Building the Heartbeat Community

I’ve always thought of community as something akin to a party. A thing that forms largely by happenstance, where the people involved are connected through discrete and clear purposes: Socializing, relaxing after a long work week, meeting new people.

So when I found myself in the role of building the Heartbeat community, I initially struggled to see a bigger picture. I had the vague sense that the main priority should be centered on putting the needs and desires of community members first—much in the same way I’d want to be a good host at a party.

But to sustain and grow a community over time, I’ve learned it takes quite a bit more than hanging streamers and making sure the punch bowl stays filled.

I’ve been reflecting on this work a lot recently. It’s easy enough to settle into day-to-day routines. For me, that’s the grind of editing, publishing, and promoting our contributor tutorials and in-house content. That, primarily, is the what of my work for Heartbeat. But it’s another thing entirely to take a few steps back and consider the how and why.

A few weeks ago, I came across a helpful article over at CMX that addressed “The 7 P’s of Community.” It has that classic listicle feel, for sure, but I related to the in-depth conceptualization of all the moving parts involved in building, growing, and maintaining a healthy community. So I thought it might be helpful to dig deeper into our own community through the lenses offered in the article (see below):

People

I’ve had a winding path to my position as Heartbeat’s Community Manager. I’ve written a book of poetry (shameless self-promo here 😏), taught college courses, counseled at-risk kids, sold cable/Internet door-to-door, and more. Very different experiences, certainly, but the common thread for me has always been the people.

Thinking deeply about people and their stories; that feeling when a student grasped a writing concept; the counselor-client relationship; and even the experience of a potential customer telling me something intimate about their pet guinea pig—it all starts with these kinds of experiences and eventually loops back.

Managing Heartbeat, this focus on people has intensified and sharpened. Here are a few specific questions I’ve been turning over:

  • Who are the people I’m working with? This is a complicated, nuanced question, especially since almost all of my communication is digital and filtered through online avatars. All members are different: their careers, their interests, their motivations, their cultural backgrounds. It’s important to slow down when communicating so that I effectively consider all these intersecting factors.
  • How do I align our community strategy with what our members truly value? Is it technical help? Is it a sense of belonging and camaraderie? Is it exclusivity and status? All of these and more are valid reasons for joining a professional community. It’s important to keep this in mind as I consider how much and what to share, how aggressive to be in recruiting new members, and in thinking about what kinds of events and outreach efforts align with our vision.
  • What “personas” is Heartbeat trying to reach? This has been one of the more difficult things to understand and manage. Our central focus is mobile machine learning, and we’ve been working to tailor our content and approach to mobile developers. But we also have a strong stake in web-based ML, and these folks also produce great work and are passionate about what they do. Balancing these related but slightly separate interests has been a difficult but worthwhile challenge.
  • Who is our community for and who isn’t it for? Part of me would like to open my arms and welcome everyone under the sun into the fold. That’s just a part of who I am. But in truth, we’re looking for folks who are serious and thoughtful about the work they do in this machine learning/mobile development space. Passion and shared vision. These distinctions have been key in creating healthy but sustainable growth.

Purpose

We strive to make mobile machine learning as approachable as possible for mobile developers, data scientists, and more. This could be a basic definition of our community’s purpose, but I want to dig a bit deeper.

A more essential question might be, Why does our community need to exist? Simply-worded, but with some more nuanced answers, I’ve realized:

  • Discrete Business Goals: It would be disingenuous to suggest that our purpose with the Heartbeat community is disconnected from our business interests. It is indeed a fundamental part of our strategy at Comet. Relatively speaking, mobile machine learning is an emerging field. Building a community centered on this developing tech serves as a way to start conversations, spark passions, and ultimately direct people towards our developer tools, which will ultimately help them realize the mobile experiences they’ve dreamed up.
  • Alignment with company culture and values: If the preceding notion is off-putting, I very much sympathize! Nobody wants to just be a customer or a piece of a sales puzzle. Comet truly values inclusivity, diversity, and democratizing machine learning tools to try to make the world a better place. This culture certainly feeds into my work with Heartbeat. We want every member’s voice to be heard and considered. As long as these values remain at the core of what I do, then everything else seems to fall into place.
  • Belonging and fulfillment: This is certainly a more abstract purpose, but to me it’s a highly-motivating one. My favorite part of my day is when I receive a message from a contributor who’s thrilled to see their work published or is excitedly pitching their newest idea. This is my main source of fuel.

Place

Every community needs a location in order to transform it from a random gathering of individuals into an established, structured environment. A few thoughts on the place of Heartbeat:

  • Heartbeat is a global community. The challenge, then, is building a digital space that transcends things like time zones, cultural and language barriers, and more. On the other hand, this diversity also creates a more innovative and well-rounded community.
  • Extending outside of our own community. This is admittedly something we haven’t been as effective at, but it’s a personal goal of mine to contribute to and be supportive of other community spaces. How can I expect others to join and engage with our community if I’m not willing to do the same?

