Something I don't do often enough is link to Douglas McLennan's blog, Diacritical.
This article: Five Ideas For Building Community in the Arts is a great read.
But I've got to be honest, whenever I read or hear the words "community building", I cringe.
Let me explain.
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If you believe what you read, everyone wants to build community now.
People that sell copiers want to build a community of people who are passionate about copying.
People that sell insurance want to build a community of people who rave about their brand.
But here's the truth:
Most efforts to build community fail.
They fail because we think community building is as easy as establishing Twitter and Facebook accounts.
It isn't.
Community Building is a skill.
A skill.
A skill separate and distinct from things like marketing, fundraising and artistic leadership.
If you want to build community you must have people involved with your organization that have the required skill set.
Isn't that why Obama's community building campaign worked so well? He was an organizer at heart. He had the skills. He hired other people with the skills and sent them out into the world.
So I'm going to draw a hard line here. If you want to build community, hire people (or get volunteers) that can do it. And remember . . . NOT EVERYONE CAN DO IT.
That's my first point.
Here's the second:
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To effectively build community you must have the following:
1. Central principles for the community to organize around
This is why politics naturally lends itself to community building. It's easy to build community around "hot button" issues like health care or the environment.
When a company manages to do this outside the political environment, it's because they have some clear principles to organize behind.
So the community around Zappos Shoes is built around a desire for strong customer service (and a love of shoes).
The community around Daily Kos is built around "electing more and better Democrats".
The community is not built around the product, it is built around the purpose.
The reason that most groups fail to build a significant and active community is because the purpose isn't big enough, or meaningful enough . . . or there is no purpose at all beyond the merely superficial.
2. A willingness to give the community the power it craves
Any true community will have some tension with the group that created it.
The Obama campaign is a great example of this, but there are others.
Starbucks has a passionate community that is always pushing the company to go places that (sometimes) they would rather not go.
If the arts wants to build true community, then we have to be willing to let the group touch some of our sacred spaces . . . and thus make them less sacred.
We have to not only be willing to talk about our artistic process (which is hard enough for most) but let the group influence it in some meaningful way.
I don't care if you have 1,000 facebook friends. If those friends can't impact your work, then you don't have a community.
And speaking of Facebook, here's my final point:
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Most community building happens OFFLINE.
Not to hammer the Obama example too much, but we have to remember that he used all those online tools as a vehicle for the sort of face to face conversations that actually make things happen.
In the arts, community building happens in your venue, at your office space, at the home of the 10 patrons who love you the most . . .
It doesn't happen at your computer.
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