Community Signal

Every company has the challenge of managing how to respond to customer feedback. But what if you're managing a crowdsourcing community and actively asking people for their ideas and feedback? How do you make sure that every contributor feels seen and respected for their efforts, whether their idea becomes reality or not? These are the questions that Tim Courtney and the team behind LEGO Ideas have tackled.

On a previous episode of Community Signal, we spoke to Jake McKee, who helped build LEGO's first community team. One of the early members of that community was Tim, who would later go on to join the LEGO Ideas team. In this episode, Tim shares a history of LEGO Ideas, a space where people passionate about LEGO can submit their own ideas for new sets. And while LEGO has many designers on payroll, Tim explains why the contributions from its community pay back (and pay forward) tenfold.

Here's more of what Tim and Patrick discuss:

• How 16-year-old Tim first joined the LEGO community
• The strategy behind helping all LEGO Ideas contributors feel seen and rewarded
• Measuring the ROI of the LEGO Ideas community

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Discourse.

Respecting your community's contributions (14:08): "At LEGO in Denmark, you've got dozens or hundreds of professionally trained designers. They're used to ideating and killing ideas and not getting too emotionally attached to things. [With the LEGO Ideas community], you have people whose contributions are out of pure passion or they want to contribute something back to the brand or they want to build a name for themselves or because there was a royalty and a financial reward, maybe they want to get rewarded for it. You have got to understand what their motivations are. … Really just having to understand that and build a process where as a company we're showing respect for the fact that they're spending their spare time passionately ideating and championing their ideas, submitting them, going out on the internet and sharing it on social media, gaining a following; that's commendable. We are so lucky to have a group of passionate artists who are contributing to the brand." –@timcourtney

On lauching a crowdsourcing platform (24:00): "If someone's out there considering a crowdsourcing platform or an open innovation or idea generation platform, don't let the ambiguity scare you from starting as long as you're communicative, as long as you close that loop, and as long as you strive to learn and adapt and tell your audience that you're learning and adapting." –@timcourtney

Why LEGO shares revenue with designers of LEGO Ideas sets that reach retail (27:23): "We succeed together. … I think what was critically important to the team … is that we reward people proportionate to their contributions, and we share in the success. If a LEGO fan designer is going to contribute something to the company that drives X amount of incremental revenue, then it's only fair – it's only right – that they share in that reward." –@timcourtney

The ROI of the LEGO Ideas initiative (37:00): "99% of the smartest people in the world don't work for us. Ideas can come from anywhere. It's about leveraging those ideas, but it's also about building those relationships with people. … I've had three community members come in and get hired as LEGO designers." –@timcourtney

Tim Courtney helped build LEGO Ideas from 20,000 to over 1 million members between 2011 and 2018. This crowdsourcing and open innovation community generates tens of millions in consumer sales and earns consistently high satisfaction scores. He's hosted developer conferences, meetups, VIP events, and advised dozens of entrepreneurs and professionals on developing their own communities.

Today, Tim Courtney works with brands, manufacturers, and startups to grow their business, build loyalty, and future-proof against disruption by leveraging community, crowdsourcing, and open innovation.

• Sponsor: Discourse, civilized discussion for teams, customers, fans, and communities
• Tim Courtney's website
• LEGO Ideas
• Jake McKee, the community guy, on Community Signal
• LDraw, a tool for modeling 3D LEGO creations
• LEGO CUUSOO, started by Christian Thor Larsen and Paal Smith-Meyer
• Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet Decide (New York Times)
• The "Golden Girls" LEGO Ideas set
• Past winners of LEGO Rebrick

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Community pro Andrew Thomas was recruited by Northwestern Mutual while working at Shapeways. On this episode, he talks about what it's like to go from a 200-person startup to an organization with over 7,500 employees that has been around for over 160 years.

With more teammates and internal knowledge comes the added responsibility of continuously learning, introducing yourself to new people, and advocating for your work across the organization.

Andrew and Patrick also discuss:

• The standardization of knowledge management practices
• How Andrew thinks about self-care and burnout for himself and for his team
• Getting buy-in and advocating for your work in a 7,500+ person company

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Discourse.

Standing out on LinkedIn as a community manager (04:16): "I think [I got noticed by Northwestern Mutual because I listed] out the tools that I have had experience with. My job is to manage our self-help portal and that includes knowledge and communities. One of my last projects at Shapeways was redesigning our knowledge base. I think that when they saw, 'Oh, knowledge base and support communities. This is perfect.'" –@athomitron

Andrew Thomas lives in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture, Andrew moved to New York City and has started many online and offline communities across industries that include finance, entrepreneurship, 3-D printing, and gaming. He is currently the lead community manager for Northwestern Mutual.

