Conversation with Nick deWilde of Jungle Gym. Uncommunity #32
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Hi friends,
Today’s AMA is with the one and only Nick deWilde 👇
Nick writes about career strategy, learning, and the changing nature of work at Jungle Gym.
How do communities facilitate learning?
I view learning as a series of behaviors that encode knowledge into the brain.
One of the goals of any good educational institution should be to design experiences that encourage these pro-learning behaviors.
According to Stanford behavioral scientist, BJ Fogg, in order to activate behaviors, like the ones needed for learning, three elements are needed:
Ability – which makes it easier to accomplish a given behavior
Motivation – which increases our desire to perform a behavior
Prompts – which trigger us to take action
Community plays a role in maximizing all three elements.
1. Community and ability
Community makes learning easier by giving students access to other people who can share knowledge, tools, and best practices. For example, let’s say you’re learning about web3– a community can point you toward high-quality whitepapers and answer questions to clarify challenging topics. These benefits increase your ability to build mental models around the knowledge you’re trying to learn.
2. Community and motivation
When it comes to learning, motivation is the community’s killer use case. By gathering learners who are on a similar journey, communities can leverage the power of mimetic desire to create a healthy sense of competition among learners. Along with the healthy inter-community competition, a well-run group can also bond learners and give them a sense of shared identity that allows them to persist and stay motivated in the face of distraction.
How can creators capture attention in a world full of hype and build authentic communities?
Attention is scarce these days. To keep members engaged, I’m seeing a lot of community builders leverage some combination of social and financial incentives. For example, I’m part of a few web3 communities that are using tokens, NFT drops, and contests to keep members excited. As the value of these underlying assets goes up, members tend to be willing to give more time and attention to the community. While these activities can sometimes be a bit “gimmicky,” I think gifting people scarce digital goods with monetary value, may just be table stakes for capturing attention at this point.
How did you come up with the format of The Jungle Gym, and how can community leaders create content to keep their communities engaged?
You can’t go wrong with creating content that solves your member’s problems. There are so many challenges people face that come from a lack of knowledge. I suggest listening to your members, figuring out their problems, and leveraging other members in your community to help uncover solutions.
With The Jungle Gym, I try to write posts that either give my readers practical knowledge that will help them accomplish their career goals, or help them uncover new ideas and frameworks that they may not have found on their own.
Your piece on The Rise of Platform Brands talks about how companies are leveraging their employees to build mutually beneficial audiences. How can creators implement a similar approach within their communities?
Instead of promoting your community, promote your members and their accomplishments. By giving your platform to your members, their audiences will grow, and they will help draw new members into your community.
What advice would you give to people who want to build an audience?
I think a lot of my best audience-building advice is summed up in this post about Audience as a Career Moat. But the tl;dr would be:
Figure out your career goals
Identify what kind of audience would best serve those goals
Uncover what kind of information that audience needs to succeed in their own lives
Build an engagement vehicle that can deliver the information they need
Get that engagement vehicle in front of people who match your core audience persona.
Follow Nick on Twitter.
What we’re reading?
Wondering about the transition from social media to community management? Coda and @StephNakano have you covered. This Rise of the Community Leader talks about the impact of influence, empathy, and how the community feels like social media 10 years ago. Read more about this transition here.
What a community means in the modern world of startups? We have a firm belief that a thriving community is a company’s most valuable asset, community scales your business, resources, and presence in ways that traditional marketing or advertising channels can’t. When done right, the community enables and improves customer acquisition, streamlines support and success, bolsters retention, and provides crucial product insights. Discover the community meaning in this article.
Advice for the Pre-Product/Market Fit Days — This Founder’s Playbook for Pivoting with Purpose. “Behind the scenes, almost every founder story is the same: work tirelessly on an idea, do all kinds of crazy things that don’t scale, struggle to find traction, iterate and pivot before finally hitting on the thing that has product/market fit,” says Tara Viswanathan, co-founder, and CEO of Rupa Health. These are the inside stories you won’t find in the press releases, which often chop off the first years of chaos. Learn how to scale from zero to one in this First Round's Pre-Product/Market Fit Playbook.
Time, Patience, and Work
Community first, rewards later
Mini improvement process 101
Community Economy is not a lie.
The community advantage
What’s new at Uncommunity?
Like or comment on your favorite community resources.
Products Added:
Book Added:
Customer Community - A Fresh Approach to Customer Success.
Report Added:
State of Community Management, 2021 - India - Get key insights on the challenges, impact, and growth of online communities in India.
Career Corner
Uncommunity job board has exploded with nearly 15 new amazing roles. If you want to have a role featured or are a job seeker, click here! Check out the jobs from companies like Twitter, Morning Brew, Slack, The Souled Store, Notion, and more.
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