Beeyond Buzzwords: Hands-on Community Building
In our line of work, we use a lot of terminology that may seem clear on the surface but is understood slightly differently by everyone. Without clarity, these words risk turning into ‘buzzwords’. That’s why, in this series, we’re unpacking some of the terms we use most often.
Today, we’re looking at what we mean by hands-on community building — a phrase that sits at the core of how we approach our work at Hive. We've learned that building an impact-focused farmed animal advocacy community requires more than just providing a space. It takes a great deal of work and intentionality. In fact, we only shifted Hive from a side project to a full-fledged organization because we saw not just the potential a community holds, but also the work it takes to set one up for success.
You may have been part of a community that took a more passive approach: one that provides the infrastructure and assumes motivated people will naturally connect and collaborate.
While this can work, we've found that for an impact-focused community like Hive, leaving things entirely to chance often means leaving impact on the table. For us, a hands-on approach is guided by two core dimensions.
1. The Prompting Dimension: Engineering Serendipity
This dimension is about actively triggering interactions and ensuring that high-potential opportunities don’t rely solely on chance. We believe this is an essential part of our role. We don't just hope the right person sees an important help request; we actively identify who could help and tag them directly, turning a static question into a concrete connection. We track these as part of our internal impact metrics to ensure that a high share of help requests receive meaningful follow-up.
Some of Hive’s most impactful collaborations began with a quick nudge to say, “you two should talk.” What begins as a quick tag in Slack has the potential to turn into a new project or a conversation that saves dozens of hours of duplicated work. When new members introduce themselves, we don’t just welcome them. We connect them with people and channels that align with their interests, creating the conditions for impact to take root.
This is particularly important because of a common challenge new communities face referred to as the "cold start problem”. At first, a community offers little value on its own, so people are likely to join, but not return when they don’t encounter meaningful, high-quality interactions. Our hands-on prompting helps us overcome this problem by ensuring that every new members’ early experiences leads to genuine and tangible connections.
To understand why this approach is so crucial, we often refer to the Fogg Behavior Model. The formula is simple: Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt (B=MAP).
Motivation is what a person wants to do (e.g., help animals, find a co-founder).
Ability is the infrastructure that makes it possible (e.g., our Slack community).
Prompt is the trigger that gets them to act.
A passive community-building approach assumes motivated people only need the ability. Our hands-on approach is about providing that missing piece: the prompt that turns presence into participation. We don’t just hope for connections; we intentionally create the moments that spark them.
2. The Culture Dimension: Maintaining a Healthy Environment
This is the behind-the-scenes work that creates and sustains a community that is healthy, welcoming, and easy to navigate. We focus on setting people up for success and making participation feel simple and intuitive. It’s a continuous, collaborative effort shared across our team. Some key examples here include:
Structured Onboarding: We guide new members through a process that not only shows them the value of our community, but also gives them a clear set of first steps. We keep refining this process through experimentation and feedback from community members, ensuring it remains engaging, supportive, and full of prompts to help members connect from day one.
Curated Content: We believe in surfacing the best conversations, resources, and opportunities so the right information almost comes to you. Through our bi-weekly newsletter, Hive Highlights, and our monthly "Hive Slack Threads" email updates, we try to ensure that the most important information from the farmed animal advocacy movement lands right in your inbox. This is a part of our effort to maintain momentum and continuous engagement — something that becomes even more important as a community grows.
Mindful Moderation: We actively guide conversations to keep them focused, respectful, and valuable. We design intuitive channel structures and set clear community norms to ensure everyone feels safe and supported to participate.
“The Hive founders and team are so intentional and proactive about ensuring we maximise our time on the Slack and how we can connect and for what intent. [...] The team are constantly getting feedback and looking at how Hive can have more impact, what opportunities there are and more. I think someone said it’s like the best bits of the best conference you can imagine - and so much more. Super intentional, agile, nimble, welcoming, inclusive, the opposite of all the issues a movement might face.”
Why Hands-On Matters
We've learned that without this hands-on approach, communities risk becoming overwhelming, inactive, or directionless. We believe this approach helps increase:
Likelihood of Meaningful Connections: By actively prompting and nudging, we ensure more valuable interactions occur.
Sense of Belonging: A well-maintained and proactive community makes members feel seen and supported, increasing their perceived value of participation.
Overall Impact: By engineering serendipity and providing a healthy environment, we maximize our community's potential to generate real-world impact.
The goal isn't to be overly prescriptive, but to provide the gentle nudges and clean infrastructure that allow our community's full potential to flourish. We hope this gives you a clearer sense of what we mean when we say "hands-on community building"—and perhaps even offers some ideas for your own community-building efforts!
