Jennifer Dulski has had a legendary career, she has worked in senior positions for Yahoo, Google, Change.org and was previously the Head of Groups & Community at Facebook . Not to mention founding DealMaps which was acquired by Google. She recently launched her new book “Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter” which breaks down how to build a movement around your cause and community. In this interview we talk about just that and her favorite example of people and brands that have created a movement, how it applies to community professionals and so much more. Take a listen!
Jennifer Dulski has had a legendary career, she has worked in senior positions for Yahoo, Google, Change.org and was previously the Head of Groups & Community at Facebook . Not to mention founding DealMaps which was acquired by Google. She recently launched her new book “Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter” which breaks down how to build a movement around your cause and community. In this interview we talk about just that and her favorite example of people and brands that have created a movement, how it applies to community professionals and so much more. Take a listen!
To Long; Didn't Listen
Derek Andersen:
Welcome to the C2C podcast. I am your host Derek Andersen. After holding my first event in 2010, I went on to create Startup Grind, a 400-chapter community based in over 100 countries. Along the way, I discovered the greatest marketing tool of all time: your customers. Yet, I couldn't find anyone sharing how to build a community where people could experience your brand in-person or at scale. On this show, we talk with the brightest minds and companies on the planet about how to build customer to customer marketing strategies and create in-person experiences for your brand and customers before your competitor does.
Derek Andersen:
Our next guest, Jen Dulski has had a great career. She's worked in senior positions at Yahoo, Google, Change.org, and was previously the head of groups and community at Facebook. In addition to that, she founded Deal Maps, which was acquired by Google. She recently launched her new book, Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter? which breaks down how to build a movement around your cause and community. In this interview, we talk about just that and her favorite example of people and brands that have created movements, how it applies to community professionals, and so much more. Take a listen.
Derek Andersen:
Jen, can you describe what your book Purposeful is all about?
Jen Dulski:
Sure, so I wrote Purposeful because after spending years working at change.org and then helping the lead community for Facebook, I had this realization that all of us have the power to be movement starters, to change things in the world that we want to change. And I saw regular people doing this every day and following a very similar set of steps, and I wanted to share those steps in the lessons I had learned with more people so that they could do it themselves.
Derek Andersen:
Could you just walk me through? Just tell me about how an ordinary person could actually start a movement? It sounds like such a big thing to do.
Jen Dulski:
It does. It sounds big, but the really interesting thing is every single movement that exists starts with a single person or a small group of people and a relatively small action. Even, I break down in the book, the disability rights movement, the civil rights movement, the gay marriage, marriage equality movement. Each of them have these like moments where individual people stood up and catalyzed something. And so what I say is that the beginning of starting a movement is actually just garnering the courage to get started and take that first small action. It can be starting a petition, it can be starting a fundraiser, it can be starting a community, a group. Even just emailing your friends. That initial step is the hardest part.
Derek Andersen:
Can you manufacturer a movement? How much of it is just doing something and how much of it is right place, right time, like luck?
Jen Dulski:
I mean, certainly there is luck involved with everything in this world, but I think it is easier to manufacture a movement than people realize, because the elements are the same. So what I walk through in the book is once you get the courage and take that small action, then you lay out a clearly articulated vision, you mobilize people, which is what community builders do all the time, and the key thing is knowing what you want, what you want your movement to achieve. If you can be clear about that and you know the people that you need to persuade, there are ways to do that. Now, it doesn't mean that every movement that gets started will be successful and certainly not right away, because movements take time. Sometimes they take decades. But getting something to build into a movement is doable by most people.
Derek Andersen:
This just seems to be a huge trend of companies putting community at the center of their business. Why do you think it's happening now?
Jen Dulski:
Well, I think the world is longing for community. You know, we are in a state where loneliness is a bigger problem than it's ever been. They now say loneliness is deadlier than obesity. It's equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And so people long for that human connection and they can build it around almost anything. At Facebook I helped support tens of millions of community leaders and they built community around everything you can possibly imagine. My favorite actually was called Back of the Pack. It's a group of people who really like to run but run really slowly. So they all run together at the back of the pack. Like whatever you can think of, you can build community around it.
