Community Magic, Asset Based Community Development, & Why People Work for Free with Richard Millington

In this episode of Masters of Community, we speak with Richard Millington - Founder of FeverBee. Richard knows a LOT about community, in fact, he has published three books on the topic… in this episode we dive deep into how to create a community, a data driven approach to improving your community and how to design your community strategy. Richard also covers how you can grow engagement, how to create content and how to uncover gaps and opportunities for growth. Richard shares an intriguing approach to creating unique experiences for members by introducing members to experiences specific to where they are in their community member journey as opposed to engaging all members at the same time with the same experience. On top of all this, Richard shares a ton of practical advice, data and insights on community technology, causation versus correlation and how to tie community metrics back to business results. Who is this episode for?: Community Managers! 3 key takeaways: 1. The Community Manager Magic - Richard shares that the true magic of the community manager is their ability to get people to make useful contributions to a community. Richard consults with businesses that want to give out swag or offer some kind of reward… but actually Richard shares that this motivation is often intrinsic for a community member - they want to know they are making a contribution 2. Working for free - Richard believes that a community is a wrapper that motivates people to do things that they would never typically do. Richard states that none of us would go home and plug into a support line for business, but we would all head home and answer dozens of questions for others if we feel like we’re making a difference to people or a cause we care about. 3. Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) - Richard shares that not all community members will be able to make the same contribution. For example, a brand new community member may not be able to write an expert blog post for the community. Instead, Richard urges us to make requests to community members for assets that they will be able to produce based on the stage of their community journey Notable Quotes: 1. “None of us would go home today and then plug into a customer support line to work for free for an organization. But we will go to an online community and answer dozens of questions to help someone else.” 2. “So I think the whole magic of what we do. The real skill in building online communities is being able to persuade every single person to make unique, useful contributions to the group, or at least feel like they can make a unique useful contribution to a group.” 3. “And so often I go to organizations and we talk about how to motivate people to engage in communities. And they start talking about rewards. What can we pay them? What swag can we give them? Or how can we feature them on a billboard or something just like this. But the reality is this is far more subtle, nuanced. Like people don't want their name on a billboard. It's weird. Like if someone offered me to have my face on a billboard in London today, I think probably not that I'm insecure about my face, but it's kind of weird basically, if I can just feel like I'm helping some people in a unique way... that is the most rewarding thing.” Rapid-fire question answers: 1. What book has had the biggest impact on your life? Permission Marketing by Seth Godin and also Endurance by Alfred Lancing 2. If you had a magic wand and could get any data about communities that you can't get today, what data, or what insight would you most want to get? Really clean data that matches buying behavior with member behavioral data 3. What's a go-to engagement tactic or conversation starter that you like to use in your commute? Instead of asking “One interesting thing about yourself?” ask “What is the one thing you did for X?” 4.What's your favorite video game? Counter Strike and chess! 5. Who in the world of the community would you most like to take out to lunch? David, Rachel and Jim from Roundtable and Brian, Erica John and Carrie… you know who you are! 6. What's the community product you wish existed? The “ice breaker” tool that was used at CMX a couple of years back, icebreaker.video which is now: gatheround.com 7. If you were forced to go in house and work on community for one company, what company would you choose? CMX, so I could bring it down from the inside :) 8. What's the weirdest community you've ever been part of? A community for psychopaths... 9. If you were to find yourself on your deathbed today, and you had to condense all of your life lessons into one Twitter-sized piece of advice for the rest of the world on how to live, what would that advice be? Just go and do interesting things. Nothing is ever as good or bad as you think it will be...