DevRel Scribbles
  • What are Scribbles?
  • Index
  • Developer Advocacy
  • Developer Advocates
  • Life as a developer advocate
  • Modernising Red Hat’s enterprise developer program
  • Engaging 9-year-old software developers
  • Making 22-year-olds love 26-year-old software
  • Dogfooding developer products: gathering insights from internal hackathons
  • How far does your ethical responsibility stretch for the tech your devs create?
  • Outside the lecture theatre
  • How do you design programs for diversity?
  • Build the Platform Your Developers Actually Want
  • Measuring dev rel programs far beyond marketing activities
  • Developer Evangelism
    • Developer Evangelists
    • How to rock a technical keynote
    • The Art of Slide Design
    • The Art of Talk Design
    • The Art of Story Design
    • Dev events beyond 2021
  • Developer Experience
    • The Power of Content
    • Building a Developer Community in an Enterprise World
    • How to lose a dev in three ways
    • Developer relations, why is it needed?
    • The hierarchy of developer needs
    • GitHub is your documentation landing page
    • Docs as engineering
    • Commit messages vs. release notes
    • A11y pal(ly)- crafting universally good docs
    • Inspiring and empowering users to become great writers, and why that’s important
    • Solving internal technical documentation at Spotify
  • Community Management
    • Building community flywheels
    • DevRel = Community Management?
    • Creating high-quality communities
    • How to grow a healthy Open-Source community?
    • Managing communities at scale
    • Using community to drive growth
    • Useful community success metrics
    • Communities aren't funnels
    • How to mobilise your community during a pandemic
  • Managing a DevRel Team
    • Developer Relations + Product
    • Distributed developer relations
    • Understanding company goals
    • DevRel Qualified Leads (DQL)
    • Path to success for DevRel
    • How to move up in your organization
    • Four pillars of DevRel
    • Building your DevRel dream team
    • Managing the burnout burn-down
    • I messed up and I’m going to get fired
    • How to report on community relationships without being creepy about it
    • How to scale a developer relations team
  • Misc
    • Is developer relations right for you?
    • Tooling your way to a great DevRel Team
    • Planning your DevRel career
    • Success metrics as narratives
    • Get executive buy-in or else
    • Introduction to the AAARRRP devrel strategy framework
    • Strategy for developer outreach
    • Connecting dev rel and product
    • Performance DevRel
    • Ultimate cheat codes for healthier travel
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  • Summary:
  • Scribble:
  • Ways to increase the quantity/quality of activity
  • Community funnel of hope
  • Flywheel
  • Takeaways
  • Example of a Flywheel

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  1. Community Management

Building community flywheels

Let's take a dive into learning what flywheels are and how to make them, eventually using them to build better communities.

PreviousSolving internal technical documentation at SpotifyNextDevRel = Community Management?

Last updated 3 years ago

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Summary:

  • Every community builder out there has felt like this at some point -- finding that initial traction with ongoing discussions can be hard.

    • Start with easy discussions, like introduction posts.

    • Experiment with writing posts

    • Creating a regular or ritual post

  • The point with all of these mini flywheels is you can’t write stuff and expect magic to happen, you need to find actions to elevate your content.

  • Great communities are built on great ethics, kindness, and human behavior.

  • Build all that ⬆️ into your community, one small flywheel at a time.

  • Community guidelines do not make a great culture, actions do.

Having a flywheel that encourages great community culture not only encourages others to copy your ‘good actions, but featuring selected community activities also indicates things you want to see within the community.

  • Giving and helping are at the heart of great communities.

  • Community culture does not happen overnight.

  • Flywheels take practice, lots and lots of practice. Failing is a part of the process.

  • Flywheels are the things you do, the process, the daily tasks.

Scribble:

  • The main challenge faced by a community builder -- trying to achieve a constant flow of activity.

  • A thriving community is one that feels like there is the right balance of activity.

Ways to increase the quantity/quality of activity

  • more discussions

  • more members

  • creating more value

  • events that matter

  • more connection

Community funnel of hope

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  • Consider funnels in terms of flywheels.

    • Effective flywheel creates energy

    • Energy leads to growth 📈

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Flywheel

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  • Instead of funnels, we are using flywheels

  • An effective flywheel creates energy or traction, which then naturally leads to growth.

  • The key is to figure out a set of actions that support each other and keep doing them

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Build on Flywheel

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  • bring energy and traction, usually in the form of more or higher quality activity

  • add value to the community

  • align with your goals and vision

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Life of Flywheel

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  • A flywheel or multiple connected flywheels have grown and evolved there will be a time it comes to a natural end.

  • What worked 5 or 10 years ago most certainly won’t work today.

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Takeaways

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  • flywheel actions like this will help you get where you want to be

  • people will naturally gravitate towards you when you come to launch a blog, a newsletter, podcast or a community.

  • when you have that gravity = people join your community!

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The things are great to know people, but how does it translate to building community?

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You can’t build community without:

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  • Knowing your people

  • Conversing with them

  • Creating something of value

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Example of a Flywheel

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“I want more members” flywheels

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  • Think about what it is members need

  • How you can align that to your community vision

  • Start by getting to know your people.

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On Twitter (Example)

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  • Instead of subscribing to their newsletter, you follow them. Bonus points for building trust by participating in the conversation.

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  • The above are a few examples of creating flywheels and how it evolves further using Twitter as a real-life example can be seen below.

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There are more examples of flywheels on the , make sure you check them out! 👋🏼😊

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Let’s build some community flywheels - Orbit
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