The CX 003: Navigating the Business of Belonging with David Spinks

The CX 003: Navigating the Business of Belonging with David Spinks

Jillian Benbow: Hey everyone, Jillian here and just a heads up that this episode contains enthusiastic language, also known as some explicit language that may not be appropriate for the younger audiences, so grab those headphones and thanks for listening.

Tony Bacigalupo:Our guest today is David Spinks, VP of Community at Bevy, Founder of CMX and the CMX Summit, and author of The Business of Belonging. David, self-explanatory, the name of the book says it all. He is at the absolute forefront of the intersection of business and community, teaching businesses how to do a good job of building community within their culture, within their relationships to their customers, and also helping people who are building communities learn how to do it sustainably. He's got great tips for you, whether you're already running a community in your business, looking to make your community into a better business, and so much more. Let's get into the conversation with David Spinks.

Jillian: Welcome to Community Experience Podcast. I'm your co-host Jillian Benbow.

Tony: And I'm Tony Bacigalupo.

Jillian: Today, we have a fantastic episode for you. We are going to learn the number one mistake to avoid when you're looking to measure your community impact.

Tony: You'll also learn how to identify and engage super members in an authentic way.

Jillian: And we will even learn how a kid with a passion for a Tony Hawk video game became one of the leading voices in the digital community movement. We're learning it all with today's very special guest, David Spinks.

Tony: All right, David Spinks, so psyched to have you on the program. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

David Spinks: Of course, thanks for having me.

Tony: Before we get into all of the other things, I feel like it helps for everyone to have a little bit of a backstory on how you and I actually first came to know each other. You were living in New York City, and I was living in New York City, I was running a coworking space. Tell me how you remember it going down way back when.

David: So long ago. How did I end up in New York City? I feel like I looked at a few different places, and then I remember coming to do a tour in New York City. I forgot how you and I - and maybe someone like introduced us, where they were like, you should check out New York City. This was back when coworking spaces wasn't a thing, like this was the very early days of the concept of coworking spaces. You kind of pioneered this stuff, you and Alex Hillman, basically.

I remember coming and just getting the tour. I was brand new to my professional world. I didn't know anyone. I had just moved to New York City after college. You guys were just super friendly and welcoming and you offered me a desk at the space. I moved in, and that was incredible for me, because like I said, it was beginning of my career. I didn't have any networking that really was a foundation for me to have a place where I could start meeting people. I mean, there are connections, that literally, like in the last couple of weeks, I can still draw back to lines of people that I met back in New York City.

Tony: Get out, really?

David: Yeah.

Tony: That's amazing.

Jillian: That's just a good life tip for people. If you move somewhere new, like find the local coworking scene because you will find community pretty quickly in a coworking environment.

Tony: It's been a long time since then. You saw the example that we were setting at my coworking space in New York City at the time. Since then, I have just been following your journey, and just cheering along the way as I've watched you rocket up to becoming really, I hate using hyperbole, but a thought leader in the intersection of business and community.

I mean, I can't even think of somebody that I would consider more of a thought leader than you when it comes to that intersection of the two. Just to start us off, you're working at Bevy now, VP of Community. Give us just kind of a quick background on Bevy and what it's about, who they work with.

David: Yeah. Bevy started as a community. If you're familiar with Startup Grind, it's one of the largest communities in the world, over 600 chapters around the world for entrepreneurs and startups together, and they needed to solve their own problem. Because if you have 600 local chapters all run by volunteer members of your community, the traditional event tools don't really solve for that problem. You have 600 people using different event tools, your data's scattered, you have no control over the brand and experience. So, they build Bevy to solve their own problem and then ended up turning it into its own business.

And that's what it does, it powers all the events that you want to host for your customers or your community under one platform. You can host now full virtual conferences and virtual events, in-person meetups, and it gives your local chapter leaders the tools they need to run their own local communities. They get their own email lists, their own chapter that people can subscribe to the events, specifically for Chicago or specifically for Dublin.

And you, as the organizer, get to centralize all the data in one place so you can see how many events were hosted, which of your chapters are active or not that active. Just takes a community driven approach to thinking about events. Now we power programs for companies like Facebook and Google and Twitch, and most tech companies that you could think of that are running programs like this, we're working with a lot of them.

Tony: I love that, because first of all, I've dealt with chapter based organizations that are trying to scale, and all of the challenges you've described are extraordinarily common and they really hamper what would otherwise be a really powerful model. I think local chapter-based communities can just be huge for big brands or even for just people getting started. So, I love that, that's something Bevy is supporting. Is that something that Bevy is doing just with larger brands or could I, as just kind of a regular Joe starting up from zero build out kind of a chapter based organization through Bevy?

David: We have a few different programs that allow us to work with some smaller organizations and nonprofits and just support them. Right now, the product is pretty primarily built for the enterprise. Either you're like a scale-up that's growing very quickly ... We've worked with like Product Hunt and a few like very fast growing startups, or larger enterprise, although we are working on more entry-level self-serve options as well to make it easier for people who are just getting started building their community to grow with the platform, so soon enough.

Tony: Yeah. Well, it sounds like I could see, as a community builder, you might aspire to graduate to the point where you would need to engage Bevy’s services.

David: Right. I mean, this is a thing that we're seeing in the community spaces. Over the last 10 years, for the most part, it was looked at as like, okay, we want to launch a community, let's hire a community manager, and this magical being is going to just manage everything and scale it. A lot of the community work was thought of as like the intimate engagement facilitation, talking to everyone. But for companies, especially companies of large status or size building community starts to become a much bigger operational challenge than it is a human challenge in a lot of ways. So, it becomes less about just building engagements and more about, how do you scale up to 600 — or, we power a Google developer groups — over a thousand chapters around the world? Or Salesforce has over a thousand trailblazer chapters, how do you scale up to that? That becomes a process and operational challenge that community builders then have to take on.

Tony: It's a great challenge, a worthwhile challenge to start figuring out how to get good at if you're a company. We're going to talk a little bit about your book in a little bit, and we'll get more into some of the strategies and some of your tips and guidance on that, which I'm sure will be invaluable. But first, I wanted to just help everybody get a little more background on you and ask you about CMX and how that came about, and a little bit of just your story of why you felt driven to dedicate yourself so ardently in this direction.

