see people live, actually have all their senses activated when they interact with each other. And so there's a massive opportunity right now to build in-person experiences. I think that's what people really want. Daniel Murray Also, I think it's a good way to show how intentional the audience you have is, because if you host an event and you see who shows up, you could see, Hey, people actually care about what We're doing, our values. They have shared belief. You could see who comes into the room where if you set it online, it's a little harder to see that. But if you, to get someone in a room is one of the hardest things to do as a anybody. So if you can, if you, if you build a great audience, it's way easier to get someone in the room. So you show that intention of your community that you build. Exactly. David Spinks Yeah. The barrier to entry is higher, right? It takes more work for somebody to show up to a physical event. But once they're in the room, it's a much more immersive experience. In a Slack group, you hope to get them in there for maybe five minutes to read what's in there and respond. And then they're going to go on with their life. With an event, you can get two, three hours of deep conversations with people. And again, you're activating all five senses. You're really building relationships and tapping into, you're building memories, shared experiences with them. It's so much more powerful than just passive online experiences. I actually think online experiences are really good in complement to those in-person events where the in-person experiences give people depth and an opportunity to really form relationships And feel like they're a part of something. And then the online space just becomes a way of staying in touch in between those experiences. ([Time 0:10:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/21874c4f-227a-463e-a08d-5b839d8d4f57)) - **Fuel Conversation with Quality Members** - Focus on recruiting the right people motivated to contribute quality, authentic interactions rather than seeding content. - A small, high-quality engaged group creates a gravity that attracts more members naturally. Transcript: Daniel Murray I think one thing that I get asked a lot is when people start community is, how do you start fueling that conversation in the community? And do you do is should you seeded with certain members how do you start getting actual content in the community so people don't arrive and say oh there's three people chatting in here David Spinks This is lame i'm i'm out of here hey three people some of my favorite communities in the world are three people it's about the right people who actually genuinely want to be there so i i Personally think it's a lot less seeding the perfect content and knowing exactly how to set it all up. It's so much more about finding the right people who have a genuine motivation to contribute, who meet a certain bar of quality or alignment with the community. So are the things they're contributing going to be at a high level? Are they going to be authentic? Are they going to be true? Are they coming with a giving mindset and not just trying to extract value? And if you create that even with three people, that's going to be super powerful because now you have really high quality people actively engaged in exchanging their wisdom with each Other and supporting each other. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that? And then you add a fourth person and they're going to see, wow, there's people actively engaged here in the things they're sharing. I'm immediately learning from. You essentially create a center of gravity that pulls people in and other people want to be a part of. So again, I would focus on getting those right people in. And a lot of the time it's solving your own problem. Like some of the best communities I've seen built and that I've been able to start is just a conversation that I was craving that I didn't have a space to have and I didn't find it anywhere Else. But I would have those conversations one-on with people. And so eventually, I have the same conversation with 10 different people individually. It always clicks for me. Like, wait, maybe I should just get us all together into a room. I think you'll all get along really well. And that is the art. That's the intuition of a great community builder, is knowing that people will get along, that there's alignment there, that there's something happening here. There's a fire to be started that if you just create the right space and bring those people together, again, community emerges. ([Time 0:13:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/71a35cec-25e7-4b24-81c4-a0f489081c0e)) - **Curate Community Entry Thoughtfully** - Set entry barriers based on community purpose; a curated invite-only approach often builds stronger culture. - Start with trusted people who align with community values and allow them to invite others. Transcript: Daniel Murray For you, how do you set those barriers to entry? Because you can also, some communities just let anybody in the forum, but there's also some that, like you said, are very curated. You know the right people in the right room. So how do you decide between that barrier to entry into the community, who should be in and who shouldn't be in? David Spinks It depends on the purpose as well. If you're trying to build this extremely large ecosystem really fast, then you might just want to let everyone in. But it almost always fails when you just let everyone in and it grows really fast. There's no sense of shared norms or culture. Members don't really get to know each other. They don't get a sense of who we are, right? How do we identify as a group of people? And so I would almost always start by curating and just making it invite only. And a really simple way to do that is, again, start with the few people that you know that you think are going to be a really good fit, and then leave it open for