The 80/20 conversations rule of community

Continuous Community Clue #004

When we think about building community we can fall into the trap of overly focusing on conversations. This doesn’t mean conversations aren’t important, they are crucial to our community work.

What I see time and time again are comments from community members saying “communities are overwhelming”, “there are too many conversations” and “I can’t keep up”.

When designing your community it may help to have a broad 80/20 conversations community rule.

What does this mean? As a rule of thumb:

Limit community activity be 20% conversations.
Use the other 80% to create other value.

The rule is a guide, a health check or a mental model. It means it might be helpful to keep an overview of where we are spending our time for our community to ensure there is balance.

What could the other 80% be?

Some examples could be:

• A directory

• Educational content

• Podcast

• Templates

• Videos

• Events

• Conference

• A job board

Some food for thought:

• There will be certain stages of the community where conversations are more important than others.

• Think about what qualifies as conversations, is it just chat? Or does it expand to events and the side chat? Social media? What about DMs?

• Members can come for something and then stay for the community

Explore for inspiration:

• Are forums inherently a bad way to build real community?

• What's intimidating in participating in communities?

• Wherever people come, community naturally arises.

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