Remote Community Management - 5 Lessons from COVID-19

March 12th was a pivotal day for our community.

As our team was carefully monitoring the Coronavirus situation the weeks prior, with the safety of our community members being a top priority, we decided to suspend all in-person activities at Google for Startups Campus Tel Aviv and transition our activity online. 

At the time, we didn’t know how the pandemic would unfold, but one thing was clear: our community was about to go through a major shift - and it was going to require us to be flexible, and think creatively, to continue to engage it successfully from afar.  

Google for Startups Campus: A (remote) home for startup founders

Google for Startups Campus in Israel (one out of 7 Campuses worldwide), brings together all the best resources that Google has for startups, to help them build a great product, business, and team, and has served as the meeting and networking center for the local tech industry since its opening 7 years ago.

Campus is home to hundreds of founders who come to work and connect in our co-working space daily; a myriad of meetups hosted for and by the community, including visitors from the local and global hi-tech ecosystem; plus a state-of-the-art recording studio where leading tech-podcasts are recorded weekly.

One might ask: how do you keep such a thriving community together, connected and engaged, online? 

The new reality inevitably led to a shift in our priorities over the past two months. Here are 5 lessons from my experience managing our community remotely during COVID-19:

Lesson #1: Your community is undergoing a transition? Start by actively listening. 

Our community is large. And large communities - call for communication at scale, along with a vast amount of individual relationships. Realizing we can’t rely on face-to-face interactions, our team worked relentlessly to check in with dozens of our founders personally within the first week of working from home.

These 1:1 check-ins helped us not only understand the individual challenges of our founders, but also see the “bigger picture”; we were able to plan ahead and take measured steps, based on valuable data and conversations.

Yes- conducting individual reach outs at scale could be challenging. In this case, I’d recommend leveraging the power of your team (or “super-users', if you are not working within an organization), to conduct systematic check-ins. This could truly make a difference when it comes to understanding your community’s needs during a time of crisis.  

Lesson 2#: Make your community members’ well-being a priority. Especially now. 

Being a startup founder is not a “walk in the park” and can be lonely, stressful and difficult. With the spread of the new Coronavirus, we saw a whole new set of challenges arise among our community members - as well as the need for a safe space to talk about them. This led us to launching a 5-week long remote program of Founder Coaching groups, with executive coach Oren Hod. 

Three groups (of 7 founders each) gathered weekly to discuss their wellness, resilience and struggles. According to one of the participants, it was highly valuable to “hear other entrepreneurs share their dilemmas and issues”. Another founder said it was powerful ”knowing that I am not alone. For me as someone who just became a member of the campus, these sessions gave me the feeling of a community that I didn't yet have the chance to experience.”

According to one of the founders who took part in the coaching groups, it was powerful ”knowing that I am not alone. For me as someone who just became a member of the campus, these sessions gave me the feeling of a community that I didn't yet have the chance to experience.”

Lesson 3#: Work with partners. 

At Campus, we provide world-leading content and educational programs. Going online had a positive effect in this case: now, we could touch even more startups and support both our immediate community and the wider startup ecosystem amidst the Coronavirus turmoil. 

One such way was working with partners. In Tel Aviv, we decided to partner with valley-based VC Upwest for a virtual Speaker Series hosting global tech leaders, to help founders keep a pulse on the US market in rapidly shifting conditions.

Alongside the individual support we provide our founders via mentoring by industry experts and Googlers, our partnership with Upwest touched upon pressing, wider challenges we've been hearing directly about from our founders. When looking to support your community remotely, collaborating with partners can be a great way to create a broader impact and expand your offering, specifically when it comes to content.

Lesson 4#: No matter the playground- maintaining your community’s energy is key 

This may be the biggest challenge of remote community engagement: how do you keep the energy going? Energy can mean different things to different communities- but it comes down to the sense of belonging and connection your members share, from the individual interactions all the way through major celebrations and challenges shared together.

To maintain that energy remotely, we held a Virtual Community Toast (after all, there's nothing like some alcohol to get people together, right?). In honor of Passover holiday, we sent gift packages to 70+ founders with personal invitations, who joined our virtual celebration gathering. 

When having these kinds of gatherings, setting the spotlight on your community members is key. For us it was focusing on our leading founders and listening to them share what they had learnt, working from home.

“Energy can mean different things to different communities - but it comes down to the sense of belonging and connection your members share.”

Lesson 5#: Rally your community together around a positive cause

One of the highlights during COVID-19 was an initiative led by the inspirational Merav Breslow from our team: a volunteering day where both founders and the campus team distributed 260 food packages to elderly citizens in need. Opportunities like this utilize your community's power towards a joint and positive mission, together - eventually strengthening it from within.

Final Thoughts

Transition can be tough. The Coronavirus created an abrupt and massive transition, globally affecting the way communities engage and behave, requiring us to be flexible and creative in our approach when it comes to community management. By actively listening to your members, addressing their challenges and well-being, working with partners and constantly taking a holistic approach to meeting members' needs, an exciting new type of engagement can be formed, even from far away.