Derek Andersen:
And you've written about it, and as with change.org you were part of so many of these things that you also built the community around Purposeful. You know, you write a book, you have these thoughts, you have these experiences you want to share, frameworks and other things. How do you then turn that into some physical thing that people actually get behind it?
Jen Dulski:
Right. Well, it does take work. I'll be honest about that, and most community builders know that.
Derek Andersen:
You don't just wake up and people banging on your door to be part of your community?
Jen Dulski:
So I started a group, it's a Facebook group. People can find it at facebook.com/group/purposefulbook, and the reason I started it was because I also wanted more people to have access, do the content and other people to support them even if they didn't read the book. I just want as many people as possible to get access to this. And it does though take work to lead that community. So it's small. Right now there's only probably 500 people in it and it's active when I'm in there driving engagement. As with most communities they need a host, they need a community builder. And I think once they get bigger they tend to take on a life of their own and Purposeful is on its way there.
Derek Andersen:
In the book you talk about sort of five stages of engagement. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about that. Like if I'm a business or running a community inside of a business, how could I use some of those to help my customers?
Jen Dulski:
Yeah, so the five stages of engagement, the principle here is that businesses and organizations are often these days asked to do things by their customers. We live in a world where consumers demand more than ever that companies be accountable, that they are good for the environment, that they treat people well, that their products are fair and good. And so, some companies are better than others at listening to their own customers, and the five stages of engagement, which starts with the denial of not listening at all and ends with empowerment, the companies that make the most progress here are the ones that not only listen and engage with their customers, but actually empower their customers to act on their behalf.
Jen Dulski:
So a good example here is when Virgin America, the former airline, wanted to get some gates at a new airport that we're opening, they started a petition and they got their own customers to sign it and say, yes, we want you at this airport and then they won those two gates. It's worth tens of millions of dollars to them. And they engaged their own customers on their behalf.
Derek Andersen:
I feel like many years ago you spoke at Startup Grind and something that you said in there was put in a video that's become like the most watched video we've had as talking about Startup Grind. I feel like you just now have laid out exactly what the Customer to Customer podcast is about, is just what you just said, which is empowering these people to succeed professionally and personally with your brand.
Jen Dulski:
That's right.
Derek Andersen:
And if you are thoughtful about that, it can have huge, huge business impact.
Jen Dulski:
That's right.
Derek Andersen:
And it's also the right thing to do and it's also good for the world.
Jen Dulski:
That's right. Absolutely. And I've seen it so many times in companies that take these steps to build communities. One of the examples I love is actually, surprisingly, Starbucks. They have a group called the Leaf Rakers Society or something like this, that is about people who love fall and they all love that the pumpkin spice latte is coming out. And they get together in this community and sure, they talk about Starbucks a lot, but Starbucks isn't there. They're not directing it. They're just encouraging this. And some of it is sharing recipes and so forth, but some of it is, "My grandmother just died and she loved to do this thing and have this recipe and so I went to Starbucks and I did this in her honor." And it's really, really great for the brand at building evangelists to let them come together.
Derek Andersen:
You did a great job. I know you weren't trying to sell it, but it made me feel like I should be part of it.
Jen Dulski:
Hey, I am in it. I'm in the group.
Derek Andersen:
So part of the art of building a community is really motivating the people behind it, and it is an art of working with these people and helping these people. How do I balance pushing growth or wanting it to become a movement and also just not pushing these people too hard?
Jen Dulski:
Yeah. The lesson I have here that has helped me the most comes from my time as a coxswain on the crew team. I was, I don't know if people know what this is, but the person who sits in the back of the boat where people row, and many people think they just say, "Stroke, stroke," but actually, you strategize the race and you pace the team and you're like a coach in the boat to them.
