A community must have the right shared space, does yours?
For religious people it is a church, mosque or synagogue. For football fans it is the club's stadium. For dieters on slimming programs it could be the village hall every Tuesday night. All communities need a shared space.
In my previous post, I wrote about the importance of community ‘essence’ (the who?, what? and why? of community) and the importance of establishing what this is for your community. In this post, I’m moving on to consider the ‘form’ your community takes, which is made up of two elements: the shared space and shared experience. I’ll focus on the first of these here.
People can worship alone, support their team alone, diet alone, but when they gather with others their experience is enhanced. They feel self-validation, belonging and solidarity. They feel the deep reward and meaning of community.
People can worship alone, support their team alone, but when they gather together with others their experience is enhanced.
These feelings are barely possible without a space to gather together. Which is why shared space is a crucial pillar of the 'form' a community needs for its 'essence' to flourish.
The shared space does not need to be a physical space, it can live online. Wherever it exists, there are principles for shared spaces that make them more conducive to fostering the essence of community.
However, there is a minimum threshold for a space to be 'shared' at all. In the physical world a one person tent cannot be a shared space. Online, an email list cannot be a shared space. You can have a million occupied one person tents or a list of a million people who open every email you send them. In neither case do you have a shared space. So in both cases the essence of community can barely creep into existence.
But as soon as two people step out of their tents and meet in a field, or two email recipients interact on a facebook group, the essence of community takes a great leap forward, because now the form had changed fundamentally. A field and a facebook group do have the potential to be shared spaces. Places where people with the same values, beliefs or interests can gather and interact with each other.
...as soon as two people step out of their tents and meet in a field, or two email recipients interact on a facebook group, the essence of community takes a great leap forward...
Once a space meets this minimum threshold, the next concept to understand is that not all shared spaces are created equal when it comes to their ability to foster community essence. There are four important characteristics spaces must satisfy in order to foster a ‘high essence community’:
- capacity
- dedicated
- encourages connections between people
- facilitates collective activity
The higher capacity your space is, the more it is used exclusively for your community and no other purpose, the easier it is for everyone in it to mix and the more the space allows people to do things together, the more chance you have of creating a high essence community.
When we create communities we want high essence communities. High essence means richly rewarding experiences. The kind of experience that makes people come back, participate more, advocate more and all the other things that can meaningfully contribute to businesses success.
Remember: creating a shared space that scores high on the four dimensions above is smart, because it creates the potential for high essence. But, you are still only working with form. Form cannot create high essence by itself. To create a high essence community you need to do other things which I will talk about in another post.
Robbie
Robbie Hearn
Co-Founder and CEO of Standing on Giants.
Read my white paper 'What is a community and does your business really have one' here.
Standing on Giants empowers businesses to build thriving communities that put customers at the centre of everything they do. If you'd like to find out more about how we could help you build a valuable community, don't hesitate to get in touch.