• Sponsor: Discourse, civilized discussion for teams, customers, fans, and communities
• Andrew Thomas on Twitter
• Andrew's website
• Roll Control, Andrew's fitness game inspired by Wii Fit and Super Monkey Ball
• Northwestern Mutual
• Shapeways
• The Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) initiative
• The official Minecraft feedback forum

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Shannon Emery manages both the external customer-facing and internal employee communities at Higher Logic. With so many tasks to manage and two distinct communities to nurture, how is a community professional to focus?

Patrick and Shannon's conversation is about just that –– the strategies and resources that she relies on to stay focused and successfully manage both communities. These strategies include:

• Leaning on dotted-line team members for support and subject-matter expertise (4:19)
• Adapting the principles of agile product management to her workflow (20:13)
• Asking about the bigger picture before accepting new tasks or projects (20:29)

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Discourse.

On transparency in workplace communities (10:30): "If an employee asks a particularly difficult question [in the internal community], let's talk about it. Let's be transparent. Otherwise, why do we have a community? … Just because somebody questions something doesn't mean [that] it's negative [or] something that we [can't] address for everybody. … I always say that if one person has posted it, there are a bunch of people who have the same question, so let's make sure we're being responsive." –@llamasayswhat

The benefits of applying agile methodologies to your workflow (30:30): "[The agile process has helped me] when an executive comes by and [asks for] something. I can say, 'I really appreciate that, but let me see how it fits in this week's workload.' That way, I can actually get it done, and I'm not trying to struggle to put something together real quick just because somebody asked for it. It's more of, 'Let's take the appropriate amount of time and do this the right way.' Because as the company scales, as the customer base grows, you have to be able to scale these initiatives. Sometimes people get really excited about something small [but they haven't thought about how to scale it to the community]." –@llamasayswhat

Shannon Emery is a community manager for Higher Logic, a provider of customer and member cloud-based engagement platforms. She's responsible for their internal staff and external client communities. Prior to that, she was senior community manager for Blackbaud.

• Sponsor: Discourse, civilized discussion for teams, customers, fans, and communities
• Shannon Emery on Twitter
• Higher Logic
• HUG, the Higher Logic User Group
• Blackbaud
• Lindsay Starke on Community Signal
• Howard Rheingold on Community Signal
• Super Forum, Higher Logic's annual conference
• Tweet from Anna Rose Iovine, encouraging you to document your 2020 accomplishments

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

As we've shared on many episodes of Community Signal, community professionals come from numerous career paths, educational backgrounds, and areas of interest. In this conversation, Patrick talks with Matt Nevill, customer community manager at Agilent Technologies, about his transition from engineer to community manager. As a one-person community team, Matt discusses how he partners with other teams within his organization to ensure the success of Agilent's community and gets advice from Patrick on when and how to scale the team.

If you're thinking about how to justify adding another team member or quantifying your community's value, the advice is all here. As Matt and Patrick explain it, it's all about clearly communicating that a more engaged community means happier customers that turn into repeat customers.

They also discuss:

• A support staff that was getting crushed by calls until they launched a community
• The right way and time to scale your community team
• Evaluating community platform options

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Discourse.

Deciding when and how to scale your community team (24:25): "What I like to think about is depth versus width. We make choices all the time where we sacrifice depth for width. Meaning, how much can we interact with an individual community member? How good of an experience can we give to that one person versus serving everyone? If you throw one person into a sea with 30,000 people, then there's a limit to how much they can actually give individualized support to those people." –@patrickokeefe

The value of having an open community (43:47): "I think part of providing a good experience is less hurdles to jump over. If you have an open community, then people can find [your] content because it's indexed by external search engines. Not only that, but if they just visit your community, they can poke around and read the content without feeling like they're trapped into [creating an account]. Some people don't want to do that. My theory is if you have a good community site that is easy and people like to use, people are going to be more willing to create a meaningful membership in that community." -Matt Nevill

Evaluating community platforms (48:25): "When you're weighing your [community platform] options, you want to look at what seems to be the most stable. What has a good support structure when we need help? What has a good partner network? If it doesn't do what we want to do, what can we customize? … When you first evaluate different platforms and pick something that you're comfortable with, you're going to expect to be able to use it for at least probably three to five years." -Matt Nevill

Matt Nevill has over 17 years of experience in various customer-facing and digital roles at tech companies. He is currently the customer community manager for Agilent Technologies. Agilent Technologies is a global leader in life sciences, diagnostics, and applied chemical markets. The company generated revenue of over $5 billion in fiscal 2019 and employs 16,300 people worldwide.

