Inside Slack’s Community with Elizabeth Kinsey
Episode 9
Elizabeth is a Senior Marketing Manager at Slack where she leads community programs for Slack developers, builders, and makers.
Prior to launching Slack Platform Community, Elizabeth was the Director of Marketing at Branch, where she co-founded the Mobile Growth Community and expanded it to more than 25,000 members in 60 cities across the globe.
She is also a past co-President and a current advisor to the San Francisco chapter of mBolden, a non-profit organization championing women in digital.
In Episode 9 of Create Community, Marsha and Elizabeth chat about growing a self-organized community, how to evaluate whether your company should run community internally or hand over control to volunteer-led efforts, how to keep volunteers motivated, and so much more.
“Community is about connecting and being able to be your authentic self and feeling safe doing that.”
- Elizabeth Kinsey
Listen to the Episode:
Connect with Elizabeth:
Slack Community:
mBolden SF:
A huge thank you to Origins Media Haus for producing this podcast. You can find them at:
Website | Linkedin | Instagram | Twitter
Connect with Marsha:
LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | Website
Episode Transcript:
Marsha Druker (49s):
Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining me today on Create Community. I'm super excited to chat with you.
Elizabeth Kinsey (1m 12s):
Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited as well.
Marsha Druker (1m 15s):
I find it really fascinating how community builders actually become community builders. So, you know, I took a look into your journey and something that stood out to me is that you grew up as part of a really big family of what was that experience like for you? And do you think that's had an impact in your passion and love for community?
Elizabeth Kinsey (1m 34s):
I did. And I do. So I have 14 brothers and sisters, and most of the time when I was growing up, there was at least a couple of other people in the house. And summers and holidays were kind of a madhouse. My oldest sibling is about 15 years older than me and my youngest is 15 years younger than me. So I was pretty much smack dab in the middle. And because of that, I ended up kind of playing sort of the peacekeeper and the kind of relayer of information I became along with my brother, kind of the central folks in the family that if any of the kids kind of had an issue, I was always sort of in the middle of it, trying to mediate and moderate.
Elizabeth Kinsey (2m 19s):
And I think also so many different personalities. You know, my youngest sibling is completely different than my older siblings. There's, you know, a huge span of age. And so there were a lot of different personalities and a lot of different types of activities that folks did that I really had to figure out how to adapt to especially being kind of smack dab in the middle. So I think that kind of negotiating some of those things and also growing up with just kind of that very strong connection between my siblings really did prime me for the community work that I do now
Marsha Druker (2m 55s):
That must have been such a cool way to grow up. And it's so amazing that you've always kind of had this in community. What did you end up studying?
Elizabeth Kinsey (3m 3s):
I studied language arts and I got my associate's degree in that. And most of that was humanities writing. A lot of the coursework was focused around lightweight kind of psychology and studying other cultures. But when I left school, I really thought that I was going to become a teacher and I was going to go and finish my VA and become a teacher. And that is not what ended up happening.
Marsha Druker (3m 29s):
I think, you know, a lot of the guests on this podcast, you know, just people that I chat with and day to day life, or Fuckup Nights as well. It's, you know, so much of the time you don't end up doing what you actually ended up studying and you find your passion in something totally different. So how did you end up starting your career? What was your first role and how did it kind of evolve from there?
Elizabeth Kinsey (3m 48s):
I actually had planned to become a massage therapist and I was slowly building my client base when the recession happened. So within about two months, I went from having like a pretty steady client base that I was building and they all lost their jobs and I lost all my clients. And so I went to work in a retail store called urban Indigo. And one of the great things about that, it was an independently owned store. Most of the time that I worked there, it was just women, which was really an incredible experience to be in a role where it was like pretty much.
Elizabeth Kinsey (4m 20s):
I was just surrounded by women all day. And from there, I went to a company that sold software for mechanical engineers, and I worked with the user groups for the software that we were a reseller for it, but I really enjoyed whatever I got to work with the user group leaders. And I was talking to Richard Doyle and he ran the user group program for the parent company that made the software that we were resellers for. And he was describing kind of some of the things that he did in his role.
And I realized that that was really where I wanted to put my energy and put my effort is this kind of community building and ended up going to Branch, which is a deep linking and mobile analytics company and building out the community there for mobile app developers, marketers, and product managers,
Marsha Druker (5m 10s):
What a cool journey. What are you most proud of in that role and what do you think you really learned there?
