By Jen Yip
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen or received hundreds of Zoom links from friends, acquaintances, investors, startups, small business owners, gyms, athletes on Instagram, celebrity chefs, startups, etc. to join virtual events, including workouts, cooking demos, dance-offs, happy hours, and concerts. I could literally fill every hour of my day with free virtual events. In this new reality, where the face-to-face connections we crave are replaced by gatherings on teleconferencing apps, many of us find ourselves thrust into the uncharted waters of Virtual Community Organizers.
Virtual spaces accommodate communities in surprisingly wonderful ways, but fall short of enabling some of our most basic social instincts around community. By being attuned to the ways space shapes our behavior, we can use technology to create spaces that accommodate the rich spectrum of human interactions.
For all of the community curators, event organizers, and hosts who find themselves adjusting to this new reality, I’m offering some advice – inspired by the events I organize In Real Life (IRL) – on how to build virtual communities.
Borrowing from some relevant lessons I’ve learned from community building in physical spaces, I think it’s particularly important for organizers of virtual communities to:
Curate event attendees
Facilitate intros with some context
Set expectations for attendance and participation
Direct traffic and conversation
Ask for feedback during an event
I’ll elaborate on each of these below, with the (rather large!) caveat that I’m still in the process of shaping my own habits.
1. Virtual events still benefit from curation
Physical spaces lend themselves to curation. I have 8 seats around my dining room table, which limits the number of people I can invite to dinner. Other physical event venues have costs associated with renting space, chairs, AV equipment, food and drink. The physical constraints of a space impose a forcing function on organizers to choose their guests carefully.
The new tools to host virtual events make it easy and nearly free for organizers to be inclusive -- but this isn’t an excuse to forgo curation.
Think back to the events you’ve found most valuable in-real-life (IRL). Content may be what draws you to the event, but the impression you leave with is very much shaped by the people you meet. When I organize a community event with content, I hold myself to the bar of ensuring the experience isn’t the same as if I were to watch a video on YouTube. Communities aren’t built around passive consumption. They’re built when you, as the organizer, treat ‘events’ as moments to get out of the way and let great people meet each other. A successful event is one where your community members start conversations they look forward to continuing after the event.
Invite people who have enough in common with each other that they will want to get to know each other. Just as IRL, curate your guest list to include people who should meet because they can be helpful to each other given their overlapping interests, passions, curiosities, or experiences.
Even if it doesn’t cost you anything to add more people, you should think of your ‘space’ as a room you want to fill with the right people. Borrowing from best practices of an in-person event, curate your guest list and be cognizant of the optimal group size for achieving your intended purpose.
2. Set expectations for attendance and participation
When I organize offline events, I communicate an expectation that the guest list will be highly curated. Attendees need to register before the event, there’s usually a wait list, and last-minute cancellations are discouraged.
At the event, I set rules for interaction: events are off-the-record to encourage open discussion (no blogging, no tweeting), and participants are free to raise their hand to ask questions at any time.
Norms haven’t yet been established for virtual events, so community organizers need to set explicit expectations around the invite process, attendance, and interaction with presenters or fellow participants.
I’ve created a list of questions here to help you think through expectations that you may want to set before, during, and after an event.
3. Facilitate intros with context
Facilitating intros in virtual spaces is something I’m still struggling with. This week my friend Minn Kim hosted an Icebreaker, a virtual block party that facilitates intros between new people. Run the World has a similar feature where hosts can match participants for 1:1 conversations. I enjoy meeting new people, but the matching experience feels like speed dating. Being set up with a stranger isn’t the way I’d normally meet new people IRL.
At in-person events, I’ll typically start a conversation with someone I know and if others drift over to join us, the appropriate intros will be made. Or, if I’m hosting the event, I’ll make it a point to introduce people and set context for why I think they should meet. Once I introduce people, I can even walk away and often, they’ll continue chatting with each other.
Instead of relying on a platform to match participants for 1-on-1 conversations, I’d love to have the ability to facilitate intros between people I know in a virtual space – and it’d be even better if other participants could do the same.
Some ideas to consider around facilitating intros in virtual spaces:
Should participants write profiles/ complete an introductory survey to share with other guests during the event registration process?
Should participants introduce themselves to everyone when they arrive at an event? Is there a format for intros? If so, what about folks who arrive late?
Will you, as the organizer, be responsible for facilitating intros between guests during the event?
Do you set context for an introduction that’s only relevant to a couple of participants with the entire Zoom room present? Or do you facilitate intros over private chat?
Will there be breakout groups? Will people choose their own groups or be assigned to one?
