So, you are “in” when it comes to building community?

What do you need to make it happen?

The Tools

Fortunately, there isn’t a grand expensive toolset you need to implement a solid lifestyle community building strategy. It consists of:

1. A private Facebook group (not a “page”)
2. Email newsletter list & delivery mechanism (mailchimp, constant contact, etc)
3. A community member directory
4. An email address & phone
5. Transportation to meet your community in person on a regular basis

Number 3, the member directory, is the only item on the list that’s not well understood. It could be as simple as the members page of your Facebook group — but that does a really poor job of showcasing who people are, and what they do professionally. A member showcase that allows your community members to discover and connect with each other is the best starting point to getting people together in person (in person conversations are the holy grail of any community building effort) — after all, if they don’t know who else belongs to the community, how are they going to know who they can connect with, for either personal or professional reasons?

Particularly for a larger regional brokerage (or franchise), you’ll need some way to segment your community by geography. Since we began working on Oh Hey World, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and working on, facilitating connections within a given community, based around hyper local geography (25 mile radius). You can see an example member directory, for Geek Estate, here. You’ll need something similar, but it needs to be private rather than public.

All Oh Hey World’s code is open source. We can either build a custom solution for you, or you can work with any other Ruby on Rails vendor/developer. Or you can just live with a Facebook group members page. It’s up to you.

In my next post, I’ll dive into the actual strategy needed to build an engaged community…

Note: This is part of a 4 part series on the topic of “Turning Clients into Lifestyle Communities”

• Why & How
• The Tools
• Setting it all Up (sample manifesto & sample community member showcase)
• Ongoing Communication & Engagement