Over his career, Matt's responsibilities have included community management, customer service and support, support management, systems engineering, process improvement, digital customer experience, content standards, and customer self-help strategies. He graduated from Texas A&M in 2002 with a Bachelor's in Telecommunications Engineering Technology and later obtained an MBA from Houston Baptist University. Matt has worked remotely for the last 13 years and is based out of Houston, Texas.

• Sponsor: Discourse, civilized discussion for teams, customers, fans, and communities
• Matt Nevill on LinkedIn
• Agilent Technologies
• The Agilent community
• ADTRAN and Layer 3 Communications, where Matt worked as an engineer
• Agilent wins the Frost & Sullivan award for its social media support efforts
• Community platforms mentioned: Higher Logic and Khoros (Lithium and Jive)

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a frequent topic of conversation on Community Signal. As Patrick puts it, if you're a community professional in the United States, "this is the law that places the liability for speech on the author of that speech, not on you as the [community's] host. It allows you to moderate and remove certain content while not assuming liability for what remains. I like to think of it as the legal basis for our profession in the US, and it is an important legal protection against the wealthy and powerful who would happily take down an entire online community for one post they don't like."

Plainly, this is a law that protects our jobs, our communities, the people in those communities, and their right to have civil and safe discussions online.

For this episode of Community Signal, we invited past guests to share how Section 230 has enabled them to foster community and what changing Section 230 could do to the fabric of online communities.

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Discourse.

"At The Times, Section 230 allowed us to build a modern news operation where we could have a public back and forth with our readers; an ongoing one. It gave us the chance to respect them by setting rules for engagement and privileging those who spent the time to be thoughtful about the news. By allowing us to pre-moderate, and not be legally liable for any mistakes we may have made in that process, [that's] really what made our community operation at The Times economically feasible." –@BasseyE

"As co-founder of a community software company, I personally rely on [Section 230's] protection every day. If we go down the path of adding caveats and exceptions to Section 230, we risk losing it altogether. Yes, online content is messy – so is freedom, so is free speech. If we still believe in those things, we need to protect the innovators, not squash them under a burden of regulatory red tape or lawsuits." –@rhogroupee

"Yes, online communities need to be moderated and cared for and that is the precise reason why Section 230 exists, to empower moderation without creating liability. If Section 230 goes away, the main groups to benefit will not be the most vulnerable users of the internet. It will be the huge platforms uniquely possessing the resources to be compliant with whatever new regulation that they will have helped to craft." –@losowsky

"Without the protection of Section 230, a well-meaning person or organization may lose their right to maintain a clean well-lighted space for civil discussion and capitulate to every demand regardless of its merit. An organization facilitating online community may decide to close their community altogether deciding that the risk is not worth the benefit. Who really loses when we threaten the opportunities to build meaningful communities that can have a positive impact on people's lives?" –@scottmoore

• Bruce Ableson, director of evangelism and enablement at Adobe
• Gail Ann Williams who consults on community conversation and craft beer, formerly of The WELL and Salon Media Group
• Bassey Etim, editorial director at Canopy, formerly of The New York Times
• Rosemary O'Neill, president of Social Strata
• Andrew Losowsky, head of Coral at Vox Media
• Scott Moore, community veteran with a focus on nonprofits
• Michael Wood-Lewis, co-founder and CEO of Front Porch Forum
• Angela Connor, founder and CEO at Change Agent Communications

• Sponsor: Discourse, civilized discussion for teams, customers, fans, and communities
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act on Wikipedia
• Law professor Eric Goldman on Community Signal
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation's civil liberties director David Greene on Community Signal
• Patrick and Scott Moore discuss Section 230
• Bruce Ableson, founder of Open Diary
• Gail Ann Williams, formerly of The WELL and Salon Media Group
• Zen kōan
• Bassey Etim of Canopy, formerly of The New York Times
• Rosemary O'Neill, co-founder of Ultimate Bulletin Board and Hoop.la
• Andrew Losowsky, head of Coral at VOX Media
• Scott Moore, a 20-year community industry veteran with a focus on nonprofit
• Michael Wood-Lewis, founder of Front Porch Forum
• Angela Connor, founder and CEO at Change Agent Communications

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Data breaches, distasteful ads or marketing campaigns, offensive content left unmoderated for far too long… as community professionals, we've studied these situations when they arise and many of us have had to manage such issues in our own communities.

