Communities

A community is a group of people within a population, with a shared identity around some commonality. 

Communities were often geographic in nature, but the advent of the internet has given rise to digital community opportunities unlinked to any shared location or geography.

Digital communities can form organically around themes or be conceived, created and organised centrally. 

When working to create a community you should consider what different groups there will be within the community and how you may need to communicate with them independently or in combination.

As an example I will use ideas and terms I used for Ford's eSports team: Fordzilla. Which I was loosely involved with from a social media perspective in the launch phase during the second half of 2019. 

The following graphics are not numerical in nature. They serve to illustrate ideas. 


Population

The pool of people in which to grow a community: like a petri dish.

Staff

The small core of users involved in conception, planning and delivery of "Fordzilla".

I created the private Telegram the group: "Fordzilla Crew" for speedy communication between the group of people responsible for decisions and creating the eSports team.

This could have been done traditionally, over email for example, but the sooner one moves away from email the easier it is later on when wishing to communicate with other community groups.


Captains

By the end of 2019 Fordzilla had teams in five counties each team with one captain.

I was not involved in Staff to Captain communication. I would have again used Telegram or jumped directly to our community platform, but my understanding is that a WhatsApp group was created.


Team Members

Team members in each country, picked by the team captain.

Team captains may of course have need of a communication channel where they can communicate  directly with their team members. What they use for that is really up to them.

From a Staff perspective and beyond communicating with captains our next level up would be for "Team communication" encompassing Captains and Team Members. For that it was logical to look to use our Discord community. Where I used roles within Discord to set up private text and voice channels which are only visible to captains and team members.


Team Fans

Fans and advocates.
The size of the community is the number who count themselves as a Fordzilla fan or advocate.

Fans are the last internal community layer.  Communication beyond fans speaks for, not to the community.

As Fordzilla has teams across a number of different countries we are using country channels in the discord community. Each captain and their team members have wider permissions, again defined by roles, within their team channel allowing them to moderate and chat with fans within their country channel.

Fans can post in their team channel and communicate directly with each other; with their team captains and with their team members.


Fordzilla communications

The branded Fordzilla channels allow staff to publish communications as "Fordzilla".

Public channels communicate externally and encourage people to feel they are connected and actively join the community.

Conclusion

This isn't a blueprint for community building generally, each situation is different: but it should serve to illustrate that community building has requirements for communication between different groups which serve different roles.

Where possible you should seek to use a set of tools that is known to the user base you are wanting to become a part of your community. As Fordzilla is gaming related, our use of Discord seemed to be the right community tool initially in this case.

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