# Coordination Summit | Community Organizing: Party Planning 101 - Tina Survilla Lindell - Channel: [ETHGlobal](https://streameth.org/ethglobal) - Date: 2022-10-09 - Duration: 25:37 - Topics: Science & Technology - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-pfwdYZavpsA - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfwdYZavpsA ## Description Welcome Tina Survilla Lindell from LadyBirds for a talk titled "Community Organizing: Party Planning 101". Part of ETHOnline's Coordination Summit. ETHOnline is our biggest event of the year! Collaborate with thousands of developers and creatives from around the world and win over $300k+ in prizes! We're bringing in 30+ of the biggest teams in web3 to give you access like never before. Learn from ecosystem leaders and build your biggest ideas as the merge nears reality. The future of Ethereum is being written right now, and it's time to make your mark. --------------------------------------------------- Follow us: https://twitter.com/ETHGlobal​ Check us out: https://ethglobal.co​m Email us at: hello@ethglobal.com #ethereum #eth #blockchain #crypto ## Transcript foreign [Applause] [Music] next up we have our next speaker Tina she's going to be talking about Community organizing and party planning 101 from Moon birds and BFF so without further Ado let's welcome uh Tina on stage I'll uh I made you turn your video on and uh get started hi hi thank you guys for having me um I'll start off with a bit of an introduction my name is Tina cervilia Lindell I'm a sociolinguist and I work in Community Management and marketing like everybody else who works in web 3 I've got a pretty unconventional background I started off as a sociolinguist focusing in comic book scholarship and using Comics to teach refugees English after leaving the non-profit sector I found myself working in healthcare and pharmaceuticals the one thing that medicine has in common with web 3 is it's a highly technical concept and you're dealing with a pretty naive user base so you ask yourself questions like how can we teach someone as much as possible as efficiently as possible in as little time as possible and how do we help the maximum number of people in the middle amount of time so I had an easy transition in the web free with those Concepts um when I got to what three I entered with truth Labs my partner is one of the founders so I had a very interesting experience as a naive user to see a project from behind scenes and how it builds from there um I was a moderator with them and I slowly entered the space I minted crypto coven and the marketing for that was amazing because when I came on the space was largely for men and crypto coven was the first time I built a product was marketed to me as a woman now when it comes to Community Management before all of those things before I was in web 3 web 2 sociolinguistics helping out with moon Birds ladybirds BFF I was what I call a I am a party person so I grew up moving around a lot my mom is a Filipino immigrant my dad was in the American Military so we moved every three to four years something my mom did that I've carried with me throughout my whole life was whenever we got to a new location she would seek out people like her so other Filipinos and then we'd have a party immediately parties allowed us to meet fellow members of our community people we had like interests in common with and after being in a new country for just a couple weeks we'd already had Child Care Study Buddies play dates people to help us out so when I got older I attended parties like every other weekend so parties are very much just part of my life when I got into high school I was at home I was about 15 years old and I decided one day I really wanted ice cream it was a hot day and stay with me you know it sounds kind of silly um but we didn't have any ice cream at home so my mom would not give me funds to get my own ice cream but I did have permission to use your house for a party and what I did was I invited all of my friends to have a big ice cream social now kind of like token gaining in order to attend my party so I could get ice cream and spend time with my friends attendees had to bring their own ice cream so just like tokengating people came by party they brought ice cream they brought syrup they brought sprinkles they all brought something we could share and we all had a great time and from that point I had an ice cream social every summer people attended continuously so particular concept I want something how can I get it and then the reality is if you want something other people probably wanted to um so when it comes to web3 how does that work what is my ice cream social analogy have to do with organizing communities online when it comes to people people are simple they won't surprise they want the light they want connection they want belonging and so when I think about bringing people together and getting them stay together I think about hurries how do we create a medium for connection that facilitates surprise Delight Joy and this is where party finances most people well I accept that maybe you didn't have a party every weekend like I did as a kid and maybe you haven't hosted large ones you've probably hosted some kind of event Were you invited at least one person to your house or maybe a small group of people pretty much everyone has organized a gathering of some sort so I like to take party planning 101 into mine when I think about community so when we're hosting a party we ask ourselves several questions one what kind of party are we having so whether you are working for a marketing position or you're literally throwing a party parties have a theme so traditional parties maybe it's a costume party a Halloween party when we're talking about Community organizing and web screen usually your product has to deal with maybe making your own Community surrounded around nft maybe it's focused on education mental health investing Market analytics you have to decide on your party theme and what's going to be what brings people together once you've decided on your party theme you