them to be able to invite others Who might be a good fit. And if you're building just like an interest-based community, you can be very open and organic like that. If you're doing a customer community and you're only limited to your customers, then start with the people who, again, are genuinely motivated, who are going to bring really high-quality Conversations, who you already have trust and relationships with, where there's already kind of this foundation of social capital in a way. Start with those people, and then you can grow it organically from there. ([Time 0:16:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0e4dcab9-41e9-4867-897a-3b671aee0cd8)) - **Qualities of a Great Community Manager** - Great community managers excel in empathetic communication, facilitation, and conflict resolution. - They should understand the community deeply and manage operations like analytics, feedback, and cross-team coordination. Transcript: Daniel Murray If I was looking, if I was a company looking for a great community manager, what is, what are the qualities? What should I be looking for a company? Like what makes a great community builder or manager? David Spinks Yeah, there's, there's a few layers to what it takes to do this work. You have the communal layer of, is this person going to be a great writer, a great communicator? Can they really connect with people and empathize with people? Do people feel drawn to them? Are they a great facilitator? Do they understand how to start conversations, manage conversations, how to manage conflict, how to build communities that are inclusive and identify the things that are making Them uninclusive in ways that are inequitable or unjust. So that's the work of actually interacting with humans. And that's critical for this work. One element of that that's really hard to navigate, but you're going to have to, is the extent to which they have an authentic connection to that community specifically. Are they a member of that community? Do they understand it? Can they speak their language? Are the community members going to respect them as one of them? It doesn't have to be that way, especially for a mature community, bringing in people who are more operational and less like one of the members can be okay. But there's going to be a learning curve for someone who has no experience in the space. Say it's a community for basketball players and they've never played basketball or watched a game of basketball in their life. It's going to be hard for them to get up to speed on how to connect with those people and understand them as opposed to someone who is already authentically, organically immersed in that Topic. So that's the one layer is the community engagement side. And then the other layer I would look for is their operational abilities, which like any other role, right? Like what are they able to set up the systems in order to manage communities as they grow and scale? Can they track things properly? Do they understand how to look at analytics behind communities to understand how the community is growing and evolving? Do they know how to run community surveys to collect feedback and see if the community is healthy? ([Time 0:18:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/90fc83b7-3691-4703-b507-c52333dee2d6)) - **Community as Competitive Advantage** - Community provides a unique competitive advantage by building long-term identity and belonging that other channels can't replicate. - Measuring ROI directly is often difficult, but thriving communities contribute to product development, loyalty, and engagement. Transcript: Daniel Murray Because marketers always are judged on, hey, what is the ROI of this community? How am I going to get value out of it? What do you say to people when they say why I should invest in this? David Spinks I've stopped trying to convince people a long time ago to invest in community. I find that there are people who believe that it's a great channel and a great way to connect with people that is really important in the mix of creating content and doing advertising And SEO. There's a lot of this outbound approach and inbound approaches to marketing, but community just provides this completely different elements of how people connect with your brand And with each other. I mean, you can look at some of the most successful brands in the world, like, you know, the apples of the world or HubSpot and the B2B side, like community was so core to how they grew from Their very earliest days. So it's kind of a DNA thing. Some companies really believe in it and get it. And I think to some extent, you have to believe in it. It can't just be a pure ROI question because community is complexity, man. It's an infinite amount of interactions and relationships. It's going to be really hard to prove that having this highly engaged community led to this increase in renewals or this increase in leads. And I've spent so many hours working to bring more clarity and get more clear attribution for community channels. And it's just super hard. Events can be a little bit easier because again, they have a beginning and an end. So you can see what kind of action you want people to take after attending an event and see if they take that action within 10 days or within 90 days. Like did they sign up for your products within 90 days of attending an event? Okay. You can probably give that some attribution. In an online forum, is there participation leading them to spend more with your company? You can get correlation on that and say, well, the people who are part of the community spend two times more than people who aren't, but it's correlation. You don't know if that's just because they're your more valuable customers and that's why they participate in the community. So there just has to be a belief that building this long-term shared identity, sense of community is something that's going to be a competitive advantage for you. It's going to help you own a category in a way that no one else can, the way HubSpot did with Inbound or the way Salesforce did with cloud software in their early days. They built an entire community and identity around being the first cloud software company. ([Time 0:22:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a71602a4-a0f4-442d-a8e6-60ab5156d13b)) - **Trust Intuition Over Data Alone** - You can't always rely on data for community or brand success; intuition and belief in value are essential. - Being data-informed is better than data-driven, since humans behave unpredictably and won't always follow logical patterns. Transcript: Daniel Murray Think what you said at the beginning of that you don't try to convince people anymore. It's the same with brand. It's the same with creating valuable content. It's the same with, it's these things that you have to do a long time to build trust, build relationship. Relationships don't happen overnight they happen through continuous work and showing up daily it's not that and i think the people who get that win and the people who don't get that Just keep doing what they're doing so i i think it's true i think the same with brand when people say why should i invest in brand to me i? I'm like, I can't, I can give you millions of examples why you should do it. But you, if your whole thing is going to be get a sale tomorrow, I can't help you with that. Yeah. David Spinks We've gotten to this point in business where it's all so extractive and all about attribution and knowing exactly how this contribution that you're, this thing you're building or This thing you decide to invest in exactly what the roi is and we've lost like the intuition for what people actually fucking want right like apple doesn't know whether the the shape Of the curve on the corner of their laptop is going to translate to two through two to three million more dollars they just like this is beautiful this is aesthetic this is what we believe People want and you can test those things as well to see what people want but yeah like design brand is a really good example where i can't tell you what the roi is of improving your design And the aesthetic of your website you have to just believe in the power of design and i think community is in many ways similar. If you have this thriving community of people who believe in your mission and who love your product and want to talk to each other and are trading ideas on how to use your products better And are just organically advocating for you because they feel like they're a part of something, do you need to see the data on exactly what the ROI is on that to know that it's valuable? No. You just know. Daniel Murray That's why I hate when people say data-driven marketer data because I think it's data-informed. I think the whole thing about humans is humans are unpredictable. So data only tells you what humans did in the past. It doesn't tell you what humans are going to do. And you have to do unpredictable things like humans to stand out. You can't do what everybody else is doing because that's the logical thing. And everybody will do it because it's logical because five other people did it and it's proven. You have to do unpredictable things to stand out because humans aren't predictable. ([Time 0:26:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5f7b833e-6307-4e48-b39b-5344a228951e)) - **Build Joyful, Intuitive Communities** - Avoid seeking a single metric to judge community health; use a portfolio of metrics and intuition instead. - Build communities that bring you joy and genuine connection, as passion sustains effort and effectiveness. Transcript: David Spinks Would die on. I guess two things come to mind. One is similar to what we were just talking about with measuring ROI, also with measuring community. People try to find this one metric that is going to tell them whether or not their community is healthy. And again, I think you just need to lean on your intuition and look at data as something that informs, not decides. And so I recommend that people get a portfolio of metrics that they look at. So it's not just total number of posts or total number of comments or total number of members. It's all of those things. It's your monthly active members. It's looking at the quality of those contributions. It's doing interviews and running surveys. So I just don't think there's one metric that's going to ever tell you whether or not a community is healthy or not. And frankly, a lot of the time you don't even need data. You can feel it. You can use your heart to know whether or not a community is healthy. So I find myself dying on that a lot when I have clients that are like, all right, what's the one metric we should be looking at? And I have to do a lot of unlearning around this idea that there's a one metric that matters when it comes to community. And then the other thing that came to mind is just build communities that bring you joy. It's kind of like the same in the world of business. Sometimes people build businesses because they see it as an opportunity, but they don't feel joy from it and they kind of force themselves to do it anyway because it's an opportunity. I think community is much the same way. Community becomes pretty easy to build when it's something you genuinely crave and find joy in yourself. You're going to want to show up every day and have these conversations probably because they're conversations you're already having and already enjoying. But when you try to build a community, just because it's an opportunity and you don't feel a genuine care for the people that you're bringing together, and you don't feel genuine joy Out of being in that space and participating in it, it's going to feel so hard to get it going. It's going to feel like a job. And I don't think that's a very effective way to build community. ([Time 0:29:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8e889c86-90a7-4d24-92a5-78cc4e434e1e))