[00:00:00] Welcome to Elements of Community Podcast about discovering and exploring the Elements of Community. I am Lucas Root, and each week we talk with a community leader about what makes their community thrive and bring value to both the leaders and the members join me as we unpack the magic of The Elements of Community.

[00:00:38] Amanda, I’m so delighted to have you with us. Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself?

[00:00:43] Yeah, I’m really glad to be here. Thank you so much for having me. So I am Amanda Hamilton. I am the founder of two businesses. One business is Hamilton Raye, your outsourced admin, and the second business is the admin community. Really the place for professionals of the administrative role and how to build and learn from one another. That is really our focus in the admin community. I started Hamilton Raye back in the end of 2019. Kind of got kicked off really kick-started faster than I intended in 2020.

[00:01:21] And when all of that was shaking out, Probably in the back half of 2020, I realized that there was this opportunity to kind of build this community of administrative professionals, especially in this remote world that we’ve shifted to because it becomes, I would say a lonely and the admin role and really how can you build a community of admins to support one another?

[00:01:43] So I kind of started the concept back at the end of 2020, but I really kicked it off this year.

[00:01:50] That’s so cool. All right. Can you imagine, like for everyone else who’s listening, can you imagine like deciding to do an outsource business and launch it just before 2020 hits? What amazing luck, I guess, but the best kind of luck.

[00:02:10] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:02:13] I’ve heard a lot of stories and we’re going to go way off topic here. Right. But I’ve heard a lot of stories about how COVID has been horrible, but equally a lot of stories about how it’s been amazing. A very good friend of mine posted on LinkedIn. At the beginning of October, I think, a year ago he said, COVID has been awful for all sorts of reasons, but I haven’t missed a single one of my son’s baseball games. I was like, yeah, that’s great.

[00:02:43] Yeah. It’s pretty incredible that that’s been able to be a shift for a lot of people.

[00:02:49] Yeah. I hope that as things continue to shift and we, you know, change the way that we approach this going forward, he continues to not miss his son’s baseball games.

[00:03:02] Yeah. I completely agree.

[00:03:05] And you have a story kind of like that, which is very cool.

[00:03:09] Yes, absolutely. I think the one, especially as it relates to the business world, not everybody had a lot of success as you mentioned, but I think one of the pieces was if you could pivot quickly and really think on your toes.

[00:03:28] And say, okay. Well, where’s the world quickly shifting? I think that that’s where a lot of people saw success. I even saw this very random example, but there is a local restaurant down the street from me. And all of the restaurants everywhere around us were struggling and he’s thriving. And we’re like, what is he doing?

[00:03:48] And he shifted his entire restaurant to be carry out. He created a window that people could order out of. It was COVID friendly, COVID cautious. And started to do to go cocktails and things like that. And so he was light years ahead of what people started to do later on in COVID, he started and as soon as things happened, when everything shut down in March of 2020, so it kind of goes back to if you’re able to really shift and pivot quickly, I think that’s really where you can see success, especially as the world evolves so quickly.

[00:04:28] Yeah. Wow. That’s very cool.

[00:04:30] Yeah.

[00:04:31] So we were talking about the name of your community and the description in the green room before we fully launched. Can you share the name again and the description?

[00:04:43] Yeah, so it’s the admin community and we are a group of professionals and experienced admins and we provide monthly tips and tricks and really have a focus on a community approach to learning.

[00:04:58] Cool. So tell me.

[00:05:00] Yeah. So we work out of the platform, the Mighty Networks, I had met with somebody that I met through a networking group. She is also a founder of a community called Wolf and Friends. And I had asked her just, Hey, what do you use for your community building? And she recommended it.

[00:05:20] And honestly, the mighty networks has been probably the best part of our community building just because it’s so easy to navigate. Really cool. We’re able to kind of keep this cohesive, connected for people together. So yeah, we do a lot of different things. We do monthly or weekly admin tips kind of sharing best practices.

[00:05:43] We do like wellness Wednesdays just how to stay well mentally, physically, all of those things emotionally. And then we kind of just do a variety of things here and there just to like try and keep the community connected as well as like I mentioned, really support that learning and engagement for the admin role.

[00:06:06] Interesting. So how does somebody know that they belong in that community from the name and the description?

[00:06:15] I would say, if somebody, as an administrative professional, they’re looking to learn and grow and connect with others this is their place to be.

[00:06:25] We don’t have any requirements. You don’t have to be a certain skill level. We actually just had a gal joined recently. She has never been an admin, but that’s where she wants to pivot her career. So she’s joining us to learn and to grow and to leverage that community learning from more experienced professionals.

[00:06:44] And that’s really the goal. And so it’s an open forum for everyone.

[00:06:53] Can I take a shot at a rewrite?

[00:06:57] Sure.

[00:06:58] Okay. So I’m hearing, professional administrative people who want to learn and grow, I’m hearing that they don’t necessarily have to be in the profession yet.

[00:07:14] No.

[00:07:15] Okay. So do you have corporate representatives in there?

[00:07:20] Not yet. That’s definitely something. Well, yes and no, I would say the Hamilton Raye side of the business that I support everybody in our business is in the community. So they’re a very large piece of things. And I don’t look at us as a corporate entity. We’re more of an agency, but we work with a lot of corporate organizations. So we have that level of expertise.

[00:07:48] Okay. Oh, I got something, but I want to come back to it. I’m going to put a spin on it. Why did you create the community?

[00:07:58] Yeah. For a couple of reasons, I would say first and foremost I wanted to find a better way to train people. I was always coming up with like all these really interesting ideas and ways of working.

[00:08:14] And while it was really cool to do that training for my team. I was like, oh, we could do the same thing for everyone else. And so that was one part of it. As well as, and it’s funny, I actually just finished reading this book called The Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace and it’s essentially the fundamentals of the love languages.

[00:08:36] And It talks a lot in that book about how the administrative role is one of the loneliest roles in an organization, because you’re so siloed. You don’t necessarily work with anybody else. You typically work with an executive who was then on a larger team, but then you’re typically on your own. And unless you’re working in a large organization where there’s multiple admins that you’re connecting with and working with on a daily basis, You can typically feel very lonely.

[00:09:03] And so I, especially as the world pivoted to more of this remote environment, I thought this could be a really cool way to bring kind of the two things together, learning engagement, but also this remote connected building people together and really having someone to lean into during the day, if you are feeling lonely and you’re like, oh, I wish I knew somebody else that could help me with this problem I’m trying to solve.

[00:09:26] And so it would just dropping a note in the community to say, hey, does anybody know how to do this? That’s kind of what we’re looking to do. And that’s kind of bridging those two gaps is why I brought this community together.

[00:09:41] Okay. So it’s not just people looking to learn and grow. It’s people looking to beat the loneliness and learn and grow.

[00:09:49] Yes. Yeah. I think that, and I know everybody has a different definition of community, but that’s how I define community in my eyes. It’s a place to come together. Right. It’s like like-minded people coming together to kind of like work together.

[00:10:10] And that’s how I like have a vision of what that looks like and feels like

[00:10:19] I love it. Tell me more about that.

[00:10:23] Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, like you talk about your neighborhood community or I mean, really any community, right? You typically are together in a form of you have a common goal, a common interest, something of that nature. And you normally aren’t joining a community to get away from people.

[00:10:48] It’s about how are you trying to meet and connect with others, right? I feel like connection and community are kind of connected. And I really see those two things coming together.

[00:11:00] Okay. Yeah. So we have the framework that we’ve identified that helps people understand what are the elements that make it possible for people to be successful as a community, but you’re right.

[00:11:13] They have to come together somehow some way for some reason. And those elements talk about that to some degree, the common purpose, that’s the reason why we’re coming together. So the neighborhood community is coming together because they all live together in the same area, physically, right. They’re co located at night every night.

[00:11:32] And they have thoughts about how they want that experience to be, and they want to work together in order to execute those thoughts. So that’s like having a common purpose and you know, the little things that they do to start execute the idea that, the way I want my living experience to be, you know, here’s I want to do this thing and I want to do that thing. Those are projects.

[00:11:57] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:12:01] How does your community, which is an online community, right? They have a place to co locate, but it’s not physical. How do they create a common language?

[00:12:13] That’s an interesting question. I think now if you’ve never worked in an administrative role, you wouldn’t know the admin language, but I think if you have a little bit of experience, you kind of walk in knowing how to interact and it’s kind of funny. It’s hard to describe, but you know, as an administrative professional, who to talk to and how to like communicate to one another.

[00:12:45] And so I think in that way within a community, if you don’t know that you can kind of see it as people are communicating, I’m trying to, like, I don’t know how to explain it in the best words possible, but like It’s even when you’re scheduling a meeting. And if you reach out to somebody to schedule a meeting as an admin and you reach out to another admin, it’s just common knowledge that if you’re the one that’s reaching out, you’re typically going to be the one that’s sending the invite.

[00:13:12] So if people operate on the flip side of things, that’s where it’s kind of, it’s a funny thing. So there’s like this weird like learned language, I would say along the way, it’s not super prescriptive. I think it’s just things that you learn as you learn the role and you work with others and kind of understand the nuances of it.

[00:13:36] That’s just one silly example. There’s several others. But I would say within a community environment, you develop a language together as you’re building the community and engaging on a consistent basis.

[00:13:54] I love that. That’s awesome. And I agree that the way that you choose to do things, it counts as a language. So, the social convention around choosing who it is that sends the invite, right? The person who first reached out, that’s the one who sends the invite. Yeah. That’s language.

[00:14:12] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:14:13] Like, everybody jokes and it’s a hilarious joke and I’m Italian. So it’s funny to me too, everybody jokes that if you tie in Italians, hands behind their back, they won’t be able to talk. And that’s a hundred percent true. So talking with our hands is a piece of our language.

[00:14:32] Yeah. I am not Italian, but I do talk with my hands.

[00:14:39] Yup. Well language is a learned thing.

[00:14:42] Yes.

[00:14:44] Okay. So going back to what we call a CPOP the Community Point of Purpose. It sounds to me like your CPOP is Professional Admins Looking for Community.

[00:15:02] Yeah.

[00:15:05] It seems like that’s it, because community includes doing projects together. It includes having a common language.

[00:15:11] It includes getting together and being engaged together. And in this case, the projects are learning and growing. The projects are talking about the challenges that you have as an admin. So professional admin seeking community.

[00:15:25] Yes, absolutely.

[00:15:31] Cool. What do you think, you’re going to put it up on your mighty networks? No, It’s okay. You’ve been running this community for how long, when did you start building it?

[00:15:44] So we officially kicked it off early this year. So probably in January, I started to build it in 2020, but my primary focus, the agency that I own and run ended up being my, I had to really focus on my efforts there.

[00:16:02] Testing grounds?

[00:16:03] Well, not even testing grounds, but just in terms of priority for a while, that’s where I was focusing on growth in terms of business. And so the community, I finally had the capacity to take on really starting and building that this year.

[00:16:19] Yeah, I get that, I’ve been there.

[00:16:23] Yeah.

[00:16:25] In the process of putting this together, you must have tried some things that didn’t work and tried some other things that worked really well and sort of doubled down on those. What is it that makes a community effective?

[00:16:37] I definitely think you have to have a vision of like what you’re trying to achieve. You definitely need to know your audience. If I had no idea what an admin did or what that role looked like, I would probably just fail at what I’m doing right now.

[00:16:54] So I think between those two things, you can kind of figure it out. I also think too, if you’re looking to build a remote community, you have to have the right platform and I kind of explore different options for what I was trying to do originally. I thought, oh, I’ll build a communit in Slack. And it’ll be something we just truly are focused on questions, engagement in Slack. And the more that I thought about it.

[00:17:21] It could be done.

[00:17:22] The more that I thought about it, though, it just, it didn’t make sense for what I was trying to achieve. And so I walked away from that as well as just keeping it organized. I think I actually joined a remote community in slack saw that I did not like the way that it worked and said, okay, what should I do differently on my side? And that’s really one of the biggest things like feeling out that, that piece of it.

[00:17:54] So what I’m hearing is co-location has to be easy?

[00:18:00] Very easy. Yeah. I think that’s with anything right?

[00:18:03] So in the neighborhood example, it’s really simple. Co-location is easy because you walk out your front door and you’re in your neighborhood.

[00:18:10] Yes.

[00:18:12] In the Slack community example, for some reason that wasn’t easy for you. So you walked away from that feeling dissatisfied because you couldn’t become part of the community. Cause co-location, wasn’t easy.

[00:18:25] Yeah.

[00:18:26] That’s cool. And then you’re using a different platform. Obviously you told us Mighty Networks. So is the platform, is the co-location being easy, a core tenant to how you’re building this?

[00:18:42] Yes, absolutely. You can access the community from your phone. You can access it from the web. It’s easy to communicate with somebody it’s easy to read notifications. Yeah, it’s very, very easy, very straightforward. And it’s very user-friendly.

[00:19:05] Are there other things that you’ve tried that you learned from?

[00:19:11] Not yet, I would say the Slack piece was something, that was the eye-opener for me. We haven’t built the community at large enough yet that I haven’t been able to learn enough to pivot quite yet, but I’m definitely a person of seeing what works. If something doesn’t work, identifying the why and then kind of pivoting from there.

[00:19:41] So as we continue to like grow and evolve, I’ll definitely be assessing what that looks like. Because realistically, every business has to evolve and pivot. Right. And if you don’t, that’s where you get stagnant and ultimately at the end of the day, most fail when you are not evolving with the times.

[00:20:01] And so that’s really in my mind from a community standpoint, I have to continue to think that way of like, how do we continue to evolve as the profession evolves?

[00:20:16] Okay. I love it. Have you built mechanisms into your community to help you identify the changing in profession?

[00:20:25] Well, the good news is, we do the profession. So I’m the Hamilton Raye side of the business. And so, my ultimate goal is to be like, long-term, I would love to be like the leading organization of outsource administrative support.

[00:20:45] And so. In order to do that, we have to be ahead of the curve in terms of the administrative professional world. So it’s very connected, you know, like everything that we do over here, we have to then say like, well, how do we take that and integrate it over here? So they’re very connected in that way, which is really cool.

[00:21:06] Cool. What makes an effective community leader?

[00:21:13] I think a leadership role is the same, an effective leader is the same. If you’re in a community, if you’re in a business, if you’re running a business, if you’re leading a nonprofit, whatever it might be. And I think with that, it’s not about telling people what to do.

[00:21:33] It’s like how do you give them just enough information that they get to a solution themselves. And so that’s kind of where with the community aspect of things, I’m consistently trying to create tips and tricks, but I don’t want to tell somebody exactly how to do something because I want them to figure it out on their own, but I want to give them a little bit so that they know generally what they need to do, but they can formulate their own process behind it.

[00:22:01] And I think that sometimes leadership tends to dictate what to do. And I think if you take that approach, it doesn’t allow people to like learn and then like bring their true colors and their thoughts behind everything to the forefront. And in my mind, like a really strong leader, their team is the one that’s like running the things they’re just like helping them get there.

[00:22:31] So an effective leader is someone who has a clear vision and is able to communicate the vision without dictating the process. Is that what I’m hearing?

[00:22:46] Yeah, but you have to give them a little bit, like you don’t tell them you have to do it X, Y, and Z way you tell them, like, this is how you could think about it.

[00:22:54] Give a little bit of like a nugget and then let them take it all the way through then of course you have to like help and guide along the way. But if you continuously instruct people, they just don’t learn

[00:23:13] Right. And life without learning is boring. And why would we do that?

[00:23:18] Exactly.

[00:23:20] Yeah. I’m with you there. And also that’s the core of your community, right?

[00:23:25] Yes, exactly.

[00:23:29] Yeah. So a clear vision and how would you describe giving someone just enough?

[00:23:42] I think it depends. I can’t give you like a concrete example, but I had a gal on my team recently, we were traveling for a client retreat and I was saying how I’m really trying to not talk as much in meetings to be a better, like, kind of exactly how I was describing. Like give people just enough to like bring them to where they should go and then they can figure it out after.

[00:24:12] And she made a comment to me, which I thought was very interesting. I was like, yeah, I’m trying not to join as many meetings. And she said, well, I don’t like that, I want you to be there. And I said, well, why is that? And she said, well, you’ll just be typing on your computer. And then out of nowhere, you like give us this brilliant idea.

[00:24:29] You don’t tell us what to do, but you come up with this brilliant idea and then you go back to typing and she is like, it’s always helpful cause you just throw it out to us. It’s great. And then we run with it and I’m like, and that to me is like giving just enough. It might just be a quick idea.

[00:24:48] It might be a solution to a process or like a challenge that they’re running into, but you’re not telling them exactly how to do it. It’s just enough that they’re like, oh, okay. Yeah, I can do it this way. And almost like securing the confidence that they need to take it all the way.

[00:25:07] So what I’m hearing I think is the leader needs to be an extraordinarily good listener.

[00:25:15] Yes.

[00:25:16] And the leader needs to care about the growth of their community?

[00:25:26] Yes, absolutely.

[00:25:28] Cause it seems like the just enough description comes from being a good listener and caring about the growth.

[00:25:35] Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think those are definitely two traits of a really strong leader in my mind. You have to be able to listen.

[00:25:45] Yeah. Are there other things that make an effective leader?

[00:25:53] I think empathy is another really great quality of a strong leader. If you can empathize with what people are going through, I think you can get through a lot. And so I would say that’s like another core trait of somebody that’s effective.

[00:26:14] Why? I mean, I think most people agree with you, but why let’s talk about it.

[00:26:19] Yeah. People are connected to empathetic people. And if you can show people that you care, they’re going to be more apt to be connected with you and want to like, either join your community and like evolve and help you build and grow it. Right. Or if it’s like in a work environment, if somebody knows that you care about them and are truly like empathetic towards what they’re dealing with, they will want to do better.

[00:26:55] And so that is a really, I would say a common trait of successful organizations is when you have like an empathetic leader. And people truly feel that way they’re going to do their best work for you and that’s not always the case, but I would say more oftentimes than not, they just feel valued.

[00:27:16] They feel valued. Okay. So in the Elements of Community, we have two different elements that might describe that. And I think they both actually do so. There’s common language, if you’re empathic, if you’re paying attention to somebody’s emotions, then the way that you speak to them is going to be unique to the scenario and the emotions that are involved.

[00:27:41] So for that moment, you have a community of two, and the common language includes the emotions. Rather than speaking to somebody and excluding the emotions. In which case you don’t have a common language, it’s going to be harder to communicate. So kind of like ease of co-location there’s also ease of communication and that common language eases communication.

[00:28:05] It makes it easier, simpler, faster, smoother. The other one is common heart, as humanity, we do our best work when we know that we are enrolled and we have enrolled, right? So the people with whom we’re interacting, they care. And You get there by doing things that show you care, like shifting your language in a moment to account for emotion, which would be possible, but really challenging without emphaty.

[00:28:49] Yes, absolutely.

[00:28:53] Cool. What do you think, what do you think of that?

[00:28:57] I think that’s great. I think that makes a lot of sense. And it feels very connected to the community environment.

[00:29:08] Does that change the way that you think about look at and talk about this?

[00:29:14] Talk about community, you mean? Or?

[00:29:16] Yeah. And in this case being an empathic leader.

[00:29:21] It definitely wouldn’t change the way that I do things. I’m very much an empathetic leader. I’m a very strong empath, so that comes naturally. So it’s definitely something though that I try and encourage others to do.

[00:29:38] No, I mean, sorry, what I mean is now knowing that a piece of that is coming out through your language, a piece of that is creating ease of communication between you and the person you’re talking to.

[00:29:51] I’m not saying you should step away from being empathic at all. I’m saying it’s a strength because it creates that common language in the moment. Now, does that change the way you think about, look at and talk about being an empathic leader?

[00:30:09] I don’t, I don’t think so. No, I don’t see it.

[00:30:13] Okay. Cool. So we’ve talked about the Elements of Community, we’ve brought up a couple of them. Would you like to pick one that you’re working on implementing in your community or that you have implemented well, and let’s talk about that.

[00:30:30] Sure. I would say kind of the one thing that we’re truly focused in our community right now is about how to do more of that learning and development piece of things. And that’s something I would say is our main focus right now. I’m kind of, as I shared, I’m not sure what’s going to work. What’s not going to work.

[00:31:02] I’m still learning and evolving. And that’s where, you know, one thing actually that’s interesting is not everybody learns the same way and that’s another piece of things of really trying to figure out how to engage every type of learner, especially in a remote environment because remote can be challenging, you know, like how do you cater to somebody that needs to have that ability to ask questions, not just watching a video recording and saying, oh, that looks great.

[00:31:35] You know? And how do you prompt people to do more of that? So that’s definitely something that we’re working on. And it’s more of that like community project piece of things and just continuing to evolve.

[00:31:48] So those are, yeah, those are projects, right? Each chunk of learning each group of tips that you’re trying to send out. That’s a project in itself.

[00:31:57] Yes. Yes, it is each one.

[00:32:01] It’s a project for you. It’s also a project for the community. Cause they’re incorporating that into their culture. Separate from community. They’re incorporating that into their culture and allowing that to become a part of what they each as individuals, but also as a community know and think about and act on.

[00:32:23] Yeah.

[00:32:25] How do you create engagement for those projects?

[00:32:31] That’s something I’m still trying to work through. One of the things that I do and I think it can work. I just have to figure out how best to improve it is, we do a lot of video tutorials so that it shows how to do something, but then prompting.

[00:32:54] Hey team. How do you use this in your day to day? You know, and using more of those like prompting questions and asking people to kind of share their perspective. And that’s really where we’re trying to get more engagement. One thing that I’m looking at, it’s not something we’re doing right now, but doing more like webinars forums or more of that, like actual learning and engagement collectively so that people can be in more engaged asking questions.

[00:33:24] And I think there’s some value of like being involved. And having a higher level of engagement when you’re in a forum like that.

[00:33:38] So you’re encouraging engagement through questions. Like how do you use this thing? Are there other things that you’re doing to encourage engagement?

[00:33:49] I would say it’s a lot of prompting questions. So we do like on Mondays, we kick off the week with a positive kind of what we call positive vibes and say like, all right, let’s get the week started and we’ll share a quote or something cool out of a journal and see, like, how does that prompt engagement from the team? Like, how are you going to use this to incorporate this into your week? Or we have wellness Wednesdays where we talk about. All right. One thing that’s helped, a lot of people in terms of like mental wellness is giving yourself restrictions on your phone in terms of like social media interaction, that sort of thing.

[00:34:28] And even explaining how to do that and then prompting other people to say, like, what other solutions do you have that you can share with the rest of the community that people can learn from? And that’s really where we are right now. I don’t have a lot of other I would say engagement opportunities as far as sharing.

[00:34:49] I think a lot of it will come as we do move to more like book clubs or a webinar opportunities, things of that nature.

[00:34:59] Okay. So questions, content, right? Cause tips and those things. Those are content. Do you have a reward system?

[00:35:12] We do not.

[00:35:16] Okay. I mean, to some degree, community is self rewarding, right? So there is an inherent reward in that people are showing up and they want to be enrolled.

[00:35:25] Enrolled

[00:35:26] Yeah. Be a part of something. Agreed.

[00:35:28] Yeah. You started this in part, because people were lonely, the role itself is inherently lonely. Is it working?

[00:35:42] Yes, I would say it is we still have work to do, but I would say.

[00:35:49] That’s fair. Do you want to talk about some of that?

[00:35:50] In terms of visibility. No, I think it’s just about visibility. We haven’t done a very good job of how to get the word out and the benefits and things of that nature. So that’s something that we’re currently working on.

[00:36:06] Yeah, I get that.

[00:36:08] I think that’s any business and any community.

[00:36:14] The good ones. The ones that survive.

[00:36:16] Yes. Yeah.

[00:36:19] Yeah. Awesome. Thank you for being here, Amanda. How do people who know they need to be in a community of admins who want community, how do they find you?

[00:36:31] Yeah, they can find us on online. Our website is TheAdminCommunity.com. We’re also on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And you can find this on the Mighty Networks. You can join the community directly through there, just doing a search of the admin community.

[00:36:50] And then the big curve ball question. What questions did I not ask that I should have?

[00:36:57] Oh gosh. Well, let me think about that just for one second. You know, I would be curious, it’s a question of, is. What other platforms are out there for community engagement? Cause I know there was endless, but I think that would be a really great question to dive in if you know of any others or if others know of others. Just as other people are building communities.

[00:37:37] Sure. I mean, the obvious answers that people will come up with are how come you didn’t use Facebook, or, that’s sort of what Facebook was built to deliver. And I see more and more people are migrating off Facebook, not choosing to use it to build their communities. And I get that. So for you, how come you didn’t use?

[00:37:58] It’s a good question. I actually don’t like Facebook. I find it, I mean, community I’ve ever been in has like been extremely spammy. I think it’s very hard to monitor Facebook groups and communities. And I just don’t like the flow that I actually have removed myself personally from Facebook.

[00:38:24] It was not giving me any value. It was a lot of stuff that was bringing me down and I knew that it wasn’t right for me. So that’s why I took myself off of it, end of last year.

[00:38:43] It kind of goes back to the loneliness thing. Right. If it’s not serving you to help you feel more personally connected, not necessarily plugged in, but actually connected, then, remove it.

[00:38:58] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:39:00] Now could you have done this on Facebook in a way that’s healthy for you and the members?

[00:39:08] Probably, the thing that I did not like about Facebook. And the thing that I like about Mighty Networks is you can, Mighty Networks is very similar. I would say it’s like this hybrid of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, because you can have a really cool professional profile.

[00:39:25] Like you have on LinkedIn, a community member can message you all of those things, but then it feels very like Instagram feed, like of a fun and uplifting. But it has that like feed structure of Facebook. And so I think it has like the positive qualities of all three of those platforms kind of like what brought together.

[00:39:50] And that’s the reason I personally chose it. I’m just curious if there’s others out there.

[00:39:54] Without the baggage.

[00:39:55] Without the baggage. Yes.

[00:39:57] That matters. It’s not a joke, that matters.

[00:39:59] Yeah. It does. It really does.

[00:40:02] I’ve looked at and considered Circle.so.

[00:40:06] Okay.

[00:40:07] And I think it’s great. My challenge with that is that you as the creator have to build more and Mighty Networks is prebuilt more. So you have to build a bless

[00:40:19] And that’s always the benefit, right?

[00:40:21] Yup. Not, not necessarily a problem for people who want more control. I find Circle.so Is probably going to serve them better for people who don’t want more control. Maybe Mighty Networks, maybe Facebook, right? Maybe, Slack.

[00:40:37] Exactly.

[00:40:40] Awesome. Thank you. Any other questions?

[00:40:44] No, I think that’s it.

[00:40:46] Awesome. Well, thank you very much for joining us, Amanda.

[00:40:50] Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

[00:40:55] All right.

[00:40:57] Thank you for joining us this week on Elements of Community. Make sure to visit our website ElementsOfCommunity.us or you can subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or via RSS. So you’ll never miss a show. If you found value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes or if you’d simply tell a friend about the show that would help us out too.

[00:41:22] If you liked the show, you might want to check out our EOC inner circle, where we deep dive with each guest on the inner workings of their community. We cover things like community model, profitability and engagement strategies. You can join the inner circle at ElementsOfCommunity.us/inner circle.

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