Our secrets to success in forming an online community in just six gatherings
If you follow our blog or keep up with us on social media, you’ll know this is all we’ve been talking about recently. A few short months ago Matchbox Co-founder Arianna Rehak teamed up with Amanda Kaiser, MBA of Kaiser Insights LLC to create a cohort of over 150 associations to meet bi-weekly over the course of twelve weeks. The goal? Learn, invent, and investigate new ways of networking virtually so that we could all incorporate palpable takeaways into our own communities.
Well, we did the thing. We formed a community we called the “Virtual Networking Incubator” which gathered a total of six times, venturing into the world of strategies to help build personal connections online… while actually building personal connections online. What we created was heartwarming, valuable, and, to put it quite simply, amazing. So, a little over a week ago we hosted Results: A Networking Garden Party in order to share out our valuable findings and reveal how we planted the seed in the first place (that is to say, the steps we took to build our incubator community).
Why network in the first place?
In order to plan for successful networking, it’s so important to continually remind ourselves why we do it. Depending on the community, event, or person, we see a few objectives:
- Creating a feeling of connectedness to a larger community
- Networking to solve a specific problem
- Networking to identify other individuals you are interested in connecting with
Networking, whether in person or virtual, can be such a powerful tool in adding meaning to what you do. However, the fact of the matter is that virtual networking is hard and doesn’t always work. We won’t tip-toe around that. But it’s not impossible; it simply takes care and intentionality to develop (like, say, a garden).
Much of what made our incubator powerful was the transparency we maintained in asking our community to take risks and be vulnerable with us. We had to foster a safe space where our community members could feel comfortable. We wanted to take a cohort from strangers to friends.
When Garden Party panel speakers Arianna Rehak, Amanda Kaiser, and Sze Pak Ng were asked by moderator Reggie Henry to summarize in just one word how they wanted the community to receive the incubator, different pieces of the puzzle were presented. They were, in order, Joy, Generous, and Excitement. Living up to these words meant more than just inventing the incubator; we had to nurture the incubator.
Creating a Safe Space
Establishing Tone
From the very first typeform application, we very strategically wrote any incubator-related copy as if we were speaking to the applicant face-to-face. All emails, and gathering descriptions were intentionally casual and personal. An incubator community member in the Garden Party attendee chat even remarked, “[The emails] were personal…and y’all took a lot of time to connect with people on an individual level as well, so we were more likely to want to pay attention to what you had to say even in ‘mass’ emails.”
Tone matters even before you “step” into the virtual room. Make your space one that people are looking forward to participating in.
Making a ‘Code of Conduct,’ so-to-speak
It was always important to us that the incubator establish boundaries. When venturing into vulnerability, community members must feel protected, or else they will cease to participate. We needed a code of conduct, but not a traditional one. Because that sounded too corporate and harsh for our garden of good ideas.
Our solution? A Golden Rule Haiku, in thirteen words and seventeen syllables. For those who don’t know, Haikus are very simple, brief poems following a pattern of five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Simplicity, in our case, was pivotal to setting up boundaries for our community. With minimal words to express those boundaries, we came up with this:
The Golden Rule Haiku became a sort of mantra, which we read aloud at the beginning of every gathering. It kept us grounded and reminded us why we all made the decision to gather every other week for three months. We even gave the community space to write their own Haikus, which some daringly participated in.
What did these gatherings look like anyway?
The Unofficial Start
We began with what we call an Unofficial Start five minutes prior to the start of the gathering. We would play welcoming music, put an activity on the screen, and greet individuals as they entered the space. Not only did the unofficial start reward the early birds and create excitement around attending on time, but it also served to launch people out of their emails and slack notifications and into the creative space. Two incubator folks shared in the Garden Party chat that they have incorporated the unofficial start into meetings within their own community! It works, we promise.
The Activity
At each gathering we would focus on a different networking strategy, whether it be a concept or an innovative technology. This is where the vulnerability came in, both for the incubator and for us. Why? Because it could flop!
Testing out something new means understanding that it could fail, and that’s okay! We experienced technical difficulties that even threw us off our balance, but just like anything else in this world, online events are not perfect. ‘Mistakes’ are lessons, and our big lesson learned from tech mishaps was the importance of having an extra facilitator present to tend to tech issues while the main facilitator engages with the community.
Our Debrief
What better way to know if a new networking strategy worked than to ask? After each activity, a typeform was sent to those who attended asking for feedback on the activity or technology. That feedback allowed us to narrow down not only the overall effectiveness of each strategy, but the parameters of success.
There is no one size fits all when it comes to networking (or most anything). In debriefing we were able to assess, if the activity flopped and in what circumstances the activity could potentially thrive. Factors of success could include introverted vs. extroverted audiences, bigger groups vs. smaller groups vs. one-to-one, a community already familiar with one another vs. just getting to know each other, and probably more considerations we haven’t even discovered yet!
How will we know if the incubator was successful?
Well, the first indicator is a feeling. The simple feeling of warmth in connecting with a community of people who were strangers a few short months ago. One incubator member remarked in the Garden Party attendee chat, “It was amazing co-learning and networking experience with experts and new and ‘old’ association friends!”
The second indicator is how many personal connections will exceed longer than six months. It is too soon now to gauge our success in this way quite yet, but we look forward to hopefully seeing some long lasting friendships blossom from our little garden.
The last indicator is one we have already seen come into fruition: seeing our strategies being implemented in the communities of our incubator members. Two attendees of the Garden Party already began incorporating unofficial start times into their meetings, and we can’t wait to see how many others find success in the activities we all ventured into together.
Putting together Recipes for Success
If you’re at this point in the article and you are kicking yourself for having missed out on the opportunity to join our incubator, we have good news for you. We have transformed our best activity structures into recipes including ‘ingredients,’ step-by-step instructions, and optional ‘spices’ in order to create your own virtual networking gathering (or dish).
They are all housed in what we call the matchbox kitchen, which we are pleased to announce is now open to the public for perusal. Check them out!
