How to federate a community? The Makesense inspiration

Newsletter June 2017

What is a community?

Delbourg-Delphis thus defines the notion of "tribe": "A group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader and connected to an idea" (in preface to the Tribes of Seth Godin). The community is characterised by both the quality of its connections and the attachment to a person and/or a vision. It consists of your customers but also of your suppliers, of your employees and even of your competitors, if they pursue the same purpose and the same vision as you. This vision can be attached to your brand, to a particular product or to the founder of it (think of your iPhone).

Loic the die, in his Article, also speaks of the community as an indispensable force for any company. It allows to be close to the beneficiaries and thus to understand their need in order to answer them in the most pertinent way.
A group of people is not de facto a community, and this transition from a group to a community is far from obvious. A community is a grouping of individuals who share one or more affinities and are willing to claim them as an integral part of their identity. Thus, a common passion among many people makes it a group, but it is necessary to develop an identity so that it becomes a community, that each individual has a sense of belonging and can recognize in each of the other members.

In the case of a digital community, like a Facebook group, developing this sense of belonging is not easy. Loic The Meur explains to us that we must do everything to stimulate interactions between individuals. Regular posts, creating small games, giving the floor to everyone in tagguant directly some in the post are essential elements to federate.
It is also important to directly contact a few Members who are personally known to ask them to interact on the group, create and respond to the posts, to encourage other members to "break the ice" and get started.

MakeSense and its community

The Incubator MakeSense is a place where the community is at the heart of innovation. The holds up, MakeSense's flagship exercise, allows anyone to come and submit their problems to the community, a kind of collaborative brainstorming.
For example, an entrepreneur who created a "5-way Box" aimed at improving the moral well-being of hospitalized patients came to solicit the community around a hold up in order to define a name, a slogan and an identity for its product. About fifteen "gangsters" gathered in the challenge room for 2h to answer his problems.
Here, the link between this community is the desire to move things, to show that business can make sense. Every individual, entrepreneur or volunteer has the deep conviction that one can undertake in respect of his values.

The 25 000 volunteers also form a community, brought together by the desire to help and share. Present on all continents, the MakeSense model is replicated to infinity. Wherever there are entrepreneurs, MakeSense has an active community ready to face challenges, the only condition being that they have a beneficial, environmental or social impact.

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The Isahit community

MakeSense has greatly inspired isahit on this point, in addition to having them incubated in their premises. MakeSense has enabled Isahit to better understand the strength of the community, the benefits and above all the help and support it could bring to a global deployment. MakeSense's experience has positively influenced the implementation of methodology on the community of Hiteuses, a still modest community that has a hundred people to date.

Isahit is working to develop his community of workers. The hiteuses are on Facebook newsgroups or they help each other in difficulties.

The importance of the community for us is paramount, firstly for a qualitative purpose; What better way to provide explanations than a person who has been through the same difficulties?

Everyone can ask a question, answer to others, as freely as possible. This has many advantages, creating interactions between our workers is necessarily more rewarding than one-way trade workers isahit. Each one is thus an actor of the good functioning of the platform, if not responsible for the progress of the latter.

The dynamic created allows to increase the motivation, and thus the productivity.

Different means are put in place in order to consolidate this mindset: regular posts, the election of the hiteuse of the month or the realization of videos tutorial often initiating debates in commentary and bringing up questions in each . Isahit's ambition is to federate at 3/4 years a community of more than 10 000 people. Isahit will keep you informed of developments and will share its feedback.

Sources:
http://https://medium.com/@loic/a-Few-thoughts-and-tips-on-Communities-b4d880b1e47f
http://www.usine-digitale.fr/Editorial/Tomorrow-community-Manager-Will-le-poste-le-Better-pay-of-your-Company. N321917