In this episode, Patrick and crisis communications expert Kate Hartley discuss examples of micro and macro communications crises and how to best manage them. Kate breaks down the difference between a full blown communications crisis and negative or critical response to a change. "It's only a crisis if it's going to stop the community [from] being able to function," she says. "If it's not going to stop the community being able to function, then it's not really a crisis. It's an issue that just needs to be well-managed."

Kate and Patrick also discuss:

• How social media and news feeds fuel outrage
• Remembering your employees during a communications crisis
• Setting a strategic intent for handling a communications crisis and knowing how to measure your outcomes

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Discourse.

The concept of manipulated outrage (6:30): "We are more likely to post or share commentary that makes us angry. The two things we like to share are things that make us laugh and things that make us furious. The more angry we are, the more likely we are to share things. So we're seeing more and more of this content everywhere we look." –@katehartley

Living up to your community or organization's values (25:18): "One of the things that will get a community to turn on you quicker than anything else is if you go against your own values. If you do something that goes against your own values, people will call that out, quite rightly. … You have to have the actions that meet the words you're saying." –@katehartley

Don't forget about your employees during a communications crisis (34:40): "We see this a lot when we're working with organizations on how to manage their reputations in a crisis. They're so focused on the external, on what the media think, on what their outside community think, on what their customers think, [that] they forget about their own people. In some organizations, that's a significant number of people who actually could be your greatest advocates. … These are people who are going to be talking to their friends, to their families, [and] they need to believe in you. They need to believe that you're doing the right thing. They need to share your values, they need to understand why you're doing what you're doing. If you have an employee community, what better place to talk to them and explain exactly what's going on [during] the crisis." –@katehartley

Measuring whether or not you've managed a crisis successfully (40:23): "The measurement for [the successful handling of a] crisis has to come quite a long time after the crisis is over to really understand the full impact that crisis had. It needs to reflect what you wanted as the objective from managing the crisis right at the beginning. If you bear that in mind at the beginning, everything you do will be informed by it. How you communicate, how you behave, what you ask the business to do for you. Everything will then be informed by that objective. Then six months down the line, you can look back and say, 'Did we meet that strategic intent? Did we behave in the way we said we were going to? Did we retain the loyalty of our customers? Are our communities healthy?' That's how you measure it." –@katehartley

Kate Hartley is the co-founder of Polpeo, a crisis simulation company that helps some of the biggest brands in the world prepare to deal with a crisis as it breaks and spreads over social and digital media. She is the author of Communicate in a Crisis, a book that explores the changing way people behave in crisis situations, and how organizations respond.

Kate has 25 years of agency-side experience in crisis and reputation management and corporate PR. She is also a trainer in crisis communications for the PRCA, the UK's PR industry association, where she sits on the digital steering committee, designed to shape digital best practices in the PR industry. She has spoken at and run workshops on the impact of social media on crisis management at international events including SXSW, The Global PR Summit, PR Week's Crisis Comms, and Social Media Today's Social Shake Up.

• Sponsor: Discourse, civilized discussion for teams, customers, fans, and communities
• Kate Hartley on Twitter
• Polpeo, a crisis simulation company
• Communicate in a Crisis
• PRCA (Public Relations and Communication Association) and CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations)
• The Social Element
• Dr. Molly Crockett on moral outrage in the digital age
• Rohit Bhargava on manipulated outrage
• Streisand effect
• Derek Powazek on Community Signal
• Ocado says fire at robotic warehouse cost it more than £100m
• Jonathan Hemus, UK crisis expert

• View on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

If you've ever Googled a medical condition or a new symptom that you've experienced you know that the search results leave much to be desired. When Nina Lorez Collins posted about symptoms of perimenopause on Facebook, she saw that many women in her network were looking for a space to talk about the same symptoms that she was experiencing. The conversation flourished into a Facebook group of over 30,000 women looking for answers and support through all stages of menopause and aging.

