How to Create Community

AnitaB.org wanted to find a way to sustain the energy and connections felt at GHC to make them last year-round. There are AnitaB.org local communities (online groups) in existence, but the success of these is varied and relies heavily on the participation of volunteers and local ambassadors. If a city has a highly engaged community leader, the group thrives; but if a city doesn’t have anyone willing to lead the charge, the group lies dormant and lacks purpose and engagement.

Women find ways to keep in touch, but it is fractured across various platforms: Slack, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp (for starters). AnitaB.org wanted to be the glue that held it all together via a platform or online system, hosted by the organization themselves.

But nobody wants another social network to check – a service like this had to offer something that these other existing services didn’t. Jeanne Hultquist, Chief Marketing officer and project lead at AnitaB.org said it had to have a “stickiness” to it. So we set out to conduct user research to learn exactly what it was women technologists needed to be successful.

Who Are Our Users

Photo Credit: wocintechchat.com | #WOCinTech Chat

Our projects always start by learning as much as we can about our partner and their goals for a project. In an onsite session with the AnitaB team, a lot of ideas came out for what a networking platform would contain:

• Job boards
• Facilitating connections
• Resources
• Access to events

Of course, what an organization wants isn’t always what its audience wants. Jeanne knew this as well as we did. And so our research began.

We combined research methods and held conversations with 17 women and 3 male allies, and distributed a survey to over 40,000 contacts in the AnitaB.org email list. As the interviews progressed, some clear patterns began to emerge about what women in tech want and need to feel successful:

• Mentorship (specifically from women who represent specific experiences and backgrounds)
• Access to resources and support
• Ways to connect with and access more women in your field

In addition to learning more about what women in tech really needed, this research fed into defined personas: the high priority audiences that it would be important to AnitaB.org to address. These personas contained trends in needs, motivations, challenges, and success states. Below are sample narratives that emerged for the personas of Mothers in Tech.

Who Else is Creating Community?

Alongside the user research, we also ran a landscape analysis to determine who else in the sector was maintaining a sense of community, and doing so successfully. We started with broad reviews of sites, apps, and community platforms that were doing some form of what we wanted to achieve: connecting people in meaningful ways.

We also wanted to make note of features and functionality within tools and platforms that we could improve upon, as well as identify gaps in the landscape where AnitaB.org could fulfill a need. It’s known to many as a basic SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats).

Another aspect of the landscape analysis was to ensure our findings would directly serve the audience needs identified in the user research and persona work: mentorship, resources, and support. Implementing a feature that doesn’t serve the people you’re intending to engage is inefficient and unproductive (not to mention costly!). We wanted to ensure our recommendations coming out of this research were backed by the user data.

Photo Credit: wocintechchat.com | #WOCinTech Chat

The Recommendations

Out of our research and landscape analysis, we determined the focal point of this platform would be:

3 Recommendations were to focus on Mentorship, Networking and Connections, and Knowledge Sharing.

In utilizing features we found across a variety of sites, platforms, and apps, we could borrow functionality that we liked and piece together the components of a platform that would serve this specific audience. Although no platform has been implemented (yet), our findings have helped AnitaB.org re-shape GHC itself, as well as their marketing and engagement strategies.

What We Learned

The greatest learning that happened in this entire project was seeing how the organization’s assumptions about their users compared to what people actually told us they wanted out of AnitaB.org. Whether you’re building a platform, designing a new site, or simply trying to learn more about your users, these research tools are invaluable in bridging those gaps and building relationships with your users. It can help you shape your content in more intentional ways, and lead your users towards deeper engagement through content that resonates with them.

Strategic Services Utilized: User Research (Surveys, Interviews) | Landscape Analysis | Persona Development