Elizabeth Kinsey (5m 16s):
So I think what I learned there was just a lot of strategies to deal with things that change often being in a startup that's growing rapidly, something is always changing. And what you thought worked the day before, maybe doesn't work two days later. And one of the things that I really took away was it's super important to center the intention around the end user. You're always going to have to have business goals. You're always going to need to bring some value back to the company for the money that they're investing in programs.
But I think for me, one thing that I really took away was how important it is to have that be a secondary intention and that otherwise if you're building something and you're calling it community and it's not really community, and you don't really have the people who are gathering together and coming together around this thing that you've built, it's just really easy. That falls flat, that it doesn't resonate. One thing that we tried to do was the mobile growth community was really focused around not necessarily branch, which I also really loved, but it was focused around helping people grow their business, introducing them to each other, sharing best practices, talking about the challenges that come inherently with trying to build a business that is purely mobile.
Elizabeth Kinsey (6m 33s):
And one thing that we tried was to see if there were people interested in user groups and instead of kind of looking to the users to run those events or to bring us the inspiration for what they wanted to see, it was really a very top down and kind of me just planning things and it didn't work. And the reason it didn't work is because we weren't focusing on what the community wanted. We were focusing on what we thought was going to be good for the business and the community would want, and it didn't work out because they were like, no, we get what we need for out of mobile growth.
Elizabeth Kinsey (7m 7s):
We don't need a user group if we want to talk to other branch users, like they come to these events as well. And so I think that was one thing is like not being afraid to one, say this isn't working and to really center the community in that and your intentions around supporting and connecting them rather than primarily like business objectives.
Marsha Druker (7m 27s):
With community, you have to pivot. And a lot of the time you are sort of running experiments and kind of listening to the community and also trying to reconcile it with company goals. So I love the points that you brought up there. You know, not being afraid to say that, you know, this is not working and how can we do this differently? The other part of my question was what is something that you're really proud of in that role?
Elizabeth Kinsey (7m 47s):
I think the thing that I'm the most proud of is the people that connected and were able to grow their business or grow their reputation. When I think about my time at branch, I always come back to one story that really drove home for me. We had a meetup group in Seattle and we put together the event and worked with the community to figure out, you know, who did they want to hear from? And I had a woman who was on the panel and she worked at a major retail company.
Elizabeth Kinsey (8m 18s):
And after the panel, I connected her with her fellow panelists and one of them, they ended up kind of hitting it off and talking. And it turned out that he had a role open at his company for VP of growth. And it was a much smaller startup and she was really ready to change where she was at in her career and ended up going to work for them. And she wrote me an email a couple of months after the event and said that if it wasn't for that event, then she wouldn't have changed her role. She wouldn't have even thought about going to a smaller startup, even though she was pretty unhappy where she was.
Elizabeth Kinsey (8m 52s):
And that's the kind of thing that, for me, that I'm the most of those kinds of stories that I've heard even two years after I have left a branch, I still hear from a couple of people that are like, Hey, I got this job because I met this person. Or I was able to like convince my boss to give me a raise because of this growth event that you put on. And it inspired me to ask for this stuff because I realized how much work I'm doing. And so those kinds of stories and instances, those are the things that I'm the most proud of. I love the community that we built and I love the people that are part of it, but I loved that it was meaningful.
Elizabeth Kinsey (9m 26s):
It was a huge labor of love. And I was so passionate. I'm still super passionate about community, obviously, but I was so passionate and that community about connecting the people that I thought needed to know each other. And the fact that those relationships worked out and turned into a life changing event and that I was able to help someone with that.
Marsha Druker (9m 46s):
That's so amazing. And yeah, I can totally relate to that through running my community with Fuckup Nights Toronto. There's been so many cases of, you know, people finding their next job through it, or ironically meeting their next co-founder at an event all about fucking up. It’s just so rewarding to see that. And also just to see that, you know, you're making an impact, then something shared at those events or something that kind of came out of the community. It got these people to think about something differently and to change their mindset.
How do you think that role at branch prepared you for what you're doing now at Slack?
Elizabeth Kinsey (10m 21s):
At branch, our community went back and forth. So the first iteration was a mix of events that I was leading and my team was leading and volunteers were leading and eventually we ended up at branch cutting off the ambassador program and that volunteer aspect of it. And it became completely owned by the community team. And what I learned from that when I went into my role at slat was really what not to do with volunteers and how not to run a volunteer program. There were a lot of things that just because it was the first time that we were doing it.