As the What Would Virginia Woolf Do? community (now The Woolfer) continued to grow, it tested the limits of Facebook's product and support and Nina found herself looking for alternatives. She faced the realization that she could not sustain the group as a free community. It needed dedicated resources and income to continue operating at the same level. If you're looking to launch or move your community to a paid model or debating changing community platforms, Nina offers lots of suggestions on what to consider as you're negotiating with new platforms and keeping your community in the loop.

Nina and Patrick discuss:

• Recognizing the product limitations of community platforms, along with your community's product must-haves
• The emotional, financial, and product hurdles that come with moving from one platform to another
• How Woolfers stepped up to help those that wanted to join the paid community but couldn't afford it

On feeling used by Facebook (3:44): "As we grew, [Facebook] would occasionally reach out to us [because] they were interested in featuring us in videos or they asked us if we wanted to join their subscription pilot when they started it. We had ended up saying no. Every time we tried to reach out to them with a question or for help with something, we wouldn't hear from anyone. They would direct us to their big Facebook groups for people who are managing groups, but it was so impersonal, and I started to feel a little bit used. Here we were directing all this traffic and having all this intense engagement and we couldn't really get an answer from anyone." -Nina Lorez Collins

Facebook's propensity to silently take features away (4:21): "[With Facebook Groups], we would lose features. We had the topics feature for a long time, which we really loved and used and then it disappeared one day. Dozens of times, we wrote to Facebook and couldn't figure out where it had gone and couldn't get an answer. The lack of ability to communicate with these people who were essentially hosting us was impossible. … It started to feel increasingly over time like there was so much we couldn't control, and it didn't make sense. I started to feel a little bit like we were slaving away for this machine that we couldn't manage the way we wanted to." -Nina Lorez Collins

The pros and cons of breaking away from Facebook (22:05): "A friend said to me, '… I've come to be addicted to Facebook. I'm not feeling addicted to the [new community] app, so I have to remember to check it.' I thought that was interesting. On the one hand, we're relieved that we're breaking our addiction to Facebook, this thing that we resent. On the other hand, it is like second nature to all of us. I mean, they've made it very smooth. While our app has a lot of the same features, it's different." -Nina Lorez Collins

Thoughtful Woolfers addressed the barrier of joining a paid community (28:40): "We were very concerned about people who might feel that the cost [of joining the paid community] was prohibitive, and we immediately had lots of Woolfers offering scholarships. We did create a way for members who wanted to sponsor people and for people who wanted to be sponsored. We've to date, I think, sponsored 280 women. [They] have gotten into the app for free through the generosity of other Woolfers, which is awesome." -Nina Lorez Collins

Nina Lorez Collins is the founder of The Woolfer, a community for women over 40. The Woolfer started as a Facebook group called "What Would Virginia Woolf Do?" and has recently migrated to its own platform and app.

Nina has written a book, What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself As I Attempt to Age Without Apology, which came out in April 2018. She's a graduate of Barnard College, has a Masters degree from Columbia in the field of Narrative Medicine, and has a long professional background in book publishing, both as a literary scout and then as an agent. She has four nearly grown children and lives in Brooklyn.

• Nina Lorez Collins on Facebook
• The Woolfer
• The Woolfer Facebook page
• What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself As I Attempt to Age Without Apology
• The Grown and Flown Facebook group
• Mighty Networks (formerly known as Mighty Bell)
• TopFan
• Why Paid Apps Could Be the Future of Online Communities (via Tech.co)

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Communities are good for business, but are businesses good for communities? This question has come up on the show before, specifically when we spoke to community hosts losing their Yahoo Groups and when IMDb's message boards were closed and erased. What happens when corporation-led communities are determined to have outlived their usefulness to the corporation, but not to the members? Does this lead to more grassroots-led communities? How will the tools and examples we've created serve those grassroots communities?

Bailey Richardson, a community professional that helped build Instagram and recently co-authored Get Together, and Patrick address these questions on this episode, as well as:

• The current community software landscape and why there's still room for growth
• What happens when you need to demote or ban a community leader
• Why graffiti is allowed on Instagram

Not all interactions can infinitely scale (10:08): "When we left [Instagram], people on our team [asked], 'What's the one thing that we should remember?' Our response was treating people well on a one-on-one basis, on a very human level, I think does scale. Those interactions that you build that are deep touch interactions, I think actually can have a very big impact on culture, on a platform overall, and that's a principle that I think a lot of people try, as their businesses get larger, to do anything in their power to not do high touch things with a small number of people. … I participated in building one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Some of what made the platform special was the fact that we met people who really cared about our platform where they were and got to know them and celebrated them." –@baileyelaine