David: Yeah, so CMX is the community for community professionals. We have tens of thousands of community professionals now that gather in our online spaces. We run an annual conference called CMX Summit. We developed training, research, basically anything that we have found that community professionals in the community industry needs to be successful. We've been working on that for over seven years. Yeah, we were acquired by Bevy two and a half years ago, and that's when we combined forces. CMX just came out of my own experience of being a community professional and an entrepreneur.

Back when we met, I had come out of a community job. My first job out of college, it was a community manager, and then I was running this site called Blog Dash. It was like a huge community for bloggers. That's when I joined New York City. If you think back then, community management and the idea of business building community wasn't very common. It wasn't an established profession. A lot of companies didn't really understand it.

If you told someone you were a community manager, they'd say, "Oh, so you manage a Facebook page?" And then you'd have to explain for the next half hour what you actually do. We kicked off CMX as like a side project. We had 300 people that came out to that conference from all over the world.

We put the whole thing together in six weeks. So, 300 was like a huge number for us. Everyone who came was a practicing community professional. They walked in the room and would look around and you'd see the look of surprise on their face as they started talking to people and realizing like, everyone in this room is building community and understands community, and not just like the social media management misunderstanding, but like, no, they get what you're doing. It really felt like one of those magical community moments of getting people together who didn't have a space that was designed for them before, and then watching them all enter this space together, it was just this like, incredible vibe.

And I was like, oh shit, this is what I should be doing in my career. We ended up winding down that last startup, sold off the product and assets, and I switched my full-time focus over to CMX.

Jillian: It's funny because I kind of watched this happen from the other side. I have not been to an in-person CMX summit. I have participated virtually, and I'm always insanely jealous of everyone going to Portland or wherever and meeting up for that exact reason, because most people you tell them, oh, I work in community or I'm a community manager, and they're like, either they think you work at like a assisted living home, like a physical community manager, which is still a lot of the job listings, or they think, they're like, oh, you're a Facebook moderator.

I'm just like ... Tony knows one way to get me really pissy really fast is call me a moderator, because it's just like, I'm not a moderator. But actually, just for you, I actually got my last two community roles through CMX, through the Job Board, which I know is kind of like an aside of the actual community. I think I was in the first year of the professional group as well because my friend was selling it. He'd joined your team for a while to help with-

David: Oh, and CMX Pro. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I do remember that.

Jillian: Yeah. It's fun to talk to someone who started it, having been there on the other side.

David: Love to get you to the in-person event next. I'm hoping next year, we're really pulling for bringing everyone back for a big ... oh, it's going to feel so good when everyone's back in person. I can't wait.

Jillian: Well, and just what you were saying about having all the community professionals in the room who get it all together, just that hyper-focus, I can't even imagine the energy there.

David: Oh my god. Well, it's also kind of cheating. Imagine bringing together—we had a thousand people at our last in-person event, a thousand people, whose job it is to build community that are all very empathetic. They're always including everyone, like nobody was left out in that conference. No one was alone in a corner. If you stood alone, someone was guaranteed to walk over to you and be like, "Hey, what's up? What are you doing? Tell me more about yourself." Yeah. It's a hack.

Jillian: It's almost like a conference for camp counselors. It's like, okay, ropes course at nine, like we've got plans.

Tony: I remember, I was at an informal gathering of a bunch of coworking space owners early on. And it was, I don't know, maybe 40 of us. At the end of the day, we had all these chairs out and some food and all these things. And they were like, all right, well, that's it. Let's just clean it up and then we'll head off to whatever. I looked up, and in five seconds, all the chairs were stacked, the dishes were clean. Everybody was just ready to help tidy up the place. It's nice to be in a room full of professionals who are there to help each other.

What an identity thing, having people in the same room who maybe aren't used to being in the same room with other people who can really understand their story, which unto itself is a really valuable community lesson. Just asking yourself, are there people out there who haven't had a real avenue to hang out with people like them is so great.

David: That's the opportunity. You find a group of people who are isolated, who don't have a place to express an identity that they have, and you give them that space where their identity is accepted, it's made into the default, it's made into the norm, it's even celebrated. It can be life-changing for people.

Tony: Yes, I love it. I love it. That really, often it comes from your own motivation, you, as a person, saying, well, I feel alone. I have an identity, but I don't know where to go. Maybe you find something that kind of approximates it, you find something, other adjacent communities, or you might find other people who are saying the same things, and that's where you start getting the first few members of what would become your new community.

David: Yeah, absolutely. If you don't have a community and you're looking for it, you can just build it. That was like my hack my whole life. If I didn't fit in, it's like, well, I'm just going to build a community because he can't exclude me from the community that I've built myself. I don't think I've met a community builder that didn't have some sort of background in their childhood of feeling super lonely and excluded and isolated. I think it's what drives most of us to do this work.

Tony: Facts.

Jillian: Yeah. I remember that part of your book when you're talking about — and I know we'll talk about the book more in depth later, but just as an aside, just like growing up and then you created this, I think video game community. It was over my head, the topic. I was like, I don't know what this is, but okay. Just, so —

David: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, best game ever.

Jillian: That's right. And like assigned, I remember a signed pudding.

David: Yeah.

Jillian: That was the highlight.

David: That's right. Tony Hawk signed a pudding pack for our community, and he was very confused, but he did it.

Jillian: Aw, which makes it even better. Once communities start having their own, like inside jokes, you know you've made it, but I love that, that was kind of your origin story with community. It was like, I love this game, other people like this game, let's make a place to talk about it, and then fast forward to signed pudding packs.

Tony: What I find interesting is just we've all seen community grow and grow and grow online, and in different ways in person over the last 10 years or so since you and I first met 11 years ago, and we've seen this dichotomy showing up of well, there's people building communities, but they're not really businesses, or are they? There's brands and bigger companies that are dipping their toe in community, but how many times is a company saying community, but it's not really? It leads to this conversation about, what role does community play in business? We've already touched on this really important notion of, don't call me a moderator, don't think of me just as a Facebook group manager.

