What makes a Facebook group “off the charts” active 👩🏻‍💻 Lindsay Russell, Facebook

“Every party needs a host. Every team needs a coach. It's no different online than it is in our real world communities.” - Lindsay Russell

At Facebook, Lindsay Russell was a part of the team that used data to identify, validate and supercharge the company’s biggest community building investments to date.  

In their research on what makes a Facebook group active, even vibrant, Lindsay. and her team realized that successful groups had one clear commonality: a remarkable admin. These admins were spending hours every day running the platform's most engaged groups, where users were talking about everything from infertility and miscarriages, to gender politics in Nigeria, even dog spotting and cruise-going. 

That core insight led Lindsay and her team to spearhead a novel effort within Facebook’s walls: investing in the community of power admins who were essential to the product’s success. If the groups team wanted to supercharge their product, they’d need to supercharge these power admins–empowering more of them to fulfill core tasks for their groups. With the help of power admins, Facebook groups would affect more people and sustain itself longer than the product and marketing Facebook teams at HQ could have managed on their own.

In this episode of the “Get Together” Podcast, we sat down with Lindsay to learn more about her experience spearheading Facebook’s big pivot towards supporting communities. What can we learn about building successful groups from her research?  What investments helped community leaders spark and stoke their communities? Tune in for more.

👋🏻Say hi to Lindsay on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/lindruss

📄See the full transcript

🔎Checkout our case study on Facebook's power admins with lessons from Lindsay and the team that supercharged Facebook Groups.

This podcast was created by the team at People & Company. 

🔥Say hi! We would love to get to know you.

We published GET TOGETHER📙, a handbook on community-building. 

And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

Hit subscribe🎙 and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.