need to ask yourself who am I inviting to my party who's my target audience so with web3 we ask ourselves what is the level of comprehension for the people I'm inviting into my party are we talking to people who are naive about the topic they have a lot to learn but you're going to teach them are we looking at people who are middle level they're what I call curious or skeptic they have some information but not all of the information they want more information or are we looking at people who are very advanced in their knowledge base so it's all about messaging and crafting the right language for whoever you're inviting maybe you want to cast a wide net and diversify you have to keep that in mind when you talk about who am I inviting to my party next we want to talk about venues where are you hosting your party so in what three and ask ourselves what platforms am I using are we having our party are we having our community meet on Discord are we having them meet on Twitter or do we use telegram do we use SMS texting are we using all of them are we being multimodal with our approach no matter what you're doing though you have to be clear with your attendees where they're going to be able to find the most resources so when you do choose a venue and the difficult thing with web3 communities is they are very decentralized people have to know where you're going to get the consistent message so venues where are we hosting I do want to share a very fun Parable for my friend alsi who is the marketing director of the Ives over at truth Labs who infamously did not create a Discord for Goblin Town because she loved the fact that Goblin Town was decentralized so you don't have to do what everyone else is doing when it comes to hosting your own party it could be what's right for you and right for your community now once you've figured out what kind of party you're having who you're inviting to your party and where you're hosting your party you have to actually ask yourself what are we doing here um are we just hanging out are we going to be providing events recurring themes what are we doing at your party the thing with parties is they have to be self-sustaining once people get on the door a good Community manager will set guidelines for the party and whether that's hosting regular games trivia for current resources and to decide on what are people actually going to do so in Twitter you might see this through weekly events remember it's toast parliaments on Fridays and Discord you're going to have different sub channels or different groups within your community can connect and create together parties are all about lateral connection people can go in any direction they want as long as they stay within the party so you want to decide on different events on what you're doing now with that we want to talk about what am I giving people at my party like why are they coming here are we providing connection education career advancement and the thing with good parties is you have to keep doing it you can't just set it up and leave so we have seen a lot of projects try and do that in web screen but you got to give people a reason to get them to learn and stay in the room Community managers are being called Vibe directors in some instances and I love that term their responsibility is to facilitate Joy surprise the light and dispel fear and certainty and doubt you want to make sure people are connection and make sure that you don't have any Bad actors and that people are not feeling left out so during the minimal amount of work to make sure the party has the most fun now when it comes to parties to me they are the original decentralized Community whether you're launching a new community breathing new life into one of your own I hope that these guidelines what kind of party are you having who are you inviting to your party where are you hosting it what are you doing I hope these can be of help when you're planning your own community um and with that I can't open the question um about my experience you know I have been working with Moon Birds ladybirds which is a not officially proof but they're one of the sub parliaments when we did that I had joined proof and our moon Birds after minting and I noticed that there was a lot of chatter I truly want to connect with women and some have found my way with Christine Wu and Cheryl Lazar for ladybirds we started hosting Twitter spaces and that grew into a real life brunch at nft NYC we were able to host hundreds of women together in new Birds and facilitating the real life connection at an in real life party from this online community is one of the Highlight which cheer lozar I've also worked with her to bring people together on Twitter spaces with Alpha Mondays and women on web3 Wednesdays where we've had literally thousands of attendees on our spaces just focusing on Joy and education so yeah it's just great yeah looks like there's an echo all right um thank you so much for kind of going into essentially the the storytelling I love the analogies and also just not even actually there's a really nice parallelism um but uh uh maybe it kind of zooming out a little bit um to actually kind of think about or and see how this actually applies to how we look at managing Community especially in web3 um I'd love for you to kind of talk about what your role is right now in members and sort of how you are helping uh kind of that scale and and kind of if you were to kind of talk about just how that can be used to be clear like I'm not officially an employee of members they have multiple subparliaments the ladybirds is one of them and so what ladybirds is it's a um they do accumulate it's a Dei Initiative for women in the community to connect with each other the thing about I love about Peru and how supportive they are is that they really approve of their country their Community being decentralized so they have these various apartment some of them are based off traits or mental wellness fitness ladybirds is All About Women connecting and so where that actually started was right after mint like any other NFC project