And you've been championing this for years, this idea that community should be regarded as more than just kind of another piece of the marketing department. Can you tell us a little bit about that and maybe a little background of how that kind of led you to the book?

David: Yeah, I mean, it's been a theme of my whole career. It's a constant struggle for community professionals to not just define what they do, but to measure the impact of it and tie it back to real business goals. It's this weird situation where you have market norms and social norms clashing in a way, or there's a tension, and that's kind of the tension that I wanted to tackle in the book. I found that a lot of community books would either only focus on non, not professional, or like not profit-driven communities, or they talk a little bit about profit-driven, but they tiptoe around the actual measurement and bottom line and revenue part of it and still try to include the people running knitting circles and run groups, because they wanted to talk about all communities.

I really wanted to lean into, what does it mean for a business to build community, and what does that tension look like? Even in the title, The Business of Belonging, makes some people feel uncomfortable. Even when I first thought of it, I was like, ooh, that's like there's tension in it, because do the words business and belonging go together? Should you make a profit on people finding a sense of connection and community? This is a challenge that we have and taking social norms where people are doing things because they have intrinsic motivation and they're passionate about it and they want to contribute and they care about others, and tying it into market norms where it's more transactional and revenue-driven and you have to have these kinds of outcomes.

My take on it is that you have to make sure that your community’s sustainable. So whether that means you are a indie community entrepreneur and you're just building something, it could be a simple Facebook group. I've seen so many people start Facebook groups that blow up, have millions of members, and it's still just one person running it all day, every day, not even getting paid for it, running like massive moderator programs, running a huge community, but because there's a tension of not wanting to monetize community, they struggle to get resources, they're spread thin, and then they just completely burn out, and then the community fades or just doesn't have sustainable leadership.

Regardless of the community you have to build, you always have to think about like, how do we make this financially sustainable? From the business side of things, I think it's a great thing if more businesses are community-driven, if they lead with empathy, if they lead with, how do we serve people and create connection and belonging for them. If they're using it inauthentically and saying, Hey, we're going to give you community, and they're just using it to sell product and they're not actually building real inclusive, meaningful community for people, then that's bullshit, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about companies that are building real community, real value.

If you think about what a business is, is just creating value for people, right? You build a product to give them value. You create marketing to give them value, and you hope that you created enough good marketing that they trust you. Well, there's no greater way to motivate someone to trust you as a brand than to give them a true sense of belonging, and to say, don't just trust us, we're creating a network, a community, a space where now you can form relationships, you can get support, you can grow your career here. That's, to me, the ultimate form of trust, and that's where the massive opportunity lies for businesses to invest in community.

Jillian: It's such an opportunity too, because I mean, I know I have worked for large communities, and as a business, it's often hard as a community professional to show the ROI outside of vanity metrics. I've had to fight to keep communities before, and it's sometimes hard to convince people who are not — and then maybe that's their first mistake, but they're not in the community enough to see the value outside of the profits and the losses, if you will. Because it is, it's expensive to, as a large company, to run a community and to do it well. You have to invest money into resources in many ways, right?

Besides the platform, you need professionals doing programming and growth and whatnot, and it's very easy to then take that for granted and be like, well, why should we keep paying for this? The community’s big and fine and it's free, so what are we doing? Let's monetize it more, and then they ruin it, unfortunately.

David: Yeah. Look at it from the CMO's perspective or the CEO's perspective, they have a board, they have shareholders that they're accountable to. And at the end of the day, they have a certain amount of money that they have to spend. They have more money come in than goes out, and they have this much money, and within that pool of money, they have to prioritize, where does this money go? Does it go to marketing, to sales, to product, to HR and people? Does it go to community? Does it go to any of these different things?

If they're looking at it from a data perspective, which they will — and they have to, because data is what they're accountable to at the end of the day to those shareholders and to that board — then they're going to look and say, okay, well, marketing has a clear ROI. We know if we put in this much money, we're generally seeing this much out. They see that for sales, they see that for product, they see that for operations, and then it's a community, and see, okay, well, there's a lot of events happening and there's a very engaged forum. It seems like there's a lot of activity. Those are the metrics I'm seeing, but how does this add up to revenue? Yeah, I believe it does. That seems all good. I'm a human, I like community. I like connection. That's probably having a positive impact for us. But I don't know if I put in another million dollars, what I'm going to get out. I don't know what impact it's actually having on the bottom line. Yeah, I trust that it's having an impact, but I can make a logical decision on how much more to invest. So, I'm almost always, in that situation, going to invest less in that and invest more in the things that I can measure.

That's where community teams need to get to, is to say like, yes, believe that community is important. Yes, trust us. We all believe it is, but I'm going to now put the numbers behind it that show how community’s actually impacting the bottom line.

Tony: How can we dive deeper on that? What would be something somebody could do to start that process if they're not necessarily feeling great about how far they've come in terms of measuring that impact? What are the easiest wins?

David: I think it's important to start with the business objective you're trying to hit in mind, which is not how most companies do it. They usually start with community engagement and then they try to figure out what the business value is. So, they just launch a group or they launch a forum, or they launch an event program or some sort of community experience, and then afterward, they say, great, is this driving retention? Is this driving growth? Which is backwards. I think you need to start with a business objective and use that as a constraint to define what kinds of community programs you build.

Because the beauty of community is that there are countless ways that you can build community. You can host a big conference, you can do small meetups, you can launch a big forum. You can start a WhatsApp group. You can start a text thread, you can do a council. You can do small discussion groups virtually. You can do all of these different formats to connect people with each other, because that's — at the end of the day, all community is, is connecting people to each other so they can help each other and form relationships.

There's countless ways you can do that. Which ways should you focus on? You should use the business objective as a constraint to define the kinds of community programs you run. For example, if your business goal is to drive new leads or new revenue or marketing metrics, then there are some specific kinds of community programs that are going to be pretty effective at driving marketing impact. You can do a crowdsource content program where you source articles and blog content and social media content from your community members and your customers.
You could launch an ambassador program where you give people an official status as an ambassador, and you build a community for those ambassadors. You can launch a forum, but now, because you know marketing is a focus, you're really going to optimize for SEO, you're going to make sure it's all publicly available. You're going to make sure that people want to come to it, even if they're not a customer, so you're probably going to choose a topic that's more broad than just people who use your product today.

