Building Communities: The Art of Connection

Building Communities: The Art of Connection

In today's hyper-connected world, people are no longer bound by geographic neighborhoods, cities, or even countries. The concept of community transcends borders, bringing together like-minded individuals through shared values and interests.

While it might seem straightforward to pick a niche and start a community, building a thriving one requires more than shared interests—it demands vision, strategy, and an unwavering focus on human connection.

Defining Your Purpose

How do you go about starting a community from scratch?

The process is simple at its core: determine what your group aims to achieve and why it exists. Purpose isn't just the "why," but also the "who." Understanding your target audience is crucial for determining their needs and curating experiences that will engage and grow the community.

Whether it's fostering professional growth, supporting a social cause, or simply sharing a passion, a well-defined purpose serves as the foundation for all community activities.

For instance, Women Founders Bay, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, grew into one of the Bay Area's most active networks of 500+ women by rallying around a singular goal: closing the funding gap for female entrepreneurs. I was working with Girls in Tech, prior to joining as COO of Women Founders Bay, to empower women, provide workshops, curate events, and build a strong community of female founders.

If there's one thing you should know about living in San Francisco, it's that everyone is always in hustle mode, working on 20 different things. The only way to stay sane (at least for me) is through health and wellness.

Hear me out—running at 7 am on a Saturday morning with people you just met, cold plunging for 10 minutes straight, and heading to the sweat tent for an intimate sauna session—count me in!

In an effort to get back into fitness and start running again, I joined Bay Area Run Club. Starting with just 100 people on our first run, we've now grown to a community of 7k on Strava and 28k on Instagram. While helping organize runs, secure sponsorships, manage vendor stalls, handle registrations, and create social media content, I realized the immense time and effort community building requires, along with the diverse stack of tools needed to manage just one community—from Instagram and Strava to Apple Wallet QR codes and third-party events platforms.

While I started building communities through Bay Area Run Club and Women Founders Bay, my real growth in this position happened through Vently.

Creating Value

Once you've defined your purpose, the next step is delivering value. Communities thrive when their members feel they're gaining something meaningful—knowledge, resources, opportunities, or even just a sense of belonging.

In a post-Covid era, people are yearning for authentic connections, chance encounters, and meaningful interactions. As someone who thrives on social interaction, meeting new people, and curating experiences, we set out to host the best events in San Francisco.

How did we do this?

By doing the things that don't scale—what does that mean? We partnered with nearly every run club, social club, small business, events host, and organization in the 7x7 miles area. We've collaborated with TechCrunch Disrupt, SF Standard, Golden State Warriors, SF Social Club, Founders Bay, Women Founders Bay, Darwinian Ventures, Courtside Angels, The Faight Collective, Tribe Social Club, Orangetheory SF, Thursday SF, Mana Society, Volo Sports, Global Entrepreneurs Hub... to name a few.

Each event provided an opportunity to make people feel welcome, valued, and seen, but more importantly, to give them third spaces for making meaningful connections.

Value can come in many forms. For online communities, this might mean offering exclusive content, organizing engaging webinars, or facilitating peer-to-peer connections. For in-person groups, it could be hosting events or providing access to tools and resources that members can't find elsewhere. The key is to continuously listen to your community and evolve based on their feedback.

Fostering Engagement

Communities are about connection, and connection thrives on engagement. Building engagement starts with creating spaces—physical or digital—where members feel safe, heard, and valued. Encourage conversations by posing questions, sharing stories, and recognizing individual contributions.

And we did exactly that—opened up Vently HQ as an open-invite Dinner with Strangers concept where the team cooks a full 3-course meal for 10 strangers with placards set to spark conversations, make life-long friends, and offer our home base as a safe space for people genuinely trying to meet new people.

Vently may have started out as a couple of 20-year-olds trying to build the new social network for events, but through the process of partnering, building, and working with communities—we made the decision to (wait for it—PIVOT—please read in the Friends voice). Building the next social network is great and ambitious, but building an end-to-end community management platform is more rewarding as community builders ourselves.

Building communities comes from a place of empathy, love, and care—a place to build something greater than ourselves. Not to be too cheesy, but it is what fuels the very core of what Vently stands for.

Scaling Without Losing Soul

As communities grow, it's easy to lose the intimate, personal feel that made them special. Scaling a community requires balancing growth with authenticity. Building Vently couldn't have been possible without our very first supporters—the Ambassador Team—who believed in us when we were just an idea, a thought, a belief that we could bring SF back together under the umbrella of genuine, meaningful connections.

By staying true to the original purpose and leading with empathy, the tone was set for the culture and values that permeate every interaction across every Vently event.

Conclusion

Building a community is both an art and a science. It's about more than just gathering people; it's about creating a space where individuals feel connected, valued, and empowered. Whether you're fostering a global movement or a small local group, remember: the heart of every thriving community is its people. On a final note, Vently V2 is so much bigger than building a social network...stay tuned.

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