A Guide for Building Community in Spaces
From someone who's been building a ground-up community for 10 years.
I grew up with a small, divorced family. Part of my family is mixed and middle-eastern and lived on the east side of Detroit. I wasn’t allowed to visit them often as a kid, as Detroit was deemed unsafe. Part of my family is white and polish and lived in middle-class suburbia. Growing up, I felt split between these two words, craving unity.
This upbringing fueled my value for community. Community gives me energy and makes me fulfilled. Building a community around you in any time or place of life means you always have someone looking out for you. You are not alone. You were never alone. You were and always are supported.
For the past ten year’s we’ve been building an organic community at Bamboo’s spaces. As we hit ten years and recently celebrated 1,000 members, I’ve been reflecting on what makes a community.
Community = Common Unity
A community is a shared identity based on finding common ground. It’s finding that common unity. At Bamboo, it’s creating a welcoming space for entrepreneurs and creators. It’s an environment that welcomes all walks of life and all styles and all people.
When thinking of common unity, having clear values and a clear story to tell will help your community find one another.
At Bamboo, we live our core values of empowering entrepreneurs, celebrating our diversity, and creating community every day. We do this with a greater mission of creating culture change in Michigan. We’re telling our own story of innovation.
Community is built on connections
This is one of our mantras at Bamboo. Connections occur organically, especially in a physical space, but they must also be intentional. Not everyone will come into your space at the same time, or attend the same event together. There needs to be a facilitator of connections and the connections must be valuable.
Organic connections occur based on the way you bring community together.
Intentional connections take a team, a facilitator.
At Bamboo, organic connections occur at the coworking space or events. Intentional connections occur through our Community Team. Founders have found a first investor, CTO/or co-founder, or business opportunity through both of these routes. Specifically for startups, we’ll meet with you 1:1 to help connect you to resources, mentors or peers in the community.
Community is organic, but requires a foundation.
I went back and forth with the word structure. Structure feels too formal for me. Community must be organic and evolve easily. What a community wants in one year or season, may change in the next. However, you must create a foundation for community participation. How do you do that?
Co-create community together. At Bamboo we co-create with our community. We listen and respond. We use our slow season in November/December every year to survey and listen. We then take community feedback into the curation of a guide for the next year’s programming. This guides us, but we also stay flexible. A community may cite they want more social connections, but then we may hear a few months later that a specific need or topic that’s timely needs to be addressed. Staying flexible allows you to meet community needs.
Let members lead when possible. Invite community members to partner with you, create special series of content or events, or let them lead the community in some shape or form. This can create authenticity and value for others but must be aligned with your companies mission and values, too.
Communicate with clarity & consistency. Whatever your foundation is, being very clear and consistent is key. It makes it easy for others to show up and participate. Whether it’s a branded day of the week, or a special event each month, it signals a regular way to connect and participate. At Bamboo we host “Tech Tuesdays” and “Community Coworking Days” at regularly repeating times so members and guests know what’s happening easily at Bamboo and can participate.
Team rituals help with facilitation. At Bamboo, we host a Monday meeting to kick off the week across all locations. We have a section in our meeting for “intros + connections”. This creates regular space to share ideas for ways to connect the community to already existing events/resources or make introductions between members for one another. On Fridays, we try to reflect on a personal or community win, a connection made or a positive story to remind us our impact each week.
^ a few organic stories we’ve heard from members at Bamboo
Community success is hard to measure.
It’s wild to me that no matter how many members we have, only a certain subset of members regularly participate in our monthly or weekly events. It’s almost as if an 80/20 rule applies — 20% of members show up all the time, and 80% off members show up much less.
Audience really matters here. And all audiences are different.
Those who participate receive so much value but our audience is made up of very busy founders of small businesses and startups, solo-preneurs, and folks who are busy leading in their own communities. As a founder/CEO myself (and a new mom) I don’t have time to go out and network often. But I do read newsletters, attend an event or gathering once a year with an organization, and in this way I feel connected.
We know that there are many ways to feel connected to a community and participation varies for our members. So we don’t sweat it if someone tells us they haven’t been to an event yet, or they don’t go to events but just cowork with us. We’re here for them when they need it.
How do we measure our community? We capture number of members, length of membership, membership retention, NPS, and more. We ask in our end of year survey did you attend one event or make one helpful connection this year? Almost always, the answer is yes.
Measure the impact of the community connections, too.
Can you measure connections made throughout the year? Did they lead to an impactful event for the company? For us, we don’t have a formal way to capture it, but we do often hear from members “I found a business opportunity” or “I found a job/new hire” or “I met my co-founder here at Bamboo” or “I presented my product for the very first time” etc. Those are invaluable moments that change the trajectory of someone’s journey. Internally, we call these our “Magic Moments” — allowing members to create community together.
^ a snapshot of variety of events we host at Bamboo
Community must be accessible.
This last one is an important note. If you’re community is like ours, large and diverse, then you know everyone is in a different stage of life. It’s important to have different ways to make community accessible. Here’s an overview of a few ways we try to do that at Bamboo:
Virtual community via slack, organized for member asks, intros, and sub-groups
Virtual community via newsletter spotlights and ways to post jobs, resources, events
Variety of in-person events hosted at different times of the day and different days of the week (our members don’t love breakfast - so lunch, afternoon and evening are best for us)
Variety of general and more specific events (for those who need support, and those who just want to connect)
Those are just a few ways we think about accessibility via variety and virtual community.
Would love to hear from you on the topic of community. What ways do you build community for you or your business? What do you value most from a community? And what, if you’ve participated, do you find most helpful about Bamboo’s community?