Delight 2014 | Everything Is Better In Community: The Dinovember Story
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The creator of Dinovember shares the story behind the idea, and lessons for building a meaningful community, at the Delight 2014 conference. Originally presented at Delight 2014, Oct. 6-7, 2014. http://delight.us/conference
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Delight 2014 | Everything Is Better In Community: The Dinovember Story
- 1. 1 Refe Tuma everything is better IN COMMUNITY create experiences worth sharing #BetterInCommunity
- 2. Introduction: SEARCH for COMMUNITY 2 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 3. I was walking along looking for somebody, and then suddenly I wasn’t anymore. A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh 3 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 4. 4 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 5. INTIMACY must be EARNED 5 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 6. Chapter One: the STORY of DINOVEMBