5 Kick-Ass Community-Building Lessons For Brands from Lola Omolola and Bailey Richardson
Strong communities form the basis for so many of the world’s most blazingly hot digital campfires. That in mind, I was excited to speak with two community-building veterans on a recent episode of the Digital Campfire Download: Bailey Richardson and Lola Omolola.
Bailey is co-founder of People and Company, a NY-based consultancy that aims to take the mystery out of community building for clients like Nike, Porsche, Substack, the Surfrider Foundation and many others. As one of Instagram’s first employees, she was responsible for building out that platform’s community in its early days. Her mantra: “Communities can feel magical, but they don’t start by magic.” In other words, there are specific things you can do to build and stoke the fires of community.
Lola was born in Nigeria. A former journalist, in 2014, in the wake of Boko Haram’s kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls, she launched the private Facebook Group FIN (“Female In Nigeria”) as a place for Nigerian women to gather, support one another and push back against Nigeria’s oppression of women. Since then, the group has mushroomed to 1.7 million members worldwide. FIN (which now stands for “Female In” to encompass women globally) is a shining example of how to build a grassroots micro-community campfire.
Here are 5 key insights drawn from my conversation with both of these women. Their experience is applicable for anyone looking to harness the power of community-building, engage more authentically with their audience, and grow, grow, grow their business.
1. Be specific
The word ‘community’ is one of the most overused words in marketing today. Most often, the term is used as a stand-in for user base or audience. But those words are far too broad and generic to accurately capture what the word ‘community’ means.
In order to be an effective community builder according to Bailey, you really have to drill down to determine who you are (and are not) for. For instance, originally Lola created her FIN group specifically for Nigerian women. While the group has grown to include women from all over the world, the focus is still on women sharing their stories about the personal challenges they face living in societies where women’s rights have a long way to go. In other words, the FIN community is anything but generic. The lesson for brands and businesses: Stop trying to appeal to everyone and be really clear about who your community is and what it’s for. If you adhere to that one simple rule, you’ll find it much easier to build a community for that group. If you serve a broad swath of customers, think about your community as specific subsets of your broader audience. Find your super-fans, for instance — the subset obsessed with a certain aspect of your offering. Then figure out what obsesses them and how to keep them engaged and excited with content, experiences and products. Doing so will drive the engine that fuels your bottom line.
2. Strong leadership makes for strong communities
While casual observers might think that all Lola did to create the FIN community was hit ‘create group’ on Facebook, in reality, she was far more thoughtful about the process, and that thoughtfulness has been essential to her community’s growth. As Lola puts it: “Beyond the will to win, you need the skill to win.” Two key things she did early on to stoke the flames were search the Web (blogs) and social platforms (Twitter, Facebook), pull together a curated collection of short excerpts and quotes from women she thought the members of her community would connect with, then post them as prompts so they’d share their own experiences. As women started sharing their own powerful stories in response, Lola re-posted them just as she had the original excerpts. The effect? A feedback loop that drove even more posts and conversation. As the group grew, she enlisted volunteer moderators (today, there are 28, including Lola) and tightened up posting rules for the group. All these strategies ensured that as the community grew, its spirit remained intact. The lesson for brands and businesses: Set out clear rules and guidelines for your community and appoint a leader or group of leaders to enforce them consistently. Keeping those guardrails in place is especially important if you’re asking your community to make themselves vulnerable.
3. Build with people, not for them
This simple formula, says Bailey, is behind today’s most thriving communities. Creating a great one isn’t an act of “dictation or control.” It’s a grass-roots, collaborative effort. “Your job as the leader is to create ways for others to become leaders, contribute and give.” You don’t want to speak at people, advises Bailey. You want to build from the ground up, “passionate person by passionate person.” (Which, by the way, is exactly how Lola built FIN.) The lesson for brands and businesses: Ask your customers what they want, build channels to stay close to them, then listen and learn. The multi-cooker brand Instant Pot has mastered this approach, says Bailey. Its engineers stay close to the brand’s vegan and Indian cooking aficionados — two clusters of people who use the product every single day. Then, because they’re such important stakeholders, the engineers solve their problems.
4. The best communities are about making people feel seen
Originally, says Bailey, Instagram was simply a platform for sharing creative photos and getting feedback from clusters of people who might say “yeah, that’s awesome, keep going.” But that desire —having others communicate that they see some aspect of you creatively or otherwise —drives and remains at the core of the most engaged communities. Ultimately, people gravitate to communities because there is something about them that their current cluster of people doesn’t appreciate, or that they don’t feel comfortable talking about with them, and to fill that gap they need to reach beyond that original cluster. The lesson for brands and businesses: Figure out the thing people wish they could have more conversations about, then create a safe place for them to do just that.
5. Measure the success of your community by the amount of people who return again and again
People who come together once and then never convene again don’t make a community, says Bailey. By definition, communities are groups that keep showing up for one another, and build meaningful relationships in the process. Like the people who return to Lola’s Facebook group day after day, they’re the heart and soul of every successful community. The lesson for brands and businesses: After you figure out what your audience cares about, double down on it if you want to improve community retention. Last, but definitely not least: what you care about and what they care about aren’t necessarily the same. You care about selling your product, but the people in your community care about their problems. If you focus on the conversations they’re having around their problems (conversations they maybe can’t have anywhere else)— and on how your offering can help solve them, you just might build a sticky community — and a robust business.
Want to hear more from Lola and Bailey? Check out our full hour-long conversation on The Digital Campfire Download here.
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Additional reporting by Cara Straus.