Starting a new initiative in your community or interest group?

Customer Discovery gives you a powerful way to enlist community support and deliver what people really want.

Communities are developed around ideas. If successful, those ideas take hold and spread virally until you have a community of believers who have experienced their power and usefulness. Unfortunately many community development projects fail to gain traction while using up limited resources. We asked ourselves why this takes place from the perspective of our experience as entrepreneurs. The answer we found was that starting a community is not different than doing a technology startup, on a basic level.

For a community to build connections and engage people it has to be aligned with their own self-interest. Unfortunately many community projects are based on an unproven conjecture about how that alignment works. A visionary person or group develops an idea and strikes out into the community to pursue it. In other words, they begin an operating campaign to make their idea a reality. The problem here is that they have not verified that the community wants that idea, needs their help or even that their idea is viable. So how do you take an idea and improve it until it is compelling to the community and aligns with their personal needs? The answer lies in the Customer Discovery Matrix.

Are you involved with a not-for-profit or community organization starting a new initiative? Contact us about our seminars on using the Customer Discovery Matrix to help you successfully launch your new community project.