(work in progress)
We rarely talk about community in terms of business value, but it is so important to highlight the value of the work you are doing within your organizations as a community leader.
Communities grow your return on investment. Investment not only in terms of the tooling that you use, but in your people.
Community builders help bring people together and connect them to learn new things, share experiences, collect feedback, and ensure that we all feel welcome.
While people are learning from each other and connecting with each other, they are learning how to be more productive, working across departments, and solving business problems.
I was recently inspired by Erica Kuhl, who built a 3 million+ member community at Salesforce from scratch. She shared how she was able to prove the value of community at Salesforce in her talk, “Building Community is Smart Business.”
With this return on investment in mind, building a community will help do these three things:
Improve your organization’s productivity
Increase adoption
Accelerate innovation
The community work you do within your organization should increase your visibility within your company and help grow your career. People will not automatically see this though. You have to be able to share metrics on this return on investment.
So you’re ready to start your own community?
The best community organizers do not have to come from a specific community background or even have a community title. If you listen to other high-profile community leaders, you will repeatedly hear that empathy is one of the most important traits. You may find these empathetic people in customer-facing roles, like support or customer success or…a restaurant.
I shared in my talk at the RStudio Conference that everything I learned about community building comes from growing up in my mom’s restaurant.
How do you find people at your company to join the data science community?
Use LinkedIn to see who in your area or at your company may also be using data science. For example, who is also part of the “Python Developers Community” or “The R Project for Statistical Computing” groups? (You can use a free trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator to be able to more easily search by company - or reach out to me if you need help)
Ask a few people that you find if they would be interested in building this with you. Starting small is great, find a core group of people to get the group going consistently
Create a Slack/Teams/other channel for people to connect.
Try scheduling a Lunch & Learn session every other week. Tell people to invite their friends. They may not realize how powerful their own networks are. When you get people together you can share what you’re all working on from different departments.
Give people an understanding of what’s possible to help it to spread organically. Start sharing recordings of your sessions with something that you learned in this Slack/Teams/other channel that you created
Build a blog to share upcoming events and past sessions with people interested in joining. Make it easy for people to add an event to their calendar with free tools like AddEvent.
Ask those who come to an event (or those who express interest) what they would like to learn and also what they can teach others.
Thank people for joining!
Check out the Champion site for additional tips.