How boundaries keep communities on track (17:40): "Sometimes the structure that you put in can help people actually access the value they want from you in the first place. … If I'm coming to your karate forum, I want to talk about karate. I'm not showing up to talk about politics." –@baileyelaine

When business goals outweigh community values (44:20): "There's something quite fragile about someone showing up for something that they care so much about that they contribute an outsized amount of effort to with very little expectation of any kind of financial or real reward in their life. … The thing that I worry most about is the reality of business is that ensuring those people's enjoyment, happiness, and respect is not the primary goal. … It's just painful to see them let down when you know the purity of the way they showed up for you, and when you can't match them with that, it's just a difficult thing to carry around." –@baileyelaine

Three years ago, Bailey Richardson started People & Company with Kai Elmer Sotto and Kevin Huynh, on a mission is to help people bring their people together. People & Company works with organizations to make smarter bets about investing in communities. They also interview extraordinary people organizers on their podcast Get Together, and in August 2019, they published Get Together, a book about how to build communities today based on the research and strategy work they've done with hundreds of community organizers. Bailey was also one of the first 10 employees at Instagram, working on the community team. She has also worked for IDEO, StoryCorps, Pop-Up Magazine and The California Sunday Magazine, made a short film about a Pinoy inventor named Dado Banatao, interviewed Russians who are LGBTQ about what their lives are really like, asked Casey Neistat how to make and share videos people love, and started a Mola Mola Fan Club.

• Bailey Richardson on Twitter
• Get Together, a book on building community with your people, written by Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto
• Get Together, a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building, hosted by Bailey, Kevin, and Kai
• People & Company, the consultancy that Bailey co-founded
• Quitting Instagram: She's one of the millions disillusioned with social media. But she also helped create it. (via the Washington Post)
• Drew Kelly, an early Instagram user
• Tonic is a curated news app from Canopy
• Bassey Etim is the editorial director at Canopy and former guest on Community Signal
• Bogleheads, a community inspired by John Bogle's investment ideologies
• Bailey names the following community platforms: Groups.io, Mighty Networks, Disciple, and Mixr
• Patrick names the following community platforms: Discourse, xenForo, and Invision
• Sarah Hawk is the vice president of community and product at Discourse
• CreativeMornings
• Heather Champ and the Biggest Threats to Great Online Communities
• Howard Rheingold, founder of the WELL
• IMDb's Message Boards and Why Trolls Don't Force Communities to Close

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Earlier this month, Verizon Media, the parent to Yahoo, announced that users of Yahoo Groups had until October 28th to continue posting in their groups and until December of this year to archive all of their conversations. After December, 18+ years of conversations will be erased from Verizon Media's servers and the internet entirely.

Obviously, the community is fighting back. Administrators of these groups, most of whom are unpaid volunteers, are working tirelessly to download their data, collect the email addresses of their community members and, in some cases, move people over to a new platform. As community professionals, we know that a migration like this can take months of planning, research, and communication to our communities. In this case, administrators had two weeks to figure things out.

In this episode, Patrick talks to two avid organizers of Yahoo Groups about the next steps for their communities and what they hope will come out of this situation. In both cases, they want the connections and resources fostered in their Yahoo Groups to be preserved.

Patrick and our guests, Susan Kang and Deane Rimerman, also discuss:

• The new tools that Deane and Susan will use to host their communities and why Nextdoor isn't one of them
• What it's really like to download your data from Yahoo Groups
• The importance of communities as archives and spaces for political action

Will legislators step in to protect our data? (11:59): "I find it fascinating that in Europe, they passed legislation to give you the right to be forgotten on the internet and this is almost like the opposite. It's like what rights do we have? Obviously, we're all guilty of entrusting our personal data, our community's data, to a corporation that didn't make very many good decisions, but at the same time we as a community created this data and it's going to take legislation, it's going to take new laws to actually protect this data. Unless there's a lot of political pressure before December 14th, we're going lose this data." –@deanerimerman

The Yahoo Groups shutdown is diluting the impact and purpose of communities (35:24): "I posted something recently asking people to call Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's office [in response to ConEdison raising utility rates to subsidize their fracking practices]. … Ordinarily, this would have gotten much more of a response. People are so hung up right now on 'What's the future of Yahoo Groups?' [that] I didn't get much of a response. … There's a lot of interesting and important political work that we need to be doing. That's getting lost in the fray because people are like, 'Where's my Google Group invite?'" –@Solidaritybitch