Participation

Which law of Newton’s defines how an object in motion stays in motion? And vice versa? Well, I’m finding that one of the more difficult elements of managing a digital community where folks are spread all around the world is incentivizing and promoting communication and engagement. And, subsequently, harnessing that engagement to keep some momentum going.

So many things draw on our attention, so the challenge is to create a compelling and worthwhile environment that keeps people coming back.

This is ultimately about creating meaningful experiences that show we’re thoughtfully considering the needs and desires of our community members — making them feel valued through their own and others’ participation. Here are a few things we’ve tried (with varying levels of success):

  • Regular live events that encourage participation
  • Creating new roles for contributors within the community (i.e. beta testers, other forms of evangelism)
  • A full team effort in providing swift and thoughtful responses to all kinds of questions and concerns

Policy

This is more dry than some of the other elements, but equally essential. Good community policy makes people feel safe, valued, and it also can communicate the intentions behind the community itself. Some things we’ve instituted:

  • Contributor guidelines to maintain a healthy, safe atmosphere for everyone. This is especially important given the cultural diversity of the Heartbeat community.
  • Aligning company values with community values: This is less a written document and more of an implicit understanding among our team about how our values of inclusivity, thoughtfulness, and a supportive mindset pervade our work with the community.
  • Standardization: We’ve crafted standardized processes for our contributor program, contributor sharing, and more. This way, our community members are rarely caught off guard by anything we do. This helps us be as transparent and fair as possible.

Promotion

Ugh. Promotion. I’ve never been a good salesman (the door-to-door experiment ended in spectacularly bad fashion), and the promo part of this job is the most difficult for me personally. Unfortunately, building a tech community isn’t like Field of Dreams…

Kevin Costner had the benefit of some supernatural shenanigans and the long, storied history of baseball on his side. We have an emerging tech domain that a lot of people are skeptical about. Therefore, promotion is key. Here’s what I’ve come to realize:

  • Growth “vs” Engagement: Ah, the crux of it all, really. How do we grow in healthy, sustainable ways that don’t discourage engagement? How do we bring the people we want into the fold? What are reasonable expectations for growth? This is the dichotomy that keeps me up at night, and I’m sure it will continue to be something I grapple with moving forward.
  • Living the community: This is more of a personal concern, but as a community manager, I need to be able to live the values of our community. This means engaging with other related communities, being deliberate about what I post on social media, and crafting my professional identity around connecting people and promoting mobile machine learning more generally.
  • Willingness to take risks and adjust course if necessary: I’ve always been a bit risk-averse. However, this role has been huge for me in terms of breaking me out of my cautious nature. I’ve been encouraged to try new outreach efforts and new styles of communication. Not everything has worked, but it all feeds into a growing bank of experience.
  • Intentionality: All of the above must be done with intentionality and a sense of purpose. It’s easy to slip into autopilot mode, where I’m checking items off a list to get to the end of the day. But when I’m most engaged, my intentions closely align with the community’s interests, as detailed throughout this post.

Performance

I referenced growth vs engagement in the preceding section and posed some open-ended questions about this dynamic. But to actually work towards answers to these questions, we’ve had to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of our content strategy, community engagement efforts, and our goals as an organization:

  • Content: We try not to get too far into the weeds with content analytics, as we’re not currently as worried about specific, concrete conversions (think clicking the “checkout” button to complete a purchase). As such, metrics around readership work well enough for us at this point—daily active users, bounce rates, new vs returning users, and page views. However, we do pay close attention to how much the community and other readers engage with content most closely aligned with our business goals (mobile-based tutorials).
  • Engagement: Every few weeks, we create simple reports that track engagement in our Slack group, which is the primary organizing mechanism for Heartbeat. Things like number of members, number of active posters, and identifying the most influential or “valuable” members (in terms of alignment with our tech focus) are all data points of interest. We also collect basic data on our live events, such as how many (and who) attend and event feedback to help tailor our efforts more effectively.
  • Business Objectives: We’re still very much in the brand/tech awareness and education phase of our community. While our SDK is now generally available to mobile developers, we understand that this community, as a true entry into a sales funnel, has to first be an educational, supportive, and technically-robust place where mobile developers who might not know where to start with machine learning can come to read tutorials, ask questions, and chat with other developers embarking on this new technical journey.

Conclusion

I’m continuing to learn, continuing to grow, continuing to flesh out my identity as Heartbeat’s Community Manager. I’d like to end this post by thanking everyone who’s made these last 9 months of my life and career possible.

Also, a call for help! If you’ve been following us, or if you’re a part of our community, or just someone who has experience in managing or building communities, I’d love to hear your thoughts, reflections, and suggestions. I look forward to continuing this work and making Heartbeat the best tech community it can possibly be.

Fritz

Our team has been at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning research for more than 15 years and we're using our collective intelligence to help others learn, understand and grow using these new technologies in ethical and sustainable ways.

Comments 0 Responses

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

wix banner square