What is a community, anyway?

The word community gets tossed around a lot these days. Brands, organizations, and influencers often describe their customers, members, or followers as a community.

We couldn’t help but wonder:

Do trial users of a personal finance app consider themselves to be part of that app’s community?

Do people who wear glasses identify as part of “the eyeglass wearing community”?

To be frank, those uses of the word community feel like a bit of a stretch.

Seeing the word getting bandied about every which way, applied to all sorts of situations that don’t pass the “Is this actually a community?” smell test got us thinking: what does make a community? How has that word, and the experience of belonging, transformed from pre-internet town squares into a catch-all buzzword?

We wanted to dig into what separates a community from a list of people.

And so we developed our four pillars of community, the ones that have been unspoken in our organization since its inception, but whose principles we’ve abided by for nearly ten years now.

In order to be considered a community, we think members:

1. Are passionate about what they have in common with one another. A group of people who love fitness and who want to discuss, share, and engage around that interest, is a community. A group of people who all wear black socks but have no particular passion for that shared experience are just a group of people.
2. Engage regularly with, and care about, one another. In order for a community to thrive, its members must interact with one another in regular and meaningful ways. They have a feeling of trust, belonging, and safety with one another.
3. Are passionate about a common purpose. A shared common purpose builds stronger identification with the group, and makes belonging to the community matter.
4. Care about the community as a whole. Members must be engaged not just with each other, but also invested in the success of the community. When members play an active, social role in sustaining the community, they strengthen it and help it thrive.

These four pillars are the smell test we’ve used whenever we hear a new use of the word — like the “socks wearing community” or the “long-haired community”. And more importantly, it’s the standard against which we measure our community building efforts. If it feels contrived, it probably is. If it feels organic and energetic, it probably aligns with those four pillars.