Rachael Dempsey | Everything I learned about community building, I learned growing up in a bar

Transcript#

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Hello everyone. It's Wednesday night and I just sat down at my mom's bar, Sneakers. I can hear the band doing their soundcheck and I take a bite of my buffalo chicken and I look across the bar and see my mom sit down next to a regular. She strikes up a conversation with them and introduces them to my neighbor sitting a few seats down.

I've witnessed this so many times at Sneakers that it's become commonplace to me. But lately, probably the last year or so, I've thought a lot about the community building that she's done so naturally the past 38 years.

And when I say growing up in a restaurant, I really mean that. This is my baby picture on the bar there at Sneakers. But jumping ahead, I'd say just about 30 years from there, I am now our manager of our professional community at RStudio .

In my role, I get to work with a lot of you all, either in the room or watching virtually, and help connect customers to be able to share use cases and best practices and teach lessons learned with one another. In doing so, I've learned that a lot of what makes us really good at our job is not what's apparent in our resume or through our prior job experience or through the degree that we have.

So when I think about my role in organizing and building community at RStudio, I realize I've been running my own bar. There are four, well, there's so many things that you can learn from restaurant experience itself, but there are four key takeaways that I want to share with you all today that you can take in building communities of your own or growing communities of your own.

Find your Taco Tuesday: be consistent

So the first one, find your Taco Tuesday or be consistent. At Sneakers and at a lot of restaurants, I'm sure we know, there are certain days that are often associated with certain foods or certain days that are associated with certain events. At Sneakers, this could be having tacos on Tuesday or live music on Wednesday and Saturday.

And people don't come to every single event, but when they have a free night or when they're looking for something to do with friends, they know exactly where they can go. And so I try to do this with our events at RStudio as well.

So every Tuesday at 12 Eastern time, I host the RStudio Enterprise Community Meetup. And this is a meetup event for people to just share what they're doing. So they may share a new use case or a best practice learned and present for 30 minutes and take questions from the community. And so these happen every Tuesday at 12 Eastern time. And it may be people gathering around an industry group like using R in healthcare or more broadly using Shiny in production.

Also every Thursday at 12 Eastern time, I host our Data Science Hangout, which I see a few people here who have been to those as well. This is a little bit less formal. Not that the other is formal at all either, but there's no presentation at these. It's just a different data science leader from the community who joins me to answer questions from the community. So all the questions are audience-led from you all and could be questions like, how do I talk to executives? Or how are you thinking about hiring right now? Should I have a centralized or decentralized data science team?

These are every Thursday at 12 Eastern time. I've included the link to the calendar for these if you ever want to add the individual events or just the whole series of events to your calendar. This one's best formatted for your phone, but if you're on your desktop, add an extra dash and type calendar, and it will look a lot nicer too. But if you're also an organizer, I just wanted to include that the tool that I use here is called Add Event. I really like that. It makes it really easy to share events that people can just put on their calendar without having to give me any information. So find your Taco Tuesday.

Start conversations across the bar

Secondly, start conversations across the bar. So as I opened up with that scene, imagine the regular sitting alone at the bar. My mom might walk over to them and strike up a conversation with them and the couple sitting a few seats down. It might be about the band that's playing next week that she knows that they both like, or it could be about a special that's on the menu that somebody else ordered across the bar too.

The topic itself doesn't really matter as much. It's just that she's giving permission for that interaction to happen and kicking off the conversation. She might start the conversation and then have to go walk away and run to the kitchen and help with something or make a drink behind the bar. But that person sitting alone at the bar might stay a little bit longer because they now know somebody. Or they might come back more regularly because they feel a part of the sneakers community.

I think one of the sneakers regulars said it best, and this is a newspaper article from a few years ago. But Deb is someone who I've known for many years now. She's filmed employee weddings. She actually made a video for my high school volleyball team. But Deb said, it's the kind of place where you can go in alone, have some food and a glass of wine, and pretty soon you are a part of the conversation.

But Deb said, it's the kind of place where you can go in alone, have some food and a glass of wine, and pretty soon you are a part of the conversation.

I want people to feel this way at our studio community events as well, minus the food and wine except for this week. But as community organizers, we have a responsibility to bring people together based on shared interests. And I think it's important here that these interests aren't something that we ourselves have to be experts on.

But we can go a step further here to help kick off conversations with people at events as well. I think one of my favorite examples of this comes from the Data Science Hangout, which happens every Thursday at 12 Eastern time. But this particular week featured Kristy Angel, a data science manager from Stitch Fix. And leading up to that session, a few people had reached out to me on LinkedIn or maybe at meetups as well and mentioned that they're really having a hard time finding a new job. And they were hitting roadblocks with recruiters and not getting through to a hiring manager because they didn't have a certain degree.