Just by saying, “okay, I'm trying to hit marketing goals,” that's already defined the kinds of community programs you're going to run. Now you can apply this same thing too, if it's support, right? We have a lot of customers, but it's costing us a lot of money and it's not efficient right now for people to get answers to their technical questions. Great, let's launch a community focused on support. If you do that, now you're looking at building a support forum. Your metrics are going to be things like, how quickly do people get answers and do they get the right answer?

You actually don't want a lot of responses in a support forum. You want the right response as efficiently as possible. If there's a lot of responses, that might mean that people aren't getting the answers they need. The products are different, the tools, the metrics, the people that you hire to do it are different. Because some people are really good at running events, some people are really good at running technical forums. So, you start with a business objective in mind, and then you design the community programs in order to achieve those business objectives. The framework you use for those business objectives I share in the book, it’s called the SPACES model.

This is a framework we developed at CMX. It's by far, our most popular model because it breaks down this nebulous concept of community into what are the specific business impacts that it can have, what are the objectives it can drive? SPACES just stands for support. You can think of customer support, where people are answering questions for each other. Product is where people are sharing feedback and ideas that you can use to improve your product. Acquisition is driving marketing and sales. Contribution is where you have a marketplace or platform that people are contributing content or products or something to. You can think Airbnb or Lyft or eBay. You want your contributors to be successful so you have a contributor community program. Engagement is customer retention. By engaging your customers around their interests, they're more likely to stick around as customers and spend more. Then finally success, helping your customers teach each other, provide training for each other, help them be more successful at using your product and more successful in their careers.

All right, so SPACES is support, product, acquisition, contribution, engagement, and success. If you really hone in on which one, maybe two of those, if you're just starting out, just focus on one or two and do it really well, design your community programs for those objectives, it will be much easier and more efficient to be able to measure the business impact.

Jillian: That's so smart. I think it's also really good advice for the solopreneur out there that everyone ... Community is very hot right now. Everyone's like, if you don't have a community, you need one. And so many people are like, okay, I feel obligated to do this and I have no idea what I'm doing. Using that guardrail to determine, well, one, does it even make sense in my business, and two, what should it focus on? Because not everybody needs the digital community platform, like what we have and like what you have with your paid membership.

A support community, honestly, is one of my favorite. Bless whoever came up with that idea. Anytime I have a problem with my phone or an app and it's like, I'm going to ... You just go and get the answers from humans that know the workarounds. It's fantastic.

Tony: Orienting around a business outcome just makes it inherently easier to know exactly what success looks like because it's baked in right from the start. I imagine for a company that's already dealing with a community, that's running a community, it might give them an opportunity to step back and reevaluate why they're doing it. Have they picked the correct audience, the audience that's most effective and most useful to them? And not just the audience, but the medium as well.But I almost wonder how many times is somebody saying the word community when they really mean audience or followers or customers or subscribers, how does a company not fall into that trap? How do they really make something that's legitimate and authentic that really taps into the real value and potential of true community?

David: Yeah. I mean, for one thing, actually, I used to get really frustrated with companies calling things a community when it was an audience. I've kind of reframed my thinking on that, in that it's not even like a battle worth fighting. Because in every group, you're going to have a spectrum of people who are engaged at all different levels. If you take like the Airbnb community, let's say Airbnb says, well, we're talking to our community. In their IPO prospectus, I think they said community like over a hundred times in that prospectus.

I remember people being like, well, is Airbnb really a community? It's like, well, it depends who you're asking about. If it's a guest who uses it casually, they probably don't feel a very strong sense of community. If you talk about a host, yeah, they're starting to open up their home to people, they use it more regularly, it's a source of income. Maybe they are more engaged and they feel a bit of a sense of community. If you talk about their superhosts. Yeah, those probably, they probably feel a very strong sense of community, and there's over a million superhosts in that program now. Then you go all the way to like employees.

Well, yeah, employees are part of the Airbnb community and we tend to feel a strong sense of community in the place that we work. I wouldn't say like, oh, you have an audience or you have a community. I would just say like, you have a group of people that you're engaged with where there opportunities to engage people more deeply to connect them to each other, to put them in a position of leadership and give them the reigns, give them the keys to be able to build in the community. How do you build with those people? That's how you start to deepen the sense of community within the audience.

It's not about converting it from audience to community. You can look at it as a spectrum. All groups of people are in a spectrum of community from, let's say one through 10. The random group of people waiting for the bus on the street, they're probably like a one out of 10 in terms of community. But if someone in that group had a heart attack in that moment and they all had to rally around that person and work together to get that person help and get them to a hospital, that group of people will feel a real strong sense of community. They go from one to 10 real quick, right? It's this fluid thing. It's an organic thing.

I try to just not even define it and just think about like, how do we enhance the sense of community for this group of people? And so how do companies do that authentically? It has to start with talking to the people that you're trying to build a community for. I look at it as like a Venn diagram. You have your business objectives in one circle, and then you have your members' goals, your members' objectives in the other circle, and they have to overlap. Because you might be a business and you might say like, all right, we want to launch a support forum to provide our customers a better support, but if you don't have members who are organically motivated to be answering questions in a support forum, that support forum is never going to work.

If you want to launch an ambassador program, but no one cares about your product or your business, that ambassador program's not going to work. You have to design your community programs in that Venn diagram, where it overlaps of like, here's what's important to our business and here's where that aligns with what's important to our members and where we're organically seeing people want to be involved, want to take action, want to be a leader. Then you empower those people to take those actions. You make it easier for them. You give them an official role and resources and status that encourages them to want to contribute in greater and greater ways.

Tony: That brings up actually a really interesting point, which is, if you are not already engaged with your audience, with your customers or whichever prospective kind of community members that you're looking at, you're not necessarily ready to build a community yet. You don't want to open up a new forum and expect people to just show up and start creating value for each other if you don't have a starting point. In fact, you could end up doing a lot of damage because those people are going to start talking to each other about you and you won't be able to control it, and you might not like what they have to say.

