Community and Corn Dogs: Small-town Parallels to Online Communities

As a community builder, this weekend is one of my favorite weekends of the year where I live. Our small American Midwest town hosts a 5-day citywide festival that (to my nerdy community-focused perspective) showcases an amazing offline parallel to the kinds of online communities we work to build for our employers and customers.

If you haven’t been to a town like mine, I’ll try to set the scene. It’s the kind of place where Main Street is about two blocks long, there’s not a single McDonald’s or Starbucks, and where someone going to visit their neighbor a few streets away might opt to drive their lawn mower instead of taking the car.

With that in mind, I want to explore the parallels between our annual town festival and a successful online community, and what it reveals about online community building.

• On the macro level, we have The Community, the entire city, interacting in centralized areas (e.g., Central Park, Main Street, etc.) through pre-defined programs and activities, united by the common thread that we all enjoy living here and want to see it continue to be a place that thrives and that supports our own individual pursuits and successes.
• Zooming in, there are micro-communities within the larger one. These are the user groups: the gearheads with their Saturday morning classic car show; the sports fans with the softball, baseball, and pond hockey tournaments or 5k run; and the demonstrations from the skateboard club, RC racing club, and the dance studio. ?
• There are dedicated transactional spaces—places where people with something to offer or something they need can connect and exchange resources. Online in forums or blogs, that’s knowledge, best practices, and other collaborations. Here in town, it’s the citywide garage sales, the meat raffle (yes, it’s what it sounds like), and the various fundraisers for local charities.
• Events occur, of course—concerts in the park, pancake breakfasts, family bingo, and so much more. Each of these has something to offer attendees, giving them a relevant takeaway that enhances their success and experience as a member of the larger community.
• Rituals and celebrations. While the entire weekend is a series of repeated annual rituals, there are specific touch points that bring everyone together in a common shared highlight experience, such as the Friday night fireworks or the Sunday afternoon parade.
• Super user programs. Even in our small town, we have power members! Our junior royalty program selects grade-school aged boys and girls to be our community’s ambassadors to the larger metro area throughout the year, and the annual recipient of the community’s “outstanding citizen” award gets a special ceremony and prime placement in the parade.
• Food and drink. As with all good (in-person) community meetups, there are plenty of special items on the menu, from heart-stopping fried fare on the carnival midway to the craft beer tent to the free hot dogs at the fire department open house.

I could go on about the similarities, but what does this example of IRL community illustrate about online community-building? For most of us, this isn’t revelatory, but it’s worth revisiting:

1. It’s intentional. This is an event that has been occurring annually for years. It’s also not the only time our city gathers to celebrate together. Throughout the year, there are opportunities to connect with fellow residents, from the summer farmer’s market to the holiday Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Not everyone participates, of course; even here, there are the people you see every time, the people you only see occasionally, and the people who never show up to anything but who are part of the community nonetheless. All of it, though, is planned intentionally by people who care about the community and who want to bring people together and provide a boost to both sponsors and citizens.
2. It’s transactional. And that's not a bad thing, although it sounds like it would be. Essentially, at every level, there is some kind of exchange taking place. It could be the exchange of goods at garage sales and sponsor tents or the experiential exchange of watching a band or sports team play. Some things (like the fireworks show) are cost centers, while others (the craft beer tent or the business expo) help generate profits for the city or its residents. Some people tirelessly work for days or months straight to make the event possible; others simply attend for just an hour or two and benefit from that work. Whatever their nature or scope, this constant give-and-take knits together the fabric of the event and the community at large.
3. It takes time. In 2019, our town celebrated its centennial. Perhaps a minor achievement by some standards, but still worth observing. The point is that the state of our town today wasn’t achieved overnight; it happened by degrees, with persistence, through a lot of trial and error, enduring much change along the way. We tried things that didn’t work, we repeated things that did, and we celebrated successes and milestones along the way.

All of this contributes to and is the result of the fact that our town isn’t just a town. It’s a community. People know each other here, either directly or through someone else. You run into friends in the grocery store, your car mechanic might be your neighbor, or your kid’s schoolteacher was your pastor’s cousin (or something like that).

So many towns and cities are just collections of buildings and streets that form the background texture for where life happens, rather than having a life and vibrancy of their own. Similarly, so many online forums are simply places where people drop in for a one-time information request posed to the void and answered (maybe) by an anonymous other.

True online community is so much more than just the backdrop for business. When done right, community is where customers thrive through genuine connection and transaction.

Seeing these in-person examples of community in action helps keep me invigorated and grounded in my online community efforts. I want the communities I work on to be places where people recognize each other, where their exchanges bring two-way value, where their participation adds to the greater whole, and where they find they are better off for having joined and engaged than if they had stayed outside or on the sidelines.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I smell funnel cake…

#community #communitybuilding #communitymanagement