Elizabeth Kinsey (10m 54s):
And most of my international experience and working with people in a different country was in Canada. And so to go from Canada to try and figure out what does a volunteer need from me in Sao Paulo is hugely different. And so I think that what I really learned from brand was that kind of opened my eyes up to how much more I needed to educate myself about just the way that different cultures view community, the way that kind of opened up my eyes to also the things not to do when you are working with volunteers and things that didn't work.
Elizabeth Kinsey (11m 29s):
So I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to create when I started at Slack. And I think the other thing that it taught me, it was a lot of just scrappiness and really trying to build and create something cool with like a very small amount of resources. So when I got to Slack, that was definitely something that helps to inform some of the decisions that I made when I was kind of putting together what the community would look like.
Marsha Druker (12m 5s):
I find it really fascinating that community is actually, it's a fairly new thing at Slack. It really kicks off and around 2019, what was it that made the company take note and decide to invest in community in the first place?
Elizabeth Kinsey (12m 18s):
The thing that was really the impetus for starting the community at Slack was our users. And we do user research like anyone else would do. And one of the things that came out of some of that research was that developers specifically folks that were building on Slack, either for their team or for the app directory really wanted to know each other and really wanted a place to connect, wanted to be able to talk about the things that they were doing. A Slack developer is a relatively new kind of concept that, you know, people have been building on Slack for five years, but you know, there's few and far between.
Elizabeth Kinsey (12m 56s):
And so the response to that was to create the role that I'm in now and to really focus and double down on creating different community programs. Once we started opening the community up, it turned out that actually it's not just developers that want to meet up, it's people that are using Slack in a lot of different ways. And they want to know how other people are using Slack. They want to know how they're customizing Slack. And so it really came and it was driven by the requests from the users.
Marsha Druker (13m 23s):
I think that's what community is all about. Really bringing something to life that's going to help the people that are either using your product or interacting with your brand. So what does community actually mean? Not Slack? What kind of formats are you running and what does that look like?
Elizabeth Kinsey (13m 38s):
There's two things about community at Slack. One, we're figuring it out still. There's a natural evolution of community programs and customer success programs that happens. So I think that for us right now, what community really means is it's about putting the people that are using your product in really interesting ways in the same room, as people who want to know how to use your product and really interesting ways. But I think it really is very focused on supporting and helping the people that want to be connected. And we do that in a couple of different ways.
Elizabeth Kinsey (14m 8s):
So there's the community specifically program that I run is a very focused on in person events. Obviously that's not happening right the second, but we've switched over to online events. And then we also have a Slack workspace that we use and that our community members are in where they connect with each other. There's a lot of channels for different kind of questions around building on Slack, using Slack at work, convincing, you know, your coworker to stop using email and start using Slack.
Elizabeth Kinsey (14m 40s):
And so a lot of it is about kind of getting feedback from our community members and giving them not just direct access to each other, but also direct access to some of the teams at Slack and helping us figure out what are some of the things that we should be focused on that maybe we don't see, because it's really easy to get caught up in your own product. Like we use Slack at Slack. Obviously we test pretty much everything that happens. Like it has been in the Slack workspace first for a little while before anybody else sees it. And so it's easy to kind of forget since we use Slack so differently than so many companies use Slack, especially because we've been using it for a long time.
Elizabeth Kinsey (15m 16s):
And so one of the great things about the community is it helps us to keep really fresh eyes on what are some things that don't work or things that people would like to see future iterations of Slack. And so I think that community is also very much about feedback.
Marsha Druker (15m 30s):
So when you were doing those in person events, what I find really interesting is that a lot of them were sort of self-organized and really leveraging volunteers. How did you get buy in for this, from the rest of the company and, you know, get the rest of the company comfortable to give up control of the Slack brand for these self-organized volunteer led events to actually flourish.
Elizabeth Kinsey (15m 48s):
There are a couple of chapters where someone has stepped down as a chapter leader where I'm helping run it right now, but everything is run by volunteers. And so it is super scary for a brand to say, okay, here's all the material go put on your own events and you just cross your fingers that like, it is what you hope it's going to be. I think it was easy to get buy in because there's so much love that users, developers, engineers have for Slack. And when you talk to the people who are these chapter leaders that are volunteering to run these communities, and sometimes they know Slack way better than we do, they really want to be part of the Slack brand in some ways.