The inevitable loss of members due to this change (44:46): "We're definitely going to lose quite a lot of people because many of the people who are members of the group, they didn't even check their emails. They just occasionally log onto the interface and see what's going on. We're just going to lose them. I'm really sad about that." –@Solidaritybitch

On the importance of archiving (47:20): "My biggest concern in terms [of] online data and archiving is that I want people fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, who are researching projects and want to know the origins of great ideas and origins that made the world a better place, I want them to be able to dig through all of this information and find gems and find great stories and find, especially when it comes to the genealogy, remarkable people in their last years started sending emails and started writing some of their thoughts and ideas, and we'll never know who those people were. There was a chance we could have if we had more protection of our data." –@deanerimerman

Deane Rimerman is an archivist and content editor who manages Warrior Poets Society, an eco-poetry group that dates back to 2001. He's also involved with several other groups.

Susan Kang is an associate professor at John Jay College. She is responsible for the Jackson Heights Families Yahoo Group for parents, caretakers, and families living in Jackson Heights, New York who are interested in building a community with other families. It was started in 2004 and has over 4,000 members.

• Susan Kang on Twitter
• Deane Rimerman on Twitter
• Yahoo's announcement about the coming changes to Yahoo Groups
• eGroups.com
• Yahoo Groups Is Winding Down and All Content Will Be Permanently Removed via VICE
• Community Signal episode about Photobucket's changes with Jessamyn West and Jonathan Bailey
• Community Signal episode about IMDB's message board closure with Timo Tolonen
• Robert D. Putnam on social capital
• Archive.org
• Deleting Yahoo Groups will leave a permanent stain on Yahoo's legacy via Fast Company
• Groups.io
• Yahoo users united to right the Yahoo wrongs
• Nextdoor Rolls Out Product Fix It Hopes Will Stem Racial Profiling via Buzzfeed News
• In Jackson Heights
• How New York Politics Has Changed via Jacobin
• Posterous
• Jackson Heights Life bulletin board
• Armed with Visions
• The Armed with Visions blog

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

For communities that come with a membership fee, direct revenue might seem like the top benefit for your company. But the Daily Maverick's membership program gives them direct access to their most engaged readers, which has created benefits beyond revenue. The Daily Maverick has hired employees through its community, grown new company verticals thanks to the support of its community, and has given readers and writers a way to interact directly with one another about the stories they're most interested in.

Styli Charalambous, the co-founder and publisher of Daily Maverick, also shares the unique perspective of a founder building a membership program from the ground up, who then hires a member of the community to run the show. This episode will leave you with great starting points for discussing the ROI of community programs and a lot of inspiration around how to keep community members engaged.

Styli and Patrick also discuss:

• Why Daily Maverick doesn't have a paywall on its website
• How Daily Maverick approaches comments and allowing access to its community
• Daily Maverick's robust events and publishing strategy

The goals and value of Maverick Insider (4:05): "The primary focus on this effort is to build this community and to engage with the community. It's not [about] making money. Making money is a byproduct of doing that job well and growing the community and having a healthy level of engagement and support and interaction with those community members. That's the difference. [The community is not] just a transactional thing that is the gatekeeper access to content, it's about relationships, and that's the key differentiator in my mind between a membership program and a subscription program or even a donation program." –@StyliChara

Giving reporters a space to interact with their readers (13:50): "Some of our journalists still have PTSD from the previous comments platform. Some aren't that keen on participating in comments. We're not going to force them. … Some say they prefer to engage with members and readers in event format and so they'll do it in the physical space. Obviously, the more politicized the contents, the easier it is for it to descend into toxicity. We find certain sections of the site, some journalists are more open to participating and engaging in the comments section than some trickier content areas." –@StyliChara

Styli Charalambous is the co-founder and publisher of Daily Maverick, a 10-year-old startup, focusing on news, analysis, and investigative journalism, based in South Africa. He oversees all non-editorial functions of the business and is a reformed accountant. He is the architect of their membership plan, Maverick Insider, and has written for the publication on business, sport, media, and other topics.

• Styli Charalambous on Twitter
• The Daily Maverick
• Maverick Insider
• How the Daily Maverick developed its membership program via Nieman Lab
• Civil Comments
• Coral
• Andrew Losowsky, head of the Coral Project, on Community Signal
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.