First of all, I guess, how do you recognize if you might be falling into that trap and what do you do to kind of set yourself up to avoid that and to get yourself in a more successful place?

David: Yeah. I mean, if anyone's telling me that they're launching a forum or a group or message board, my first question would be, how many of the potential members you're hoping will participate there have you gotten on the phone with or taken out to coffee? A lot of the time, it's zero, right? You just have to actually talk to the people that you're trying to build for. I'd recommend starting small. Before you launch a forum or a group, you can do a lot to build relationships and see the foundation of community before you ever open up a space for people to gather.

If I'm opening up a new restaurant, I'm not just going to like open it up and open the doors and hope people just start showing up. I'm probably going to organize a launch party. I'm going to make sure that I get people in the door, that it looks busy and full. I'm going to guarantee that there's a line at that door. There's a lot of pre-work to do before I launch that restaurant or bar or cafe or whatever. I would look at it the same way. If you're building a community from scratch, you're just starting out, it's all about building relationships.

I talk about relationships are the atomic unit of community. If you break down a community into its atomic units, it's just a bunch of relationships of people with each other. First start building relationships between you and them, and you can do that by getting on the phone with them, taking them to coffee, and just asking them like, what are your challenges? What are your goals? What are your problems? Would you want to participate in a community like this? What would you hope to get out of it?

Where else are you going to find community today and what are they lacking? So, you're learning a lot and you're building a relationship with these people, because now you're listening to them. They feel heard, they feel like someone's caring about their problems. So, when you do ultimately go back to them and say, great, we're launching this community based on all of your feedback, now they feel like they were a part of designing it, and they feel ownership in it. So, you just start by building those relationships one-on-one with people, and then you start connecting them to each other.

Still, don't need to have a whole forum for that. You can do a group chat at a cafe or a group call online, or just a small group chat in like a message group rather than launching like a full forum or a whole Slack or something. Just start small, start to build relationships between them and build that foundation of community, that center of gravity, and then, once you have that, then you launch your space once — but you ask those people to help you seed it for you.

The same way I'm going to make sure all friends are showing up to that cafe opening to make sure there's a line, I'm going to ask all of these "founding members" to get in there, ask a question, and then respond to that question. And let's get like 10 to 20 really good conversations going so, when we do start inviting the next 20 to a hundred and so on people, they're coming into an established community with some established cultural norms, good conversations that are good quality, and they see how to get involved and how to participate. Now you have a really good start to build community on top of that foundation.

Tony: I feel like you can't emphasize that enough. The temptation can be so common to avoid actually talking to people and focus instead on, what software should we use and what's the community's logo going to be?

If you talk to the people that work with the customers, or whichever aspect of the different audiences you deal with, they're going to be able to tell you by name right away, who are the people that respond to every post on Instagram, or who are the people that are constantly offering product feedback suggestions, that kind of thing. It's already there, and the value of engaging those folks is disproportionate. And then you can keep things low stakes, it sounds like, by engaging them, and really not trying to do something too ambitious and public facing until and unless you've built a core of people who have helped you shape it properly.

David: Yeah. Those people are going to raise their hands, like the people who are organically engaged, they already exist, but you can never force people to engage or to do something they're not intrinsically motivated to do. But what you can do is find the people who are intrinsically motivated, put them in a position where they have influence and you're putting the spotlight on them. Now you're showing other people an example of what being a leader in this community can be. Even if you just start with three people who are organically interested in being an ambassador, or a moderator, or a founding member, or whatever it is, like your super user, and then you put the spotlight on them, now, there'll be other people in your community who will see that and be like, oh, there's like an opportunity to be a leader in this community, and the people who are organically drawn to that will now have an example to follow in a path to leadership.

Tony: Amazing. Love it.

Jillian: Something that CMX does really well is CMX Connect. For anybody listening, and David feel free to correct me, but there are what are kind of like ambassadors. I mean, similar to what you're talking about, these are individuals in your community that have applied. Can you speak to the CMX Connect program in this sense?

David: Yeah, absolutely. CMX Connect is our local events program. We have local chapter hosts all over the world and over 60 chapters around the world. That's exactly right, so people can apply, they're almost always people who joined our community in CMX, and they're like, oh, we don't have a great community for community professionals in Indonesia or in Dublin or in London, or any other place around the world, or within the US we have a number of chapters, and so they apply. We interview them as well, so we're pretty thorough in making sure that we choose the right people who align with our values and are motivated by the right reasons.

If they're approved and then they become a chapter host, they get onboarded, they get a whole number of different resources and guides, and we just do everything we can to support them. Generally, they're hosting an event every month, sometimes a little bit less, sometimes a little more. The idea behind that was like, we want to grow the community industry, advance the community industry, provide community professionals with a network where they can get support and feedback and be surrounded by their peers.

That's why we started CMX in the first place when we built it in San Francisco, and we want people to have access to other professionals, other peers on a local level all over the world, but there's no way we, as a team, could host events all over the world every month. So, it's a great example of where the only way to really do that is by taking a community driven approach and empowering community members to self-organize. Yeah, that's been an incredible program. And Beth McIntyre on our team deserves a ton of credit for building up that program.

We tried to get a program like that off the ground a couple times, and it never really worked that well. It was like Beth's hard work and focus, and really like staying on top of engaging with our hosts and making sure they're successful. Then Bevy, we were using Bevy before the acquisition. That's part of how we knew each other so well. Having a tool that makes it easy to spin up a new chapter, and then for those local chapter hosts, they have all these like preset events where, if they want to do a panel or a interview or a talk, they have all these kind of preset formats, and all they have to do is click a button and it pre-loads their events for them.

Having the right tools is what helped us operationalize the program. That's how we were able to grow it to so many different locations.

Tony: That's amazing. I'm jealous.

Jillian: Yeah. I'm watching the Denver one to see ... I'm really hoping, Tony, that one happens in October when the team's all in Denver. Because I will make you and Nōn go with me, and Jay. I think it's such a great case study for how you can leverage motivated community members, followers, etc, that want to be involved in some capacity. I've done a deep dive on it. I've thought about applying, and then I'm like, I live somewhere. I live in the mountains, not a lot of people here, so it'd probably have to be online events, which I already do a lot of, but yeah.