Elizabeth Kinsey (16m 31s):
And so I think that when folks started to see what people were creating and what kind of events they were running and how just passionate that folks were that were both attending and running the events, it was a little bit easier for folks to think it's okay if we kind of turn this over, because really it ultimately, even though we're building the product, there's a lot of ways like it does belong to them already. You know? And so I think that there was that level is just kind of seeing the passion and the dedication that people had that gave some of that comfort.
Elizabeth Kinsey (17m 2s):
I think the other thing is that being really clear about what the brand guidelines are. And I think that also the other thing that made it a little bit easier to give that control over is knowing that, you know, there is someone from Slack and involved. I think that if it was just something that was happening organically and flack wasn't involved, it probably would have been a little bit more of a struggle. But I think ultimately it just came down to the people that are doing this, their hearts are in the right place. Absolutely. And so I think that just having that trust that people are going to do right by your brand, if they love your brand, it's a leap of faith, but you kind of have to take it.
Marsha Druker (17m 35s):
Sure. I think if you want to scale something really quickly and you know, to have that many chapter leaders, you have to give up some control and really just be there to support as much as possible. That kind of brings me to my next question. How did you support those volunteer run efforts and how do keep those teams motivated?
Elizabeth Kinsey (17m 51s):
The first thing is just having a really good on-boarding experience. So having a fully thought out playbook and a guidebook that walks them through what the program is, what they can expect, where they can find the resources that we've created, bringing them into Slack. Every chapter leader has a leadership channel where if they have a coach chapter leader, they're also in that channel. That was a really important part for me, is that making sure that they understood who they could go to at Slack, what the process was like, who is the person that is their lifeline.
Elizabeth Kinsey (18m 21s):
I use a couple of different apps in our community workspace to help onboard a couple of other things that we do in addition to kind of that playbook and the guidebook, you know, we offer a reimbursement for costs that come in for the meetups that folks are running.
We use workflow builder for that in Slack. And then also just making sure that they understand what kind of assistance they can get. In addition to all of that, especially when they're first getting started. I think it's really hard to establish a new community and find out who are the people that should even be in your community.
Elizabeth Kinsey (18m 52s):
And so for me, a lot of the support that needs to come from Slack that we provide is this kind of marketing support, helping them to spread the word to the users because they don't know who the developers are.
Marsha Druker (19m 3s):
Yeah, that's so key. And I think, you know, the, the very first event that you run as a community builder, that launch event is so pivotal and it's just so critical to get it right. And it's amazing that you really help support them and all kinds of ways to kind of get it off the ground and to really help them do it right from the start. I think that's where a lot of companies and a lot of communities go wrong. They don't provide that support upfront. And then they kind of try to reign it in after maybe it wasn't done completely on brand, through doing all of these community events and, you know, helping to facilitate all of this.
Marsha Druker (19m 36s):
How do you measure the success and the business impact of these community events and initiatives?
Elizabeth Kinsey (19m 42s):
With community, I think it's much more of a slow burn. You don't have that same kind of direct attribution that you may be able to do with more traditional marketing disciplines. And so the things that I look at right now are very much around like the health of the community. So are people hosting events are the people that are going to those events, happy with the events. There's a survey that goes out to attendees. That basically it has a real quick NPS, the business impact that I'm really trying to affect overall is getting people to build with the tools that we're talking about.
Elizabeth Kinsey (20m 13s):
So those are the things that I would like to get to that are super, super hard to measure. And it's really difficult to tire attribute one single action. And so I'm working with our teams right now to figure out what is the right metric to measure for success. For me, what I would really like to see is are people who are in the community, is that a healthier account? Are they more active in the usage of Slack? Do they download and use apps? Do they build more? Are they using the tools that we're talking about?
Elizabeth Kinsey (20m 43s):
We're not there yet, but that is where I hope to get to. So right now it's mostly the health of the community and looking at a lot of things, kind of as a proxy,
Marsha Druker (20m 51s):
I think it's just, like you said, it's definitely cumulative and it's also a journey. And you know, when you're starting at so fresh, it's almost an experiment than a lot of ways. And you really have to just be open to that feedback and to find new ways to pivot. If that's something that the feedback is telling you and, you know, just keep learning every day and keep evolving it. So we're recording this in may of 2020. So we're smack in the middle of COVID-19 times, the past couple months must've been just like absolutely mind blowing, working at Slack was so many people transitioning to work from home.
