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Beyond Groups: Why Curated Membership Communities Are Today’s Most Important Networks

At 11:30am on Saturday, April 17, I found out that I would be stuck in London for at least a week because of the Icelandic volcano. At 11:49, I emailed TED staffers to propose a flash event we would hold the next day as a way for volcano refugees to celebrate our powerlessness. Less than an hour later they sent their excited response and by 6:00pm the next day, the curtains opened on TEDxVolcano, the world’s first popup conference.

It’s a story that would have been impossible just a few years earlier, but not for the reason you think. It was not so much the power of internet technology that made this happen, but the power of a type of “curated membership community” that, while not new, has become an increasingly central to the fabric of modern professional life. These curated membership communities are poised to become one of the most important drivers of social and economic value in the coming decades, and entrepreneurs should take note.

What are Curated Membership Communities?

Curated membership communities are networks like conference communities, fellowships, coworking spaces, professional networking groups, and meetup groups. There are a few things that makes them different from businesses or nonprofits.

• Members as beneficiaries, not employees: They are designed primarily for the benefit of their members, rather than to leverage their members to achieve a specific ends as a business would with employees. Their “outcomes” are about amplifying the variety of outcomes individual members seek to achieve.
• Significant focus on social capital: The benefits of participation tend to come in the form of the members sharing their extended network of skills, connections, and other resources with one another. In other words, it is other members more than the organizer or curator who provide value to each other.
• Highly aspirational: People tend to engage in these groups because they’re excited to feel like they have a connection with other people they admire and look up to. Aspiration is one of the main forces that drives social capital exchange.
• Ethos over tasks: Membership tends to be organized around an ethos rather than a set of specific commitments. You get to participate because you have share a set of beliefs that animates the group as a whole.
• Curators not managers: The activities and interaction of the community are curated by some actor or set of actors. These actors range from formal organizations (in the case of conferences and fellowships) to individuals volunteering their time, as in the case of mixers and meetups. In all cases, organization of members is much lighter touch than the management hierarchy of a company.
• Collaboration between curators and members: These curators who facilitate the activities of the group tend to have a highly collaborative relationships with the members. In many cases, these communities act like “platforms,” which give their members access to a brand, context, and resources to create opportunities for the group.
• Multi-faceted purpose: Unlike companies, which are organized in a hierarchical fashion in order to do a small number of things in a highly repeatable and scalable way, these communities are highly dynamic and can be reorganized to accomplish a variety of goals.

What are some examples of Curated Membership Communities?

In planning TEDxVolcano, there were three (or, arguably, four) curated membership communities involved. The first was TED. Over the last twenty years, TED has grown from a small community anchored around an annual conference in Monterey, CA to an extraordinarily influential cultural force. In the last two years specifically they’ve open-sourced their model of community curation in the form of their independently-organized TEDx events. Thousands of people around the world have planned and executed their own TED events. With the help of TEDxLondon, this was the platform upon which we designed TEDxVolcano.

The other two curated membership communities essential to putting on TEDxVolcano were the Hub, a global network of coworking spaces for social innovators that prides itself not only on having great working facilities but a highly engaged and mutually supportive community; and the Sandbox Network, a global network of excellent under-30 entrepreneurs and leaders. These two groups provided space, volunteers, audio/visual support, promotion, and much more.

The final community (the one I called “arguable”) was the “Nathaniel’s friends” group. We don’t typically think of our friends as a group that has a coherent group identity. Instead, we view them as a set of bilateral relationships. But I tend to curate my group of friends – organizing them in meetups, making sure they have access to information about eachother’s projects, etc. – as though they were a group who have relationships with each other and not just with me, and in many ways they take the shape of a curated membership community matching the characteristics listed above.

In addition to the membership communities involved with TEDxVolcano, some of the other important types rising to prominence today include fellowship communities (such as the PopTech Social Innovation Fellows) and mixers or meetups – one of the least formal of these communities, but which anchor the week-to-week professional social experience for millions.

I would also argue that the huge number of new entrepreneurship incubators fall into this category of curated membership communities, as well. While they are businesses that have investors and financial goals, their motivation is largely driven by amplifying the work of their members (i.e. startups), and much of the benefit they provide is in the social capital that the community members share with one another.

Why are Curated Membership Communities so important?

I believe that curated membership communities are going to be one of the most significant drivers of social and economic value creation in the coming decades, and that they should be treated not as a disparate set of market segments, but as a coherent unit that can be better served by entrepeneurs. Why?

• Group relationships…: Our conception of social networks is organized almost entirely around one-to-one relationships. The reality is that people have many “group relationships” as well. In these contexts, people often share needs and resources with other members of their curated communities in spite of not having a personal relationship with them. The group becomes a proxy for the trust that comes with a direct one-to-one relationship.
• …lead to wider social capital exchange: Because of this, these communities become one of the most important ways that social capital is distributed. The fact that most members don’t work directly with the others means that there is a wider array of needs, and consequently, a wider array of opportunities for individuals to meet the needs of their peers.
• …and more opportunties created: This social capital exchange leads these groups to take on the role of crossroads where people with complimentary projects can meet and form partnerships, amplifying the work they’ve already begun. By facilitating an ongoing array of introductions, they also become a generative force for entirely new projects.

There is a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs to provide tools and services for these groups. They have different communication patterns, different goals, and different behavioral norms than companies, nonprofits, student groups, and other organizations who leverage their members as inputs for a shared set of goals. With very few exceptions, today’s group-focused tools are designed for the latter and not the former type of group.

It doesn’t take pyschic powers to see that this category of groups is on the rise. Every month it feels as though there are more mixers, conferences, incubators, fellowships, and other networking groups than there were before.

While there might be many proximate reasons for this, the one that matters is this: even in a world of immensely powerful social technology, shared experience is what drives us to care about and contribute to others. As the social graph has come online, we’ve been able to keep better track not only of our friends, but all the amazing people we haven’t met yet. The explosion of curated membership communities is an attempt to create the shared experiences which bring us into contact with those people, giving us access to the amazing world which we can see, if not fully yet grasp.

Photo credit: TED