The Juggling Act: Balancing Priorities to go Global
Epistemic Disclosure: I’ve spent a few dozen hours working through the operations of community building, and want to share how foundational strong operations and communication are to building what might eventually feel like an effortless community.
I am working this year to build a global community for Write of Passage (the eminent online writing school).
My journey into this work started with this thought:
A community that can be accessed from anywhere isn’t necessarily accessible to everyone equally.
The challenge with programs like Write of Passage is that the power of online companies and communities makes it automatically easy to semi-accomodate a global community. Live sessions are easily recorded and stored online for viewing whenever a student wants. The lack of a physical classroom makes registration and onboarding equally possible for anyone, anywhere.
They have already created an incredible international community with thousands of students from 100+ countries around the world.
An international community is available to everyone, everywhere - through the magic of the internet!
A global community is accessible to everyone.
It takes a lot of work to bridge from international to global. A good first step is getting quality programming, engagement and accessibility in sync.
I took WoP from Washington DC, and then again from my new home in London the following year. (This is the kind of course some people take again and again.) I talked with people from Australia, South Africa, India and Spain. Yet the default habits of the course and the associated student-led initiatives were designed around an EST workday.
I selfishly wanted the Write of Passage community to better accommodate me and my new life in the UK. I pitched the WoP team some ideas around expanding the range of times that events are offered. It worked!
And I spent this past March leading Feedback Gyms (more on those below), weekly recaps and networking sessions for the global community. I’m spending this fall going deeper on global programming and thinking about how to balance student data, demands and priorities.
Juggling Priorities for Global Access
The key to building a global offering for Cohort Based Courses is to get Quality Programming, Engagement, and Accessibility in a state of equilibrium.
Quality programming: Excellent, above and beyond content.
Engagement: Enough people want to do the thing that the community will benefit from each other and not just the offering.
Accessibility: People are able to engage when, where and how they are most able to learn and connect.
Getting the balance between these three is a lot more complicated than it might look at first glance.
Quick movement towards Accessibility (#3) can sacrifice Quality (#1).
And too many options for access (#3) can sacrifice Engagement (#2) as fewer participants select each option.
But slow movement towards Accessibility (#3) sacrifices community growth and diversity.
A perfect example of this dynamic in practice is Feedback Gyms.
My favourite part of the course were these “feedback roulette” sessions where we were matched randomly with someone else from the group of students who showed up. We took ~20 minutes to read something that our partner had written, and then another 20 minutes taking turns giving high level, verbal feedback.
The magic of the feedback gym was having to defend your writing in real time, outloud. As an emerging writer, the diversity of people you are paired with during Feedback Gyms help you find your voice.
No one is their best in a conversation at 2am, so it makes sense to offer these multiple times a day to accommodate a global community.
The PST- EST crowd meets in their afternoon. I wanted to meet in my (GMT) afternoon. But I was on the hook to think about the entire global community and I didn’t want to leave my friends in India without a suitable option.
So do we do GMT mornings, when many students in Europe and Africa are at work?
Or host three Gyms a day?
As we add more options, we whittle down our pool of participants to just a few per session. Accessibility is up but engagement is down.
WOP Global
It still feels like a juggling act.
This past spring, we added a few new options for students, and this fall we are building on that momentum with a few more.
We don’t have the balance perfect yet, but here are two really cool things:
My mentor group this fall is happening at a time slot that works from Lisbon to Sydney.
Global accessibility is becoming more of a topic in the CBC (Cohort Based Course) community. Building a Second Brain is running multiple live sessions a day, and Kevon kicked off an interesting thread about session timings.
And two insights for you.
#1: Communicate the Juggling Act.
Community building is not about doing every idea. It is taking steps to improve while keeping quality, engagement and accessibility in balance.
Students know this, but without communication, an intentional decision might feel like an oversight. Communicating with your community lets them see the juggling act – lets them see how you are balancing priorities to make decisions.
#2: Lead with Empathy.
“It’s hard to build an experience for something you haven’t experienced.”
-WOP Student
It sounds trite, but bringing the people you are designing for along for the ride and giving them roles and agency is so important. For community building, these different experiences from around the globe bring rich insights like how people actually balance sleep with learning. Through empathy, we get closer to balance.