Marsha Druker (21m 30s):
And I'm sure with demand like absolutely surging through the roof for Slack. Can you tell me a little bit about what it's been like? It must've been, it must be so crazy right now.
Elizabeth Kinsey (21m 39s):
If anyone who's listening, follows Stewart Butterfield, our CEO on Twitter, he had a little bit of a tweet storm about kind of the initial decision to move, to work from home and some of the staggering numbers that we saw directly afterwards. And from my perspective, the thing that was the most interesting or the thing that kind of has been the most impactful as we really quickly spun up a couple of programs to do consultations with not even just new users, people who are new to remote work. So while all of this kind of chaos was happening across the world, and lots of just sort of uncertainty and confusion, there was a place where people could go and sign up for a 20 minute consultation with someone who works at Slack to talk about really whatever it was that they needed to have a question about, but anyone in the company could sign up to do these consultations.
Elizabeth Kinsey (22m 31s):
Some people that I did consults with were brand new to Slack. Some of them had used Slack for awhile, but it was always in an office setting and had never worked remotely before and needed help setting up things like daily stand-ups. But I think the thing that was the most amazing to me about those consults was that people were just incredibly grateful to have that 20 minutes to talk to someone.
People were scared and this was super new to them. And so the fact that as a company, we were like, we get it, it's hard, but I think one of the best things that has happened so far has just been the level of support that Slack has given to employees and the level of support that Slack has given to efforts to fight COVID-19.
Marsha Druker (23m 17s):
I've been following the journey really closely. I follow Stewart on Twitter. I saw that thread that you're talking about, and I really encourage everybody to read it. And then I've also worked with Slack on an event here in Toronto. We hosted a Fuckup Night together in the office where it was focused on women and failure. So I just have a lot of Slack employees on my LinkedIn and yeah, just seeing people's stories. And I think it just says so much that employees from all different departments and, you know, all different parts of the company were so quick to jump in and to really help customers.
Elizabeth Kinsey (23m 46s):
Yeah. If you told me six months ago that I would be crying in an all hands because of something that our company did, I probably would have been like, ha okay, sure. But like, I literally have cried in like numerous all hints, like watching all hands, because there's just so many amazing things that are happening. I'm so grateful that I get to be part of a company that has the privilege of doing that with customers.
Marsha Druker (24m 25s)
Over this time, how has Slack’s approach to community evolved?
Elizabeth Kinsey (24m 27s):
I think first and foremost, the thing that I tried to really reiterate was that the folks that are running our community, our volunteers, and in the same way that we're figuring out how to work remotely and all of our lives were upended. So we're there, but this isn't their job. Like it's my job. And so having really generous expectations of what was possible was a big pivot.
So relaxing some of the standards that we had in order to kind of be an active chapter leader and to stay active in the program and get all of the kind of extra benefits outside of just being a member of the community, realizing and understanding that, okay, those things need to shift and change pretty immediately. The other thing is obviously the in person aspect of our community had to shift.
Elizabeth Kinsey (24m 60s):
And one of the things that really stood out to me was that so our community, we have roughly 80 chapters around the world. And in February, I started to kind of get a little bit of an idea that we're going to need to think about what we can do to support people in an online capacity. When my chapter leaders in Japan had to cancel events. But I think in March, when everything shifted super dramatically in the U S and in North America, things were different than what was happening in Europe.
Elizabeth Kinsey (25m 30s):
It was different than what was happening in, you know, say Nairobi or in India. And so different parts of the world experienced their entry into the pandemic in different ways and at different times. And so being super flexible about what people could and couldn't do, like what were we going to do if, say in a region where there weren't any cases yet where we going to continue to say, yeah, you can meet up in person, just follow local guidelines, or was this something that we needed to say, okay, we're just not going to have anyone meet up in person until we get through this or told me, have a better understanding of what's going on.
Elizabeth Kinsey (26m 7s):
And so it was really interesting to watch kind of the different regions experience pretty much over a period of about three and a half weeks as they kind of entered into the pandemic. It was almost like I became a therapist for a little while and the focus was not on. And what are you going to do in meat? What's the content going to be? It was, Hey, you as a person who has experienced this, are you okay? Is there anything that I can do for you? And I think the best thing that you can do whenever you're presented with a problem like this, or a challenge like this is ask your community, what is it that they want?
