The Open Org Community: How & Why We Launched It

"Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much” -Helen Keller

Hello Folks!

Slightly different format to this month's Open Journal, but still with a core focus on what we got up to in the last month. March was HECTIC! We...

• Kicked-off a Fractional Bootcamp ?
• Launched Peoplemetrics.fyi out of beta to the wider world ??
• and also opened the doors to The Open Org Community... and I want to use this month's Journal entry to just talk about why we did it, but also how we approached it too in case it's useful to anyone ??

What Have We Done?

When we launched Open Org we always knew building a community around our movement was key to our success. One of the biggest takeaways from our User Research with People Leaders was that they not only needed the tools & frameworks to help take their organisations from Opaque to Open, they also needed the peer-support around them. That fed our thinking around our cohort-format; taking folks on a journey together, learning with and from each other. Our idea was to transition folks who did our programmes into a Slack community as Alumni afterwards, building slowly, but intentionally.

It worked well, but we made a call early in 2024 to open up that Slack community to the wider world, making it accessible not only to those folks who joined one of our programmes but to progressive People Pioneers from all over the world.

The result? ??

We now have an incredible, paid, members-only community which we are growing steadily that will eventually be capped at 500 paying members. (See below for why ??)

Why Have We Done It?

Simple. We spoke to so many awesome 'people people' from all over the world who filled us with so much energy with their support for our cause and what we were trying to do with Open Org. But so many were restricted from joining our programmes due to budget or time zone.

We could see we had a global community there waiting and wanting to be part of this movement, but we weren't giving people an accessible way to enter.

How Have We Done it?

This was important for us to think about. As much as we want to make this accessible to folks, both ?? John Faulkner-Willcocks and I have been part of way too many Slack Communities that have boasted about being in the 10's of thousands of members, only for them to be overwhelming on notifications, and lacking in actual value. So we decided on two things...

1. This will be a paid community (￡20p/m, rolling- no commitment)
2. This will be capped at 500 members

We felt both of these will help ensure that our community stays intimate, engaged, and of high value to those in it. We also want to make sure we can be front & centre, present and delivering as much value as we can to our members. That's hard to do in a 10k-person community.

Some things we did before launch...

?? Comms - We had 50 Alumni members in our community already. We made sure to talk to them about the changes first, explaining plans and context

?? Design - We took the time to think about what 'great' looked like for us in a small, intimate, paid community. See below for an idea of what that looks like right now

?? Waitlist & Onboarding- We wanted to build a waitlist, so we could do our best job at making sure the right folks joined, and were onboarded in the right way.

What's It Look Like Now?

This may well evolve, but right now we've got some really awesome core offerings that are working well to date. High level:

• We're nearing 150 members onboarded already ??, with more coming
• We welcome each member with a few quests ??♂?, and an offer to connect 1:1 with us if they'd like to come say hi
• We bring in monthly, paid guest speakers. We've already had Thomas Forstner of Juro , and have Henry Stewart ?? of Happy Ltd coming up too, as well a long list of awesome speakers to take us through to at least November
• We put on monthly community roundtables; upcoming topics include aligning & influencing leadership, and navigating pay transparency.
• We'll run Quarterly #BuildInPublic events, our first one approaching on 17th April. We wanted to inject a bit of our Open Org DNA in here, and nothing gets better than getting folks together to help contribute to building resources for the rest of the People Community.

Our first #BiP event will see us build an Open People Manager Playbook. Details here

• On top of that, John & I are keen to make sure we are present and available to all members as much as possible to help them with anything big or small. One of our community values (We have 3) is 'Give Back Generously', immortalised by our Ted Lasso emoji on Slack. We want to lead from the front on giving what we can to our members.

Can I Join?

You bet. See more details here. But we want to be super transparent (obvs) about who this is and isn't for. This might not be the community for you, and that's cool.

Join if:

? You believe the world of work can be better; more open, more transparent

? You're in a People or Talent role

? You believe quality beats quantity with communities (We'll cap at 500 members intentionally)

? You resonate with the challenges seen by startup people & talent teams, often under resourced, lonely, and reliant on external help

? You're prepared to give back generously. This is one of our community values and so far it's been upheld incredibly by those who have joined

? You're a fan of Open Org, and want to join in with this movement, but can't do a programme, or company certification right now.

Don't Join if:

? Transparency, Open-Source and Trust is 'meh' to you

? You have all the resources you need in your role

? You prefer the value you get from larger, free communities

To the 150+ folks who have already joined, we are LOVING seeing this community grow & interact. It's just the start though, and we're new to this, so no doubt there'll be learnings along the way... a few learns from me so far for others who might set one up one day ...

?? Go for Quality, not quantity. Communities that sell 1000's of members as a benefit doesn't work (for me at least)

?? Go paid. Many have said it won't work. It is. We're not trying to get 100k paid members. We're capping at 500. Engagement stays high, and you attract the people who really align to each other

?? Connect with a common thread. There's so many communities out there. Go niche, find out what binds folks together, and lean into that. For us thats workplace transparency.

?? Be Present, over-index on value. We want to keep this small enough to be able to still help, comment, ideate with the folks who are members here. You need to be intentional with spending time 'in' the community you build

Excited to see how things unfold over the coming months! ??

Let's go Open Org ! ??