🕒 Time: 15-30 minutes

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Who: Solo or group exercise

🧠 Type: Ideation (no wrong answers)

📓 Medium: Computer or paper

⭐️ Read this article before completing this worksheet: The Five Communal Advantages

After reading the article, use the table below to brainstorm how you can solve problems your members are facing with community in a way that content can’t.

  1. Choose a problem that your members might be struggling with (you can pull from the turpentine exercise for this if you like).
  2. Write down how it can be solved by a piece of content first.
  3. Then, write down how community can solve that problem using each of the five advantages: Breadth, Personalization, Timeliness, Access, and Camaraderie.

Repeat this process for 3-5 problems until you have a strong list of ideas you can try with your community.

EXAMPLE:

Problem: A member is trying to figure out what community software they should use.
Content solution: Publish a guide on how to select community software with a comparison chart of the features of each.
Community solutions: 1. Breadth: Encourage the member to ask others in the community, “What is your favorite platform and why?”.

  1. Personalization: Encourage the member to share the list of platforms they’re considering and ask for feedback.

  2. Timeliness: Post a monthly thread where members share the newest community technology they’ve discovered.

  3. Access: Host a private discussion group with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule so members can share their real opinions about the software without fear of angering the vendor.

  4. Camaraderie: Start a discussion about how damn stressful it is to select a piece of software and how annoying it is that all of these platforms are so opaque in their pricing and features.

  5. Collaboration: Host a hackathon for members who want to work together to build new plugins for their community software. |

Are all of these ideas good? Nope. But I came up with them in five minutes and there are definitely some gems. The private group discussion where you get to collectively poop on software actually sounds like it would be super fun and valuable.