David: Well, yeah. I mean, because of COVID, the whole program had to pretty much move virtual. That took a little bit of an adjustment for a lot of our chapter hosts, but we got there, and now we're doing more events than we were doing before COVID, and everyone's hosting it on the Bevy platform through the virtual tools now. I think those kinds of programs are incredibly valuable. Not enough companies are doing them and aware of them.

When we think community, we tend to default to like, oh, it's an online forum, but thinking about in-person community and event-based communities, and how do you empower your community members to self-organize is a huge, huge, just like amplifier of growth, if you can do it right. Duolingo, at their peak, they were doing 2,600 events a month with a team of three people.

Jillian: It's amazing.

David: So people could practice their languages that they learned on their app. Google developer groups, over a thousand chapters around the world, Salesforce trailblazers, over a thousand chapters around the world. With small teams, just to be able to engage people in-person, in their local cities, through your brand, through a community driven-approach, that's a kind of engagement, and data, and insights, and connection that's extremely valuable for businesses.

Jillian: It is. It's such an opportunity. So many different kinds of businesses, I can just see the potential of it, and it is like, you can run it lean. It can be fairly low lift, you keep it simple. But even a lot of who we work with are independent solopreneurs. I could even see it being — like someone with a photography podcast having meetups and things like that.

My final question, it goes back to your book, something that stuck out for me, is just, I really liked ... Because as a community professional, a lot of reading your book was me just like, yes, preach. It's like, yes. This is just how it is.

Something that you do, and I think Tony, you actually do a great job of this too — I'd never really thought about it, like actually said the words out loud and been like, oh, good idea — is this idea of having this ritual at the beginning of events in your community, that's specific to your community in some way, so that it just starts to become this organic process that now anytime an event start, everybody knows that this thing is going to happen, whether it's a breathing exercise or a mantra, or even just a specific question. Can you speak a little bit about that. especially thinking about the business owners or the community builders out there that don't do that, the ideas to implement that in their community programming?

David: Events like communities, you have an opportunity to create a new reality. All of us are on this kind of routine, this standard way of living where we wake up, we eat breakfast, we go to work, we finish work, we watch Netflix, whatever. Right? Maybe we deviate a little bit here and there. Maybe we go on vacation and we have a little bit of a different experience, but when people enter the room to go to your events, it's a prime opportunity to instill in their mind that they're in a unique space, that there's something different here. It's not the status quo. It's not the norm.

What's something you can do that's like weird and different — like it should feel a little bit like crunchy or awkward or something. But when everyone does it, it creates this comradery and connection that, and it becomes familiar, if they can come to your event every month, every year, and they know it's coming, it's like inside knowledge, it's like a inside joke, in a way, that they all know and people who are new don't know yet. When they do learn it, now they feel like, oh, I'm being integrated into this community because I'm learning.

There's lots of good examples. At CMX, we do a standing ovation for every single speaker. So, I always, if I'm introducing the event, I get everyone up out of their seats for like a huge rising applause. Then for the rest of the event, every single speaker gets a huge standing ovation, and that just creates this like really awesome vibe in the room. That was something I learned from Big Omaha, the conference that I used to go to did a great job with that.

You go to Creative Mornings, like Tony knows Creative Mornings with Tina Roth-Eisenberg. And they're so intentional in how they build their community. And they go through a set of rituals whenever everyone comes to their event, when you sit down. They have you like introduce yourself to someone next to you, and they have like a prompting question. They go over their values together. They randomly select people to come on stage and be able to share something that they're working on. They have people stand up if they're hiring and share job opportunities.

At our meetups for CMX, what I'll do is I'll ask, who has been to five or more events, four or more events, three or more events, and people keep raising their hand. Then for the people who it's their first event, we say, okay, we're going to give them a huge round of applause. If this is your first CMX events stand up. And they stand up and they get a huge applause from everyone. Again, it just creates this really unique, memorable moment for people, like a peak moment is another concept I talk about in the book. People only remember peak moments from events. They don't remember all the minute details. They remember these heightened moments of joy or learning something or connection.

You have Burning Man, where you have to roll around in the dust and hit a big gong. When you enter Burning Man for the first time, they literally make you roll around in the dust. It's these weird things that just change your state of mind and let you know that you're in a new reality that's been intentionally designed for this community.

Jillian: I did not know that about Burning Man, but I'm not surprised.

David: Yeah, and that's the least weird thing that will happen to you there. So, they just break the ice.

Jillian: They want you to self-select out of there. If you can't handle the rolling in the dust parts, they're like, this isn't for you guys. Turn around.

David: That's right. They tell you, they're like, look, you're going to ... By the time you leave here, everything inside and outside of your car is going to be covered in dust. So, you're coming in all clean, and you're like, ugh, I'm going to get dust on my car. And they're like, let's just get this over with because it's going to happen. And they do that if this is your first Burning Man only, but everyone hits the gong, I think.

Jillian: It makes sense. And then added sun protection. It's like anytime I go camping for a long time, and I'm like, oh, I got a tan, and then it's like, nope, that was dirt. Just dirt.

Tony: I could talk with David for hours and hours, but let's get to the final round of questions and be on our way. Jillian, do you want to lead the charge?

Jillian: Oh yeah. Happy to. David, these are just quick off the top of your head answers. Everybody has done a phenomenal job so far, so no pressure at all.

Tony: No pressure.

Jillian: There's no math, but there's no math.

David: This is messed up too, because I do a rapid fire question round at the end of my podcast, and I'm always like, don't worry, don't be nervous, and now like I'm on the receiving end of it, and I know how it feels.

Jillian: I love it. It's like karma. I'll get mine, don't worry. I like to do the exact same thing. Someone's going to do it to me, and there will be math, and I'll be like, don't, no. I don't know. No math. Okay.

David Spinks, as a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

David: I can't remember. I think like a doctor or a lawyer. Raised by a Jewish mother, it was kind of like the clear path. I think those are my main ones, but I always did have entrepreneur in my mind. I have one distinct memory from when I was a kid of this girl who, I think I was like a freshman in high school or middle school, like it was really early, and she was older and she entered a science competition, and she invented this wallet for blind people, where you can put any amount of dollar or any amount of money in it and it would say out loud how much it was, and she won the competition.

I just remember being in awe of like, you can invent something and create something and build something. That moment has always stayed with me and I've always wanted to build things since then.

Jillian: And here you are, like the ultimate community builder. It's funny how things will work out that way, but like in such a different way you never would have anticipated.

David: Right.

Jillian: You know what I mean?

David: Yeah, not building hardware, but building community.

Jillian: But still impacting lives on a daily basis. Which is a great segue to, how do you define community?

David: This is such a hard question for me. I feel like my definition changes every day. I've probably answered it a hundred times in a hundred different ways. Let's see, what is it today? Actually, a recent one I heard that really stuck with me, I'll share that one, is a community is a group of people who are willing to make your problems into their problems.

Jillian: Ooh, I like that. That's an excellent answer. And agree, that's like kind of a main question to ask, because it's kind of like …

David: Just me specifically, I've just over-thought the answer to this question. I literally wrote a book trying to answer this question and I still don't have a great one.

Jillian: But I think that's part of what's beautiful about community. It means so many things to so many people and it still works.

David: Totally.

Jillian: Okay. What is something that is on your bucket list that you have done? This does not need to be professional. It can be anything.

David: That I have done.

Jillian: Yep.

David: It's accomplished already. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

Jillian: Oh, that's awesome.

Tony: Cool.

Jillian: Did you see any giant bugs at the beginning in the jungle?

David: A lot of bugs, a lot of things. Yeah, a lot of wildlife.

Jillian: That's what's stopping me from ever doing that.

David: Really? I don't remember bugs being the concern. I'm pretty sure I got bitten up. We did like two mountains. We had to do Mount Meru first, which was 15,000. Kilimanjaro's 19,000 feet, but the idea was to like, help acclimatize yourself, and it's just a different landscape and environment, so it was cool. But I hurt my knee, just pulled something so bad that I barely made it on summit night for the first mountain to the top. I was like literally crying when I rolled onto the top.

Then I had to go down slowly with one of the guides back down after that, and it took me four more hours than the rest of the group, and I thought there was no way I would make it up Kilimanjaro but I just ... We had like two days of rest and I just slept and didn't move, and then I woke up the morning we were supposed to leave for Kili, and I felt okay, and I was able to do it. Bugs, less of an issue. That cold and just physical — it was the hardest thing I've ever done.

Jillian: Yeah, it looks great minus the — I just remember watching an IMAX movie on it, and at the lower parts, it's jungle, and they kept zooming in on spiders the size of hands, and I was like, yeah, I'm okay.

David: I don't know if I saw any huge spiders.

Jillian: No thanks.

David: I wish I did, that would have been cool.

Jillian: They saw you, I'm sure.

David: Yeah.

Jillian: On the flip side of that …

David: You're just scaring yourself out of it.

Jillian: Yeah, Tony is totally out.

David: Yeah, Tony. You just lost Tony. He's not going to Kili.

Jillian: I did.

Tony: I'm out.

Jillian: On the flip side of that, what is something on your bucket list that you would like to do?

David: I would say I want to like live in a van for an extended period of time with my family. Yeah, I want to do a van life and just ... We did a road trip when my wife moved out to San Francisco from New York. We're both from New York, but we were a long distance for three and a half years, and then I went over there. I flew there and we drove back together, and that road trip, it was two weeks, but it was like one of my favorite trips ever. You just get to see so much more of a place and meet so many unique people. You get to like find random towns with ... I saw like the world's largest ball of twine, and random stuff like that, that you would never see by flying.

I would love to just spend an extended amount of time, just without an agenda, without a plan, just floating around and meeting random people and experiencing different cultures just within our own country.

Jillian: Yeah. That would be fun. You just wrote a book, as we know, The Business of Belonging, so minus that — your book's not included — what is a book that you are loving right now?

David: Loving right now.

Jillian: Or what's your favorite besides your own of course, community book, that you would recommend to people?

David: That's also always a hard question for me. Recently, I just read like a really shitty crime novel because I was on vacation and I wanted something really brainless, so I'm not going to recommend that.

Jillian: The best kind of book.

David: Yeah, it was good for me in that moment. Really good community books, Sapiens was one of my favorite, which isn't actually about community. It's just about how humans came to be, but you realize how much of this is just innate and built into humans, and literally why we exist and how homo sapiens outlived other human species. That's a really cool book to learn more about kind of like why we experience community the way we do. [The] Art of Gathering by Priya Parker's one of my favorite more recent modern ones. Yeah, those are two good ones.

Jillian: Okay. We know you want to do that van life. We know you've lived in New York, and now in the Bay Area, but if you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be?

David: That's a tough question. All of these are tough, because we're really trying to figure out where we actually want to live in our lives, now that we have a baby, and I'm like, with like family or friends, or just go somewhere completely random? Tel Aviv is up there for me. I love Israel. My mom was born in Israel. I still have some family there, but every time I go to Tel Aviv, I just feel like, at home, and I love the weather and the lifestyle and the food. It's definitely one of my happy places in the world.

Jillian: That's nice. I've never been, but yeah, it would be a very cool place to go check out.

David: And very unique but authentic community vibes there. Everyone there is a community builder.

Jillian: Ooh, Tony, business business trip. There we go.

Tony: Yeah.

Jillian: Okay, final question, how do you want to be remembered?

David: Ooh, deep. I just want to be remembered as someone who just showed up, someone who showed up when people needed it, whether that's friends, families, my peers in work, my colleagues, just like when they needed me, I would show up and be there for them and be there even when I'm not asked. That's what I try to do, look for opportunities to show up for people, especially when they need it most.

Jillian: That's beautiful. And on that, you passed, flying colors.

David: Hey, all right. My hands can stop sweating now.

Tony: David, before we wrap it up, where do we find you? Where do we find your respective projects and your book? Link us up.