So I had the privilege of knowing this as the organizer of the group and getting to talk with all these people. So I was able to ask this to Kristy for them anonymously, just to get her insights and hear her experience. And I started to see in the chat that everybody started commenting with their own degrees and their own non-data science degrees in a room full of data scientists, or a Zoom room full of data scientists. And it was just one of those moments that you just remember, just seeing people all supporting each other and cheering each other on for their non-data science degrees and supporting people who are running into this right now.

So start those conversations across the bar.

Touch every table

Third, touch every table. So at Sneakers, it's pretty much a guarantee if you go in for dinner, my mom will come by your table and thank you for coming in. If it's her night to work, of course. If it's her business partner Annie's night to work, she'll be the one to come by. And it doesn't matter if you are regular or this is your first time coming into Sneakers. She'll stop by and say thank you for coming in and ask where you're from, how you're enjoying your meal, or maybe reminiscing with customers who have become like family.

I actually had no idea this was a term until preparing for this talk, but table touching is a real thing in the restaurant industry. And there's a lot of articles about how touching every table can help create a guest for life.

In the virtual world, I want to be able to stop by and meet you at your table as well. The way that I like to do this is when people join a meetup or a data science hangout, is to write down the names of people who mentioned they're joining for the very first time, or maybe it's just a name that I haven't seen joined before. But also write down a few names of people who have been coming back regularly, or faces that I've been seeing on Zoom.

This is not possible, I know, with hundreds of people, but I don't think that's a reason to not do it at all. So I might say to myself, today I'm going to write down the names of five regulars. And five new people. And I'll reach out to them on LinkedIn just to say thank you. Thank you for joining, or thank you for the comment that you put into the chat. So it might be just a few people that week, but hopefully, as we go, I get to reach out to everybody. So touch every table.

Notice the unsaid

And the last takeaway I want to leave you with, which also expands on the last one. Sometimes when you're going by and visiting with a table, you get a chance to learn more about someone's experience and how you can make that a little bit better. But not only in what they're telling you, but in observing the unsaid.

So I think I've given you enough restaurant examples right now that I can put you in the role of owner. So let's say over here we have our table of four who are waiting for trivia night to start. They all ordered a round of drinks, three of them are finishing up, and you walk by their table to check in on them. You notice, though, that one of the drinks is pushed over to the side. Now you ask them how their night's going, they say everything's great. But you can tell they probably didn't enjoy their drink as much as they would have liked to by the way that it's pushed over to the side. So you look at that and take it as an opportunity to ask them if there's something else that you could get them and insist that you want them to have something that they'd enjoy.

This doesn't have to just be about untouched food or drinks. It could also be about stopping by a table and noticing that it's somebody's birthday and noticing that before they actually told you. Just noticing the little things.

This dining experience looks a little bit different in a virtual world. So let me just take you on a journey here. So we'll look at my, this little stick figure here, and we can imagine it as anyone, but we'll call him Bob. So Bob joins a meetup event for the first time and listens in. Maybe Bob was on the list of one of the five people that I wrote down as a new person or maybe he wasn't. He comes back again and joins in listen-only mode again. A week later, he comments in the chat, and then I notice Bob unmutes briefly, it pops up to the top of my Zoom, but doesn't end up speaking.

So I'm not going to say to Bob on LinkedIn, hey, you joined three times and you never talk, what can I do to make you feel more comfortable? But I might say something like, hey, Bob, thanks so much for joining today. I loved your comment about learning R as a SaaS user. I think that perspective was incredibly helpful. If you ever have any suggestions or things that we could be doing to make this event more useful, please let me know.

And Bob might say, thanks for joining, I had a great time. I wanted to ask a question, but I wasn't sure if it was the right format. And so I've had the opportunity now to learn something more about Bob's experience by thanking him for coming and by just noticing that there was something there in the unsaid.

And so what Bob does for me here is I have that opportunity to say, did you know that you can ask questions anonymously as well? And so I can let him know this is a place for any question to be asked, but there's something more there. And he points out to me that I didn't make it clear maybe in the beginning of the presentation that people could ask questions anonymously. And if I said that once, maybe that's not enough. Because if somebody joined a few minutes later, they would have missed that. So it lets me know that that's something I should put in the chat as well.

So months later, maybe he keeps coming back and keeps joining, and eventually presents at the meetup as well. I think this is one of my favorite things about community building, is seeing somebody come for the very first time, and then starting to get to know people, and you see them, like, being friends on Twitter or commenting on each other's LinkedIn posts. And then eventually that person being the one presenting at the event too.

I think this is one of my favorite things about community building, is seeing somebody come for the very first time, and then starting to get to know people, and you see them, like, being friends on Twitter or commenting on each other's LinkedIn posts. And then eventually that person being the one presenting at the event too.