This is a condensed summary of the book Get Together, almost entirely in its own words. Its eleven sections match the chapters in the book. For a wealth of supporting material, see the book’s website: Get Together
Note that this is a summary of the book itself, not the 7 Cups training course derived from the book. The 7 Cups training course omits some information and adds some other information. Reading the actual book is highly recommended because of the many examples of successful communities it describes.
Overview Get Together is a guide to cultivating a community—people who come together over what they care about. The secret to getting people together is this: build your community with people, not for them. There’s an order of operations you can follow to cultivate communities that burn bright. This handbook guides you in doing that.
Getting together The first step is to pinpoint people you share a purpose with, do something together, and get them talking. There’s no substitute for a courageous leader who takes this first step. No matter your community-building endeavor, the original leader should start with a clear who, then craft a why with that who in mind.
Start with a clear who, then craft a why
Genuine passion attracts passionate people. If you rally your community because you have a damn good reason to, sincerity will permeate your efforts. Don’t try to fake the feeling. Start with people who bring energy, keen participants. You’ll need to stay invested in these people if you want to bring a community to life.
If the purpose, the why, only serves you, your community-building efforts will fall flat. The more this purpose resonates with your who, the more likely you are to spark a community. The why might be something your people need more of, a change that they desire, or a problem that they can only solve together. Make a list of names. Send out a signal.
Continually ask yourself whether your community has an exclusionary identity causing it to lack diversity, or is bonding in unintended ways. Proactively challenge your community to diversify.
Do something together Communities form around shared activities. Shared activities should be purposeful, participatory and repeatable. You’ll need to design a core activity that you and your people can get together and repeat.
Communities form around shared activities
Pay attention to feedback, and try to gauge your people’s interest objectively. If no one wants to repeat this activity with you, that’s a red flag. The inescapable truth is that you’ll have to exceed expectations with your core activity if you want people to show up and keep showing up. Do your best to create an undeniably valuable shared experience.
Get people talking To enable all the ways your people can share and collaborate with one another, you’ll have to create spaces where members can freely connect on their own time.
Take an active role in prompting and guiding your members into discussions by modeling what good participation looks like. Work with your early members to put structure in place, like ground rules, moderation, a private way to report violations, and a system for enforcing the rules.
The goal is to focus conversations on the unique ideas that your community wants to explore together.
Attract new folks The missing ingredient in many would-be communities is dedication. A sign of a vibrant community is that new members join because they want to. Aspiring leaders frequently forget the importance of this agency. They plop unknowing people on a list and start calling them a community.
Instead of a push, create a pull. Don’t broadcast a mass message to a faceless audience. Rather, work with your members to collectively send a clear, authentic signal about what your community is all about. To create a pull, tell the personal story of how you started the community. Show that the community is bigger than you, and show how someone can get involved.
Instead of a push, create a pull
Here’s the secret to spreading the word: attracting others can’t just be your job. Make it clear to members that their active involvement in recruiting by sharing their own stories and other shareable assets is crucial to ensuring the vitality and success of your community.
Shareable stories will depend on the activities you do together as a community. For example, they might centre on in-person experiences, training, learning, or contributed content like video.
Your job is to put a spotlight on the inspiring people in your community. In creating exposure for these exceptional folks, you’ll bring the community to life for others considering joining. If you want to show that your community is alive and vibrant, you’ll need to maintain a steady pulse in your storytelling.
Cultivate your identity The little things that members do to express their shared identity will bring them closer together even as the community grows.
Equip people with badges that enable members to telegraph their affiliation to your community. Beware that when you meticulously craft badges for members there can be negative consequences and supporters may be left with little space for their own voices to be heard. Instead, allow new badges to emerge from the community itself.
Bonds between members are fostered through rituals and language. Develop shared rituals and language unique to your community. As a start, try agreeing on a name for members.
Pay attention to who keeps showing up Collect participation data. Retention is the one metric that matters. You need to dig into who keeps showing up and why. Zero in on the individuals who are the most engaged.
Listen, listen, and listen. Numbers are great at explaining how many, but you’ll need to have conversations in order to ask why? and discover the root cause of people’s motivations. Keep an open line of communication and consider calling members, emailing questions, setting up interviews, or sending surveys.
Listen, listen, and listen
Use your measurement and listening processes to search for your most passionate community members, the hardcore of the hardcore. They always show up. They consistently invite friends. And most importantly, they’re raising their hands—eagerly contributing time and energy toward taking your community to the next level. Passing the torch to the folks who are raising their hands is how you’ll multiply your efforts as a leader and grow together as a community.
Paying close attention to your community helps you monitor sentiment, detect your missteps early, and react appropriately to avoid fear and distrust damaging relationships beyond repair. To remedy a tense situation, take ownership quickly and be transparent to reestablish trust.
Take extra time to speak with longtime members and emerging leaders in your community about any crisis or conflict. Internalize what you’ve learned, so that you can avoid similar situations in future. Remember: when members communicate frustrations to you, it’s a good sign because you can allow that knowledge to inform future decisions.
Create more leaders Growing a community isn’t about management. It’s about developing leaders. With their help, your community will affect more people and sustain itself longer than you could have managed on your own. Don’t bend to fears of losing control!
Don’t bend to fears of losing control!
Seek genuine and qualified people, but don’t be afraid to say goodbye if someone doesn’t work out. You can create many leadership roles with varying levels of responsibility.
Define a process for feedback and reviews with leaders. Consistent check-ins like these carve out space for hard conversations, and also create a structured, safe space for transitions to happen.
It should be clear by now: you can’t build a community on your own. One of the great joys of creating more leaders—finding, vetting, and developing them—will be watching some of them far exceed your expectations.
Supercharge your leaders Figure out what support is needed by your community leaders, and when. Map out the first steps that leaders take after raising their hands to accept a leadership role, how they are vetted, welcomed, onboarded and acknowledged, what key activities their work involves, and what support they receive.
Supercharge valuable activities
Your support should supercharge valuable activities and minimize or eliminate the others. The art of supporting volunteers lies in balancing structure and freedom. With structure new leaders gain confidence, with freedom they embrace ownership.
Celebrate together Use celebrations to revitalize the community by asking everyone tuning in to pause and focus, to mobilize around where to head next, to give everyone’s tanks a much-needed refill, and to reflect on all that’s been accomplished together.
Select a format for each celebration relevant to both your community’s identity and its purpose. The right format is crucial to getting your people to come together, and to fulfilling the intention of your celebration. Your celebrations should have direction and structure, and incorporate your community’s identifying badges, rituals and language.
Cap off your event by bringing to life what your collective acts of devotion have added up to. This why brought you together in the first place. Your capacity to realize that purpose will continue to bind members together for years to come.
What’s next for your community? Whatever stage your community is in, it’s crucial to remember that you’re working with living, breathing human beings, and, inevitably, some of what results is out of your hands. Because change is inevitable, don’t try to fight it. Instead, build a community that can respond to it.
The goal of Get Together is to help you foster a supportive, collaborative, and resilient group of human beings. It shows you how to progressively ask less from others and do more with them. At each stage, you should have relinquished more of your control and distributed ownership to more and more members.
The alternative to that resilience is an organizational bottleneck. Your work isn’t done until your members can thrive independent of your time and resources. So ask yourself: Will my community flourish without me?
If you’re not to this point yet, incorporate more listening, invite more participation, and, most crucially, make developing leaders a priority. We know that giving up that control is scary, but we can promise that distributing ownership is both rewarding and necessary. After you light the spark, your community will burn bright and long only once you’ve truly built it together.