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In December Vivek M. George interviewed me for his new podcast on how to build a multi-stakeholder co-op. At that time I was in quarantine and my voice still sounded a little funny, but as usual talking to Vivek was super motivating.
Towards the end of the interview he asked me to formulate three concrete tips based on our experience with building a community for Fairmondo.
So here they are:
1. Go out and share your vision
Sounds like a no-brainer, but I believe there is actually more to it. I saw too many cases where founders of co-ops, social businesses, and non-profit projects understated their vision and talked about what they wanted to do, rather than how they wanted to change the world.
Be bold
At Fairmondo, especially in the beginning, we did not say
“We want to build a cooperative online-marketplace“.
Instead, we said
“We want to create the new Amazon, owned by the users. And the employees.“
When I was giving talks or participated in panel discussions, I oftentimes even said (with a slightly, but not fully, ironic wink):
“We will replace Amazon with a truly responsible company.“
Obviously, this could sound utterly unrealistic. But when it comes to motivating people to join your community, it‘s simply more compelling, if they can become part of a movement for real change whose vision they can sign up to 100%.
I believe that being bold about our vision was the key to growing the membership in our co-op from 12 to over 850 members within four weeks during our first crowdfunding-campaign.
Be clear
At the same time, I also met many founders who came with a relatively blurry vision. In particular, it was not clear how they actually wanted to get there with their specific project. I am not talking about a detailed plan, rather, about stating the corner stones of a strategy.
At Fairmondo we said:
“We will make users to owners and together with them create an online-marketplace that just serves their needs better. And that, without harming them through the backdoor, but with sharing the created value with everyone along the supply chain.“
Of course, the details were still incredibly complex, but people got an idea of how this could actually be achieved. While it’s good to have a bold vision, it’s important to demonstrate that it’s more than a mere fantasy.
Be real
Maybe the most important is that your vision must come across authentically.
When Mark Zuckerberg tells me „Facebook‘s vision is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together“ it just makes me feel like replying „Sorry, Mark, go home to your x-million-dollar-villa and play with your VR-gadgets.“
These kind of artificial corporate missions and visions just leave an awkward feeling of being directly lied to. It’s like telling people „sign up to my free social network“ when really you just want them to become unpaid content providers for your ad company.
Of course, you might be able to buy a community with money, if you have enough of it. But if you want to build a community without much money at hand, it’s crucial to really believe in what you say.
At Fairmondo, it helped me to speak boldly about our vision that we had put a lot of effort into developing the “Coop 2.0 model” for the company. This model is designed to make sure that I (or anyone else) could never turn into a dictator, or into someone who just wants to make billions with it.
2. Share your needs and specific tasks
Another crucial element to community building is letting people know how they can contribute to your project as detailed, as possible.
Community building is different from hiring people. Yet sharing „ads“ for specific tasks and roles can encourage people to see how they, with their specific skills and capacities, can actually make a relevant contribution.
For example, at Fairmondo we shared a call for people to help organizing a flea-market/festival, which resulted in dozens of „applications“. We also shared calls among our members to organize small local events in their hometowns, or to distribute flyers for these events. Through this we could organize over 50 events all over Germany with practically no budget.
And it’s my experience that the more open you are about your needs, challenges and weaknesses, the more appealing your project gets for people to join in and help.
This does not mean making yourself look helpless and pitiful. People still like to join groups that seem competent and motivated. But being open about weaknesses can actually be a sign of strength and self-confidence. We all have them, and it’s encouraging to join an environment, where we feel that we do not need to hide them.
3. Have weekly on-boarding sessions
Again, this point may sound trivial, but I have seen in several projects how powerful it’s to have these continuous, regular sessions. They create an atmosphere of openness to newcomers and can give them a feeling of being welcomed and appreciated.
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A great example of this has been SuperCoop, the new cooperative supermarket in Berlin. For more than a year they held these weekly info sessions, before even opening up their supermarket. This enabled them to build a solid, enthusiastic, supportive community, which was extremely helpful when it came to taking their first big steps, like a local crowdfunding campaign and renovating and furnishing their space.
Thanks to their regularity, such on-boarding sessions take less and less effort and they can be even outsourced to community members (as it happened at SuperCoop, where after some months this community member actually became a core team member).
And these regular sessions can be used for tapping into the magic of the crowd for example by asking potential new community members for feedback, ideas, or strategies for reaching out to more potential community members.
Final remarks
These where the first three tips that came into my mind when Vivek asked me in December. But even when thinking about them in more detail now, I do believe that they can make a big difference while requiring relatively few resources.
Building a community from zero is a challenging, but also extremely rewarding thing to do. With every new community member, a new person joins your project and brings in personal perspectives, personal dreams and fears, and personal style.
Sooner than you might think your project becomes something very beautiful, just because of the people who start co-shaping it.
I found it very motivating to meet as many new community members as possible directly, or at least through video calls. Perhaps this is another reason why I enjoyed talking about this topic with Vivek so much, it brought back some good memories…
When it then comes to maintaining and growing an existing community, it’s much more about having realistic goals and successfully working towards them. We weren’t as good at that at Fairmondo as we have been at building a community in the beginning.
I will share more personal learnings from our ups and downs in my next article.
In the meantime, if you have any tips or links or questions on community building for co-ops, please leave them in the comments!
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