Not Just Another Community: Part 2

Not everything went smoothly this year. Here are a few examples for the bumps I encountered and how I smoothed them over.

5 min readOct 2, 2021

Challenges & Solutions

Imposter Syndrom ?

If you haven’t (or have) encountered the term “imposter syndrome” click here for Mike Cannon-Brookes’s Ted talk.

WTF am I doing? Community managers become leaders in a way. For someone who isn’t an entrepreneur yet it was strange leading an entrepreneurship community with members that may be more qualified to answer to the title — At times I struggled with the feeling that I’m an imposter.
This drove me to keep myself sync with what’s happening in the industry, read a lot more, triple check all of my sources, educate myself so that I could enrich community members.
I don’t have a solid solution to that emotional challenge, but listening to Mike’s talk always helps me understand that those feelings are valid yet misleading. Sharing and consulting about my experience with other community managers or my teammates also helped a lot. It reminded me that I a wasn’t alone in the boat.
Anybody home? The job of a CM can be very rewarding when a high quality discussion is developed, when members engage in a very authentic way and show a candid interest or when they approach you as a compass. However, at times it can be frustrating.

A friend sent me Simon’s tweet above and it explained in a very simple and accurate way my perception of a community and what I strived to accomplish this year.

So when I remained the main contributor in the community it didn’t make me feel like a leader, it made me feel like I was failing my job. A community is not about one person, I didn’t want it to become my personal blog, I wanted everyone to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and consulting with each other. Members would sometimes PM content or questions that could benefit the rest of the group, and I’d feel happy and bummed at the same time for the reasons above. I also understood why it was so intimidating, if it wasn’t for my role I probably wouldn’t voluntarily step out on the stage.

Engagement

There wasn’t a lot of engagement in the community even though I knew members had a lot they’d want to share and contribute.

Solutions

I invited friends to join the community that I knew would engage in discussions just to prompt others to join in and not shy away. Once you see an equivalent on the stage you gain more confidence to follow.
Asked some of my teammates to write posts themselves, even shared with them a list of interesting materials just so they’d get a bit of inspiration.
Started an ongoing competition — That really helped. I called it “IEC Championships” and it was one of those things that started “by accident”. I posted the following image with the question “Which company kicked off from this email?”

AirBNB co-founder emails the second — **Answer:** AirBNB

A couple of members began throwing guesses and it triggered the idea to make it an official competition. I came up with a few more questions related to the world of entrepreneurship and created a simple scores site with Canva.

Since the club didn’t have much budget to allocate to the community I has to be a bit creative. I approached multiple small businesses and offered to advertise them on our social media platforms in exchange granting a prize to the winner.

Sometimes I managed to get prizes that related to the question. For example, when I asked:

“Jeff Bezos instituted a rule to make meetings more efficient. Every team should be sized so that it can fed with a certain amount of pizzas. How many pizzas?”

The answer is a couple of pizzas and that was the prize that the winner who answered correctly received.

I didn’t want participants to answer solely for the prize and it does take time to manage to get a funded prize so I didn’t grant a surprise for each question.