Elizabeth Kinsey (26m 38s):
And so one of the big things that stood out for our community was the tooling, because we are global people have different access to different tools. Internet speeds are different. Internet accessibility is different. Not everyone can just hop on and do an online meetup. And so figuring out what tooling we could provide them and how I could work with our team at Slack to facilitate those things.
Marsha Druker (27m 14s):
So I want to shift gears a little bit, and I want to get your advice for companies and for community managers. So how do you think a company should go about evaluating whether to outsource community efforts to a volunteer led self-organized group, or if they should be running these kinds of communities internally,
Elizabeth Kinsey (27m 32s):
It's going to be different for every company, obviously, but I think one of the biggest questions to ask yourself when you are evaluating, if you want to have a volunteer program, or if you want to own the community efforts, yourself goes back to that question that you asked about being comfortable about giving up brand. And so I think that's a big part of the decision that you need to think about when you're evaluating. If you want to have a volunteer led community, are you comfortable? And do you trust people enough?
Elizabeth Kinsey (28m 2s):
Can you let go? Is everyone bought in around that? If not, it might be better to kind of stick with owning the community yourself or running something that's more of a hybrid. I think the other thing to think about is what's the expectation that you have of volunteers and how are you going to make sure that they feel like the work that they are doing? Cause it's work. It's hard work to put together an event to find speakers. When we go back to eventually meeting up in person and previously, what are you going to do for the people that are volunteering their time and how are you going to make it worth it for them?
Elizabeth Kinsey (28m 37s):
And if you can't come up with a good answer to that, then it might be something that you want to stick to owning internally because then it's someone's job. And that makes a big difference.
Marsha Druker (28m 47s):
And a lot of the time, you know, you can have the most like dedicated, passionate volunteers who are so, you know, into the idea, but at the end of the day, it's not their priority. You know, they're working full time. They have other things that are going on in their life. They have other deadlines. You're so right in saying that you have to find ways to be able to reward them and really make it worth their while. And to keep that motivation up,
Elizabeth Kinsey (29m 8s):
You also need to be able to be okay if someone has to step away, people have lives, things happen. You know, I've had chapter leaders who have, you know, they've had a major life change and they're like, I just, I can't do this right now. And so if you aren't ready to say, sometimes this will be inactive and we'll need to take it on. And sometimes it will be led by volunteers. Like you need to be prepared to be the support system and to be the kind of net, if the Acrobat falls.
Marsha Druker (29m 34s):
Absolutely. And if a company is seeing that there's things already happening without their involvement, the people are self-organizing, there's already kind of meetups or things happening that are really complimentary to your brand. When do you think it's time to hire somebody internally to support that and really to help take it to the next level.
Elizabeth Kinsey (29m 53s):
When you have budget? I actually have seen and know a couple of folks who kind of came on in that role and there was a want to support those kinds of events, but when it came down to it, there really wasn't the resourcing or budget to do so. So even though there was a person there, it wasn't as successful the efforts because the buy in from the company and the budget wasn't there. And I actually think that that's a really important thing. I think sometimes you have to be prepared to spend some money on community. I think also it depends on what level of support that you want to give those third party folks that are creating community externally from your company.
Elizabeth Kinsey (30m 30s):
If this is something where you feel like that you are still benefiting and all you really needed to do is provide kind of monetary support or space or something like that. You probably don't need a dedicated person, but if you really want to get involved, and if you want to help to kind of grow and support that community, like you're going to need someone who's dedicated to do that.
Marsha Druker (30m 51s):
Absolutely. And then is there any general advice that you kind of find yourself giving to aspiring or fellow community managers?
Elizabeth Kinsey (30m 58s):
The best advice that I ever got and that I pass on is talk to your community and ask questions and listen to what they say. I think that you kind of start to formulate theories and hypotheses about like, here's what we should do for them. And it doesn't always hit the Mark. I think the biggest and most important thing for any company who is working on community efforts is to ask questions and listen to the answers.
Marsha Druker (31m 27s):
Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. That's what community is all about. It's really about listening to that community. And sometimes as a community manager or as a community leader, you get really stuck on things and, you know, you're just trying to figure it out on your own or with your team. And you really have to remind yourself that why don't I just ask the people that I'm building this for.