the Discord was full of a lot of chatter and so I saw a hole where I wasn't connecting with anybody and so I said okay what is something that my identity like connect with that I know other people do and for me being a woman's a big one I like other women in the space I like to seek him out and share connection and so from there Stevie who's the community manager uh director of culture over at proof brought the ladybirds Discord to life I worked with the ladybirds Twitter and I'm part of their team and together we're all able to bring the ladybirds brunch together nft NYC so with that we maintain regular connection something exciting that we're doing as of yesterday is we actually created a community neural of all of the pfts for the ladybirds whether they have a moon bird or an oddity and so one big uh nft edition of us partying together in a treehouse as our remembrance or how to be so which is the amazing thing about nfts and website naturally how big is this uh community and and uh how um how frequently are you sort of meeting in person versus kind of obviously collaborating online you know it's hard because our first time meeting in real life was at nftnyc um ladybird started it wasn't long after mint so it had to be late April maybe early May and then nft NYC was in June I'll be honest I've tried to host different in real life meetups here at NYC um another woman and I tried to host a women and moon Birds meet up right before the conference and we had five attendees which we saw an amazing time it was a lot of fun but it was very discouraging and I was like wow like Bloomberg's is a huge 10K pfp project there's definitely more than five women in New York city so at first I was very upset like not every party goes according to plan and so when proof reached out and they said they wanted to help bring an in real life event to life I was excited but also I was like hey by the way like I have one and only five people came so let's stay humble um but the demand was amazing we booked one venue we sold out within minutes like I think it was two three minutes and all the tickets were gone so that was really exciting for them we had a moment to freak out like okay wow like there's a lot of people upset they can't come to this event so we actually opened it up to the venue next door and if I'm correct I think we had over 300 women come to the nft NYC brunch of that like the venue was pack your shoulder shoulder we were able to still under the sidewalk uh in the outdoor dining so I do think there's definitely hundreds of women in the community I don't know if it exceeds a thousand or maybe more at least as far as active members but that's one of the most wonderful things that experiences even I was surprised at the connections I was helping to facilitate and I think that's one of the most amazing things about being a community manager I try to keep the bar low for myself I try my best I always give it 100 but I always prepare myself for maybe it doesn't work out and when things are amazing it makes it all the better and that's one of the joys of working in community you really never know how people will surprise you so you just do your best to keep surprising them I know for these are the good kind of surprises um but uh you also kind of mentioned uh at the beginning that you came from a very kind of different background it was very interesting to uh well when I would say kind of the web three uh kind of tech sort of pipeline looks like a science is kind of a separate uh different realm um what kind of or things that either where you were delighted with or you thought are kind of unique in a good or bad way that I feel like you can maybe talk about and how was that transition so as far as the transition I was working in medicine I started off at like a medical assistant and the thing with Healthcare that the paralleloglet3 is very uncanny is you really don't have that much time with the people you're working with so you want to be able to teach them absolutely as much as possible in the minimum amount of time so there was a practice I joined it's a small office we had one physician um and we were a petite practice so we only dealt with like celebrities politicians at the church and state very intelligent often intimidating but also delightful people um but when I came in nobody in the office was technology Savvy we were spending way way too long with people even to the point of their frustration like when you're teaching someone and they're not getting it they're busy and they gotta go it's frustrating for everyone involved so when I came into this practice it was kind of my wheelhouse for sociolinguistics writing and marketing I came in I reworked how we communicate with patients I created protocols that drafted all the education with one click we had some really great software programs um used internal analytics to see how much time we were spending with people doing certain things and just by putting in a little work in a little bit more writing a little bit of software help we were able to double the number of patients we helped in a day without really taking away from their experience and letting them continue on their way how that relates to web3 is we have people who are scrolling on their phones most of the time a lot of the time when we have people they're not sitting on their desktop at all times with multiple browsers with like analytics on one screen and Discord on the other sometimes they are but not always so the challenge is how do we capture people how do we get them to come to our party and so the challenge with people who work in community roles in particular is you really do need to be technically minded and understand that the products that you're working with and take that very high level difficult information make it as easy to understand as possible how can I say the most with the least words How can I teach the most for the least amount of time and so the thing you see is yeah but I was just going to say I mean uh do you do you feel like it's the same Playbook that you can apply for building communities offline versus online or like of course they have shared elements but I I guess I I'm noticing uh things that sort of apply largely to a lot of the IRL groups but how do you kind of think about fostering that for web 3 or by by default you have so many people that are largely mostly online and in different parts of the world so when it comes to organizing online um I think my first online community I organized I was actually 12 years old 20 years ago um there's this platform called free webs so it was posts and pre-myspace so we're aging ourselves here to all their cool uh Jen's ears but um the First Community I ever organized so this is pre-web three but the concepts are very much the same I had these friends who were in a punk band and I wanted to connect other people who liked their punk band so I made a music fan page and there was a guest book there and I noticed the guest book was getting a little stale um and just like when you're meeting new people in real life sometimes parties die down and no one's talking and it's awkward so whether it's a quiet Discord this quiet guest book on freewebs.com or no one is hanging out at your inner life event the party planner the community man has to come in and say okay how do I fix this problem how do we bring life back into this and so I actually went to this guest for like 12 years old 13. and started making fake accounts and um had little comedy bits I was like a crazy fan girl I was like an angry agent and people came to the guest book and this is 2002 we had AOL Instant Messenger that was not a normal activation people experienced and they're like what in the world is this and this is like pre-catfish too so people would come back into this they'd start talking and then they would even bring those conversations like offline when we came to school and performance art what I was doing then with making these big personalities we actually see that a lot in web3 um whether it's people being themselves and activating themes within their Discord or Twitter we see a lot of interactive puzzles from different communities it's something I really love from working alongside truth they're really big into what they call um their lobsters or puzzle solvers or we see a lot of projects who bring characters from their media and have story lines crafted around them and so I think about what three like while a lot of the products are different when it comes to people people like to connect in the same ways no matter where they're at web 2 web 3 online in real life the social psychology of people is largely the same and so I think you're doing yourself a disservice if you're over complicating it if you're like making very wide crazy strategies I think if you approach people with fun Simplicity Joy if you take away all the fun that they're already dealing with especially in a bear Market when our portfolios are bad you got to get something people good to connect over and connect with and I mean that's an interesting point too right because uh my next question was just okay how do you think about actually maintaining that momentum and excitement when it's either the hypest down or there's been some some Market shift like people obviously do react and sometimes strongly to these types of events but uh how do you sort of make them more resilient to this as part of being together as a group so I think especially in these communities we're investing is a large reason of why people have come to your party quote unquote it's important that Community managers work with the leadership on their team to craft brand aligned messaging that's more of a traditional marketing approach so when it comes to flood when it comes to markets being down bad that goes into our public relations damage control category when it comes to people being upset Community matters need to be careful and not to Promise Too Much I'm very big into um for my time in medicine legally compliant language like I've spent a lot of time in compliance they are horribly boring meetings like I'm not into them but they are very important that we keep in mind that you are also honest transparent with your users as much as you can be um you can't always be especially when you have surprises coming down the line that you can't communicate publicly but you do want to be honest and transparent as much as you can that's actually a very interesting thing about web3 is I think in web 2 people could slide by with like very like light messaging like yeah we'll have we'll be fine um people who have three they want action items they want them now like if something's going on the market they could have you know their portfolio go down and 20 minutes later before anyone can really do anything actionable they're like what are we doing like and that is a frustration point for everyone is the instant gratification because Solutions do take more than 20 minutes and so that goes back to aligning and messaging with your team and making sure you're communicating fairly honestly transparently as much as you can um maybe uh kind of one last question to sort of uh make sure we take the actionable pieces here um what would your advice be to a lot of these communities whether they're trying to grow IRL or online to uh actively figure how do they actually grow and get more people involved my simplest question I ask myself because before we are Community managers we're community members um I asked myself what do I want and this goes back to my ice cream social analogy what do I want and how do I give it to myself and give it to other people and you really need to find the simplest solution to that question so when you want more people to come into your Discord your Twitter you want them to buy your nft give them what you're looking for yourself that's a simple and to the point so uh this is great the hardest things are always the simplest yeah well Tina I really appreciate this insightful conversation and uh thank you so much for talking about kind of your background and sharing those valuable things that you've seen at work um thank you Global for having me