How do people exchange/share contact info if they want to stay in touch after an event (eg. shared Google sheet for contact info, emailing the host, etc.)?
Has anyone found a way for hosts to help guests meet each other in ways that more closely mimic organic, IRL introductions?
4. Direct traffic
I’ve hosted several virtual happy hours this week and as the host, I feel a lot more pressure than I would at an in-person happy hour.
As the host of a virtual happy hour, you’re at the hub of the discussion and it’s your job to direct communications. Anytime someone speaks, it’s one person broadcasting to everyone. Every word you utter is heard by everyone else.
By contrast, given the boundaries of a physical space, a conversational voice will only travel a few feet. This imposes a natural limit to the number of people involved in a single conversation at a given time. In-person happy hours tend to break into several conversation threads among 2-3 people each.
One of the tools I want in a virtual space is a way to organically mix the two types of interaction. I haven’t experimented with Zoom breakout rooms but I wish you could easily slide in and out of small group conversations in a happy hour without one person having to direct traffic. Paul Davison and Rohan Seth are building a platform called “Clubhouse” that enables simultaneous side conversations. But until this exists, as an organizer of a virtual community, it’s your job to direct traffic, make sure everyone feels included, and keep the conversation rolling.
5. Ask for feedback during, not just after, an event
I recently completed my first live Zoom workout. The instructor whipped through the first circuit and I found myself unable to keep up. It wasn’t totally his fault that he misestimated the timing since many of us had our videos off. The instructor did ask for feedback – but only at the end of the class-- at which point, several of us chimed in to say the class felt rushed.
As the organizer and host of virtual events, I’m sympathetic. In virtual spaces, it’s more difficult to take the pulse of the audience. In real life, we rely on audio and visual cues like laughter, applause, the sound of people shuffling restlessly in their seats, or the sight of people texting on their phones to give us insight into whether an audience is delighted or bored.
When you host a virtual event, the lack of audio and visual feedback from your audience is disconcerting. In a virtual room, your audience will probably have their mics on mute unless they need to speak.
“A lot of laughter during our virtual meetings happens on mute. It’s kind of sad. You can see people laughing but you don’t get the emotional high that comes from hearing that communal joy.” - Justina Lai
Television producers use synthetic laugh tracks in their programs for precisely this reason -- hearing other people laugh actually keeps us emotionally engaged. And, if the content being presented isn’t engaging, it’s easy for you to covertly turn your attention to other open windows. It’s possible to completely lose an audience in a virtual event. Leaving a physical event means you actually have to get up from your seat and head to the door. In a virtual event, with no comparable social pressure to stay, leaving is as simple and stealthy as closing the Zoom app.
Both Facebook Live and Run the World let audience members send feedback to content creators and event organizers through emojis. But relying on this form of intentional signaling absent of other ambient cues makes it more difficult to determine how engaged the audience is.
There’s a greater and more frequent need for verbal check-ins in virtual spaces. As online spaces evolve, we may see more tools like Dory to capture feedback from an audience. But until we create more nuanced feedback tools to replace the audio and visual cues we’ve come to rely on IRL, remember to pause and ask for feedback during -- not just after -- a virtual event.
In conclusion…
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us”
- John Culkin
The ‘spaces’ in which we gather will change the way in which we interact. Space influences our interactions, in the same way that our language influences our thoughts.
As community organizers, we can optimize existing technologies to build and strengthen relationships by:
Curating our virtual communities despite the lack of physical constraints, both in terms of geography and scale
Facilitating intros to nurture ‘community’ rather than deliver a passive consumption experience
Setting and communicating expectations for safe, productive, and engaging interactions
We can also drive conversation about the ways in which virtual spaces can accommodate a fuller, richer spectrum of ways we socialize offline. Even if we, as community organizers, are not the ones building these tools, we’re on the forefront of realizing their limitations.
My personal wishlist for technology to build virtual communities include:
New features to catalyze fortuitous encounters or enable friends to facilitate intros between friends
More ways to accommodate fluid social interactions -- not only one-to-many in the same room, but in freeform groups that expand and contract depending on the participants’ interest in the conversation at hand
Creative ways to signal our pleasure, displeasure, curiosity, or confusion
I'm excited about how technology will evolve to address challenges in community building, and create new opportunities to deepen our relationships with our most cherished communities.
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Thank you to David King, Ralph Lin, Jonathan Lai, Minn Kim, Justina Lai, Alizeh Iqbal, Jeremy Carr, and Leon Lin for contributing thoughts and feedback to this piece.