Hugh Lashbrooke

I have previously written about how you can set the stage for people in your community to create connections between each other. While that post outlines a starting point – a way to initiate your community platform and get people talking – what happens down the line? As a community grows, new challenges are discovered and new solutions are needed.

There is still a lot that you, as a community builder, can do to encourage community connections regardless of the size or scale of your community. In fact, I believe there are five key principles that, should you put genuine effort into them, will not only set your community up for success but will provide fertile ground for it to flourish for years to come.

I would like to take the time to really dive into these principles – look at each one, understand why they’re important, and look at key implementation tactics for them. In order to do this justice, I’ll use a new post for each one, so you can follow along each week on my blog to see them all.

Seeking and building community is a deeply human need – we can’t always articulate why we do things a certain way, but we have a strong intuitive understanding of the fact that we are all seeking community.

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Before I get started with these posts, I want to give one caveat: when you read about each principle, your first thought will likely be along the lines of “well yeah – that’s obvious…” and there’s a good reason for that! Seeking and building community is a deeply human need – we can’t always articulate why we do things a certain way or what elements we need in place to build a great community, but we have a strong intuitive understanding of the fact that we are all seeking community and what we expect that community to look like.

For that reason, it’s often easy to gloss over topics like this after reading the first few lines because there’s an inherent sense of familiarity with the subject matter even if we’ve never read about it before. I would encourage you not to do that here (or anywhere!) – there’s power in articulating these thoughts and putting them into words that you never had before. When you read about a topic that you might feel you already know about, there’s a high chance that you’ll either find a new perspective or you will discover that you might not have already known as much about it as you thought.