Jen Dulski:
And coxswains use a technique that's called the Power Ten, which is the team's already rowing pretty hard, as hard as they can, but you can call 10 strokes where they're just going to go all out. And you have to think about how many times in a given race you can do that. And after experimenting with that a lot, I realized usually it's just one or two. Like teams can't do... You just can't push them too hard, but if you do zero, you will lose because to win and to really create something, and especially to create a movement, your community does have to be able to step up and push a little bit harder. So it's important to understand that pacing and only call so many Power Tens, if you will.
Derek Andersen:
You talk in the book about the power of data, and as a community builder, I'm constantly trying to... I'm doing it because I love it and I'm doing it because I feel innately it's the right thing to do, but how should I, or can I use, data to really build value or to prove the value of what I'm actually doing?
Jen Dulski:
Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on the business, if you will, but one of the things I look at, we did a lot of research at Facebook about the difference between a community and a meaningful community that really matters to people, and we found there are three factors that are highly related to meaningful community from the data side. One is what we call intentional time. So are people choosing to spend time there? They're not just coming across it in a feed, but they're coming to you to spend time in your community online, offline.
Derek Andersen:
So they direct traffic or something.
Jen Dulski:
Yeah, sure. Direct traffic would be a good indicator, or opening your app if you have an app, that kind of thing. The second is about engaged activity. So are they not just there, but are they commenting, posting, reacting to the content that's there in some way? And the third is about connection density. And this may not be as true for business, but if you want your community to be successful, it's more successful when people actually feel connections with each other. So different communities might measure that in different ways. It might be are you friends? It might be do you follow each other? Yeah. So those are things I'd look at to measure if your community is successful as a community. And then for business metrics, you might look at other things.
Derek Andersen:
In terms of online versus in real life, or customer to customer direct interactions, can you talk about the value that you've seen created offline versus you've built some really amazing online communities, but have you seen offline play a role in all of those? Some of those?
Jen Dulski:
I think offline play just plays a huge, hugely important role. And when we were thinking about the vision of sort of the ideal state of community, in my mind, they all have online and offline components. And it's not feasible of course, to get everybody, if your community is very large, together in person, it can be costly and so forth. But there's just something about the power of real physical connection. Looking people in the eye, being able to give them a hug or those kinds of things. That's really powerful. And most successful communities we've seen looking at the data find some way to do both.
Derek Andersen:
What's a community that you love and why do you love it?
Jen Dulski:
Yeah, so when I first got to Facebook I joined a few communities to see if I could have that experience of finding meaningful community myself, and the one that has become most meaningful to me is a group called Grown and Flown Parent, which is for parents of kids who are from 15 to 25. So I have two teenage kids and a lot of this is about the sending of your kids off to college. And this is an example of where online community can be super powerful, because people send their kids far, far away. And I've seen it happen numerous times where something will happen to someone's kid and they're not nearby.
Jen Dulski:
So at one point, there was a mom who lives in Pennsylvania and her daughter was in college in Texas and she got in a car accident and the mother posted into this group, "I just got a text and my daughter is being rushed to the ER and I'm thousands of miles away." And within minutes there were dozens of people posting. "I live in Texas. I'm a nurse. I'll be at the ER in half an hour."
Derek Andersen:
Oh, my goodness.
Jen Dulski:
So powerful. And when you have a kid, like my child goes to school across the country, it's really meaningful to find a community like that.
Derek Andersen:
I need to find a community like that, but for 2 to 10 year olds and that I can say like, "Hey, is there somebody that can take my kid to school." You know?
Jen Dulski:
There are. There are. There's communities for all those things.
Derek Andersen:
There probably are. You're probably right.
Jen Dulski:
I mean, seriously, I could tell you if you were a beekeeper that plays the clarinet, there is a community for you.
Derek Andersen:
Somewhere for you to belong.
Jen Dulski:
Certainly for 2 to 10 year olds I think we got that covered. Somebody does.
Derek Andersen:
Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod. Again, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod.