5 Ingredients for Building Community Over the past few years, people often ask how Designer Fund has built a community of over 100 top designers including founders, leads and angels. Building and sustaining our community from the ground up hasn’t been easy. I’ve learned that you need to intentionally design a community with at least five key ingredients: Purpose, People, Practice, Place, and Progress. People naturally gravitate to communities that represent their values and beliefs. The mission behind an organization is fundamental to our personal narrative of “why” we should spend our time and money toward it. Just look at any religion, cause, brand or company you care about. For example, Designer Fund believes the world needs better designed products and services especially in markets that traditionally lack design innovation like education, health, and energy. A purpose statement can only go so far. “There’s a universal human yearning to belong—the desire to feel welcomed, respected, and appreciated for who you are.”
Are You Leading a Tribe? Source: Flickr/James Cridland. Every Monday and Thursday I publish a new article on SamuelThomasDavies.com… …And every Monday and Thursday, somebody unsubscribes. This used to really bother me. But then I read Seth Godin’s Tribes and realised something important, something we can all use… You Need a Loyal Tribe “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea”, writes Godin. [1] A community needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’re probably interested in improving habits, adding new skills and sustaining excellence. Like you, I also want to improve my performance, grow my career and gain a competitive edge in life. And by publishing a new article every Monday and Thursday, I have a way to communicate what works for me, and what will work for you, too. But our shared interest, this blog, it isn’t for everyone. And do you know what? Examples… Dating.
The Best Places to Host Your Email With Your Own Domain « Web.AppStorm Email is the most important online service you use — it’s essential your online passport, used to login to most apps you use — but it’s often the most neglected. Sure, we check our email all the time, but how much time did you put into finding the best place to keep your email? Have you ever thought about the possibility of needing to switch email services, and how much that would affect your life? Now’s the time to think about it. Wait: Isn’t Gmail Ok? Perhaps your current email solution is fine. Remember the first email account you had, likely an old Hotmail or Aol. account, or a company or school account, or possibly an email account from your ISP? When you rely on email for as many things as most of us do today, you need to make sure it’ll be around for the long haul. If you don’t have your own domain name, you should go ahead and invest in one. Now, How Do I Get Email? Got your own domain? Google Apps for Business Really, it’s still one of the best options. Outlook.com Atmail Cloud
How Creative Mornings Runs Their 106 Monthly Chapters For six months in a row, I told myself I’d wake up at 6AM and get out the door to a monthly CreativeMornings event. Instead, I’d hit snooze every time, missing it and then perusing the event photos longingly a few days later. Last month, I was determined to break the cycle. So, at 8AM on February 13, I filled out my online profile, packed away some business cards, and headed out into the misty Seattle morning. As soon as I arrived, I knew why this series had captured the hearts and minds of creatives in 106 cities around the world. Later that day, I spoke with Sally Rumble, CreativeMornings’ Chief Happiness Officer, on how they’ve scaled their events and scaled the magic that comes with them. Whether you’re at a startup or established company, you may be asking yourself: how do they manage all of this? Today, Sally shares with us how the CreativeMornings team has built a global community of volunteers to spread CreativeMornings around the world. Step One: Listen To Your Members 3.
How to Acquire New Customers with Social Media Social media has become a preferred and convenient method of attracting new customers for businesses across a wide variety of verticals. From those in retail to others in IT, the five biggest social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest — are still growing, and research indicates that almost three-quarters of all Americans are using at least one of these networks. Not to mention social collectives like reddit and social discover platforms like StumbleUpon are hot on the tails on of these giants as well. Keeping these facts in mind, it’s important for social media marketers to be thorough, systematic and innovative in their methods of acquiring new customers through digital channels. Step One: Researching Demographics and Making Audience Profiles Every product or service has a target market, and the more pinpointed marketers are with descriptions of audience profiles, the better their social media results will be. Key Analytics for Five Social Media Sites
SendGrid Vs Mandrill Vs Amazon SES – Why Preferred Choice is Mandrill Every website needs to send emails. Emails like notifications of successful registrations or password reset emails or any such emails. Normally website use the hosting server to send such emails but then sending bulk emails from your own server means you overload your server for sending emails and that may mean that for the time it sends those emails, your server may become slow in response to users. Webmasters tend to cron the email sending process when the traffic on the server is minimum but that also means that you have to take care of email bounces and complains. So to avoid such bounce and complain loops, there are third party email providers where you can just use uniform API for such bounce and spam reports. Make a note that to be able to send emails using third party, you should have bounce rate of less than 5% and spam reports under 0.1% to be on the good side of reputations with all the three Email Service Provider. Pricing Structure Quota Notifications SMTP and Account Security
My CodeConf Talk: Your Community Is Your Best Feature Had a blast this weekend at GitHub's inaugural conference, CodeConf, where I got to give a new talk on building community around open source software based on my experience at Expert Labs running ThinkUp. CodeConf didn't record audio or video of any of the talks, so I'm posting a transcript of mine here. Enjoy. Photo by faunzy. I used to think that the process of making open source software went like this: you write software, you apply your open source license of choice to it, and you publish the source. Hi. Now, I've got to be upfront with you. Back in early 2009 I’d just finished a four year stint writing a web site about productivity software called Lifehacker. I only had this vague notion of what went on behind the scenes. So it’s February of 2009, and I’ve written this simple script, a to-do list manager, and posted it on Lifehacker, and people really like it, and it’s a command line tool, so it’s attracting open source hackers who have a lot more experience than I do. Greg wrote:
The 10 Traits of a Positive Community “Every successful individual knows that his or her achievement depends on a community of persons working together.” – Paul Ryan Humans are made to live and work with others; we are social beings evolved to exist within communities. The quality of the communities productive to the degree of engagement and happiness individuals can draw from community interactions and sadly some communities promote feelings of self-doubt and isolation. Positive communities are groups that inspire their members in ways that promote sense self-discovery and group connection, encouraging members to express their beliefs and values, as well as build relationships with others. The Importance of Positive Communities Involvement in a positive and encouraging community has a tangible impact on individual self-awareness and fulfillment. Positive community experiences also provide members with a sense of belonging and the feeling of being able to express themselves without feeling judged. Promote Fairness
Re-engage with your customers with Vero 200+ businesses use Vero to increase their conversions A few reasons why Vero is trusted by so many leaders Lifecycle email is super important to our business. From day one we’ve sent emails to our customers to increase user engagement and activity. Vero helps us A/B test ideas rapidly and make our emails even more targeted with very little effort. Vero makes it easy for us to deploy, manage and measure complex campaigns with ease. The email platform that builds individual profiles for each customer, Vero helps you send the right email at the right time Send newsletters to your customers with ease Vero makes it easy to create segments of customers based on the attributes you capture (e.g. age, location, gender) and the actions your customers take (e.g. logged in, used feature x, checked out, etc.). Use your data in outgoing emails for a personal touch You can capture as much data as you want about your customers and add it to their individual profiles in Vero, without restriction.
Scaling Facebook Groups — HS Hackers It’s been a little over 9 months since my baby was conceived, which is pretty impressive considering I don’t have a womb or any female reproductive anatomy. That’s because I’m talking about a virtual birth, one which I’ve had the luck, privilege, and sometimes duty, to have brought into this world. It’s been one hell of a ride—in the course of a school year, our group has grown to include high schoolers from all 50 states and more than a dozen countries, organizers from nearly every major U.S. college hackathon, newly-minted founders of high school hackathons and hacker meetups, and yes, even the president of Y Combinator. In sharing our story with the wider hacker community, I hope that others — especially other high-schoolers—will be inspired to learn from our mistakes, and maybe even start their own communities. Trimester 0: Conception But I didn’t know any of that at the time. Trimester I: Signs of Life Almost exactly two months after PennApps, I found myself at another hackathon.
14 Amazingly Free Stock Photo Websites If you've ever tried searching for free stock photos on the Internet, you probably know what a ridiculous hassle it can be. As a general rule, free stock photos are extremely difficult to find. A huge portion of the stock photo market is owned by professional companies like Shutterstock and 123RF, who charge $20 or more for a single photo. Lucky for you, there are a few ways to access high-quality stock photos without any hassle or significant cost. Here's a lovingly curated list of the world's best free stock photo websites for designers, business owners and anyone else: Related: Want Clickable Images? 1. Unsplash adds 10 new royalty-free photos every 10 days and they're almost always of breathtakingly attractive beautiful landscapes. Searchable? 2. Dutch artist Folkert Gorter and his graphic-design peers at SuperFamous curate this collection of incredibly high-resolution images, perfect for use in website design or as desktop backgrounds. 3. Searchable? 4. 5. Photo by John Hope 6. 7. 8.
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