I found myself doing this, you know, with COVID and figuring out, you know, it was a time to shift the Fuckup Nights virtually I was kind of struggling with… is failure something that's relevant to our community right now? Because we really share stories of past business failures and lessons learned. A lot of these just feel almost like outdated compared to what's going on right now. And then the failures that we're dealing with now, and that I almost felt stuck in that for, you know, a few days where I was really questioning, you know, should I just put it on hold for now?
And then I was like, let me just ask the community. And I put out that question and, you know, in a survey form across our social channels and the overwhelming response was that, yes, of course we still want to hear stories of failure. We want to hear about resilience. We want to hear stories that feel relevant to these times, you know, speakers that have gone through some kind of uncertainty or something that was outside of their control, or, you know, maybe through the 2008 recession, just anything that's going to feel relevant to these times.
Marsha Druker (32m 39s):
It's solved a lot of those challenges that I was kind of just trying to figure out by myself. So shifting gears again, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about your personal community. I find that really fascinating with community builders, the types of communities that they're navigating in their personal life as well. So what communities are you part of and why are they meaningful to you?
Elizabeth Kinsey (33m 7s):
I also am fascinated by the communities of community builders. So one is mBolden SF. So mBolden used to be called women in wireless. And I joined that community or started going to some of their community events and then got really heavily involved. But that community is really around women in digital spaces. And so women in technology, a heavy focus on folks that are oriented in the mobile industry. And so a lot of people who work on apps, and one of the reasons that I love that community is because I've made so many really good friends through that community.
Elizabeth Kinsey (33m 42s):
In the before times, I would go and karaoke every Friday night. It was a really great way to, you know, get some frustration and an emotion of the week out. But I ended up becoming really tight with a group of folks that were also there every Friday night, but like, you know, it became something that I really looked forward to every week, not just the scene. So that's another community that I'm part of. And then I think also one thing that's been really interesting for me this year, I got really involved in the presidential primary race for the democratic party and got involved with a specific candidate.
Elizabeth Kinsey (34m 20s):
So I got involved in a brand new community for me, I'd never done any kind of formal organizing within politics. So I got to meet and start to engage with people that had done this for a really long time. One of the really cool things that I think happened because of that is even though obviously Warren is no longer running for president, that community still kind of remains those folks that are kind of progressive minded and wanted to do some of the things that I was also really interested in are still doing those things.
Elizabeth Kinsey (34m 53s):
And now there's a lot more focus on taking all that energy that we had and pivoting it to local efforts. And so it's opened my eyes to a whole different side of things that I can be involved in.
Marsha Druker (35m 4s):
That's so cool. And you know, there's definitely some parallels between running a community professionally, but then, you know, on the political side as well. Actually the head of community at Fiverr, he comes from a political background - before he was on the Obama campaign and it really helped him a lot. And it's really inspiring to see how you've been able to kind of navigate outside of the tech community in SF. And in terms of choosing the people that are close to you, your close friends and, you know, you're really personal community, how do you choose those people?
Elizabeth Kinsey (35m 34s):
I don't know that I consciously choose. I think one of the things about in the Bay area right now is that most of my friends have moved out of the Bay area and have gone to other places. And so I think that the older that I get, the harder it is to make new friends. And so I think that the people that end up coming into my life, or I ended up coming up, going into their lives are where we get to know each other. And I don't think there's anything really consciously about choosing. I think it's gets more about how we align in ways of thinking and being respectful of each other, if there are differences.
Elizabeth Kinsey (36m 5s):
And for me, I think a lot of it is kind of happenstance and then, you know, trusting your gut on, who's going to show up for me as much as I show up for them.
Marsha Druker (36m 14s):
That's so cute. Community and friendship as well, is just really having that equal balance of showing up for each other.
My last question for you is, and I ask this of everybody on the podcast, but what does community mean to you?
Elizabeth Kinsey (36m 28s):
It is really about connection and having somewhere where you can show up as your full self and know that that's cool, like you're connected to these people. It can be a community around anything, but there is some kind of a common thread it's really about connecting and being able to be your authentic self and feeling safe doing that.
Marsha Druker (36m 49s):
I couldn't agree with that more. Elizabeth, thank you so much again for joining me. It was so great to chat with you.
Elizabeth Kinsey (36m 55s):
Thanks so much for having me Marsha. I had a really great time.