David: Yeah. I'm just @DavidSpinks on Twitter. I tweet a lot on community and business. The book's called The Business of Belonging. You can buy it anywhere you can buy books or go to CMXHub.com/book, and CMXHub.com has years and years of free content and research and articles. As Jillian was talking about, we just have tons of resources that are freely available and some paid trainings and programs as well, and events. Go to CMXHub.com to join our community. And Bevy, so Bevy’s just Bevy.com. If you're running any community events, virtual conferences, anything on the event front, check us out.Then I also have a podcast called Masters of Community, which you can subscribe to anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, and I interview other community builders kind of like this.

Tony: Amazing. Thank you so much, David. So great to see you, so great to hang with you, and looking forward to continuing to cheer you on as you do amazing things going forward.

Jillian: Thanks David.

Tony: So there you have it. That's our conversation with David Spinks, and oh my goodness, so many great little nuggets. He really just knows how to distill things into very understandable, quick little topics and ideas.

Top takeaway, I could tell you felt the same way I did, the whole idea of cracking the big problem of, how do you measure the impact of a community in terms of business value? That is something I see so many people struggling to do well, and he just flipped it right on its head.

He said, "Look, don't start with a community, start with a business objective. If you've got a clear business objective in mind, then the impact of a community endeavor will follow and will be natural." I think that, that's just such a powerful thing for anybody who's already running a community, who can kind of do a little bit of a philosophical reflection on this or somebody who's just getting started to do it right.

Jillian: Absolutely. It's so important to help dictate the metrics you track and if they actually matter. Because depending on your business objective, the metrics that kind of everyone tells you to track, whether it's new members or churn, daily active users, that doesn't always have to be what you're tracking depending on what your business objectives are. I thought it was a really refreshing way to look at what makes a community successful, how you define that, because frankly, each community may have different objectives.

Tony: And when you think about it, if you are optimizing for the wrong objective, you might be doing things that are counter to the interests of your business. There's very easy vanity metrics. You can be building up your Instagram following or optimizing for likes and retweets or something like that, but that's going to lead you down a path of creating content that yields that kind of a response. When in fact, you might be trying to go for something much more meaningful with a different audience that would be turned off by those kinds of posts.

Jillian: Definitely.

Tony: I also feel like the idea of thinking about all the different forms of media you can use is a really important one. He just listed off, really off the top of his head, so many different ways of approaching community building online, in-person, using memberships, paid, free, all these different forms of media. I think it's just really good to maybe step back and think about all the different ways you might build community and question any assumptions you might have around that. I think once you've kind of got that business objective identified, then you can look in a holistic way at, well, what does that naturally lead me to in terms of what medium I use, what technology I use, or what technology I don't use to build my community?

Jillian: Yeah, and I think that's a common issue for people growing a brand, growing a business and trying to have a sense of community within, is you feel like you have to do all the things, and maybe a digital platform where a community interacts day-to-day isn't the right community for you. It could be anything from, like he said, a support forum might actually be the type of community you're looking for, or it could be, hey, you host a virtual summit every year, and how you foster community is in the leading up to those events, the rituals that happen during those events, and the follow up after the events.

I like that there's this challenge to think for yourself in this, because it is so many people are just getting, oh, I need a community, and then they throw something together and then they don't love it. Really think about how community works best for you, your brand, your goals.

Tony: That's important because the stakes are kind of high. We've seen what happens when somebody builds a community, doesn't necessarily appreciate what they're getting themselves into, and then finding themselves in a place where there's toxicity or there's controversy, or there's just way too much going on and it becomes unsustainable.

That leads, I think, to one of the other big takeaways for me, which is to, ideally, before you start your community, identify those super members within the audience that you're aiming to build this community out of. Engage them one-on-one, engage them with each other, gather informally and prove the concept behind your community and build a cultural core that will be the center of your community before you launch your community. Ideally.

If you do that, that's going to give you a lot of, first of all, guidance in terms of how to do it right, and how to build a community that's really going to fulfill the needs of its people, but it's also going to give you a big leg up in terms of the quality of the culture and the interactions in that space if the first 10 or so people that are in there are people are awesome and that they care about each other, they understand why this community is around.

Jillian:
It goes back to what David was saying about the Venn diagram of your business objectives and your member goals. You got to be somewhere in the middle, and this is what you need to find out before launching, what are their goals? What would they like to see? Just the most active users or members in the sense of whatever existing connection you have is so important to look at and to personally invite those people to brainstorm with you.

Tony: You think about it, Jillian, if you take the opposite view, if you say, okay, let's say we did the absolute opposite of this, where I create the space for a community in secret, and then blast it out to a big mailing list of people, and I have no idea who's going to sign up or how they're going to behave, and they're all just going to start showing up, right? That sounds like an absolute recipe for disaster.

Jillian: Yeah, that sounds like a mega disaster.

Jillian: Yeah, it was, I think, overall, such a great episode and a wonderful insight into how to move forward with your own community. If you haven't already, check out David's book. I did the audio book. It was fantastic to weed my garden and listen to all about the business of belonging. You can also find David on Twitter @DavidSpinks. You could find him over at Bevy.com, CMXHub.com, and of course his own podcast, Masters of Community.

Tony: All right, Jillian. Well, I'm super inspired. I can't wait to take some of these things, apply them to some of the community work we are doing, and I hope all of you listening enjoyed this as well. Go forth, build amazing communities, do it sustainably, make sustainable businesses out of them. Go find the people that'll help you make it wonderful, and let us know how it goes. You can find us at @TeamSPI, and in the meantime, keep being awesome. Bye.

Special thanks to our guest, David Spinks, you can find him on Twitter @DavidSpinks. His company Bevy at Bevy.com. Learn more about CMX and CMX Summit CMXHub.com, and find his book, The Business of Belonging at your favorite local bookseller. This has been The Community Experience. For more information on this episode, including links and show notes, head to SmartPassiveIncome.com and click on listen.

Jillian: Your hosts are me, Jillian Benbow and Tony Bacigalupo. The Community Experience is a production of SPI Media.

Tony: Our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Our series producers are David Grabowski and senior producer Sara Jane Hess. Editing and sound designed by Duncan Brown, music by David Grabowski.

Jillian: See you next time.