I am leading a book club at MathWorks centered around the wonderful book, Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging by by Carrie Melissa Jones and Charles Vogl. The book is full of ideas, tactics, and strategies for creating, cultivating, and managing communities. My TL;DR for the book is: create belonging and serve the interests of others. There are 30 of us going through the book club together and it is like we created a little community around the book about community for our community strategy. Meta.
In chapter 5, Team Selection, the authors being up the Pareto Principal.
You might better know the Pareto Principal as the 80/20 rule where 80% of the success comes from 20% of the resources. They apply the 80/20 rule to talk about how a small segmentation of your community members are going to impact the majority of the community. Further, a very few folks are going to do the heavy lift and they are considered to be critical members of the community.
Generalizations don’t always work for every community effort, but you can use the Pareto Principal as a starting point. Identify your critical community members, give them ownership, and keep them strong. What are their concerns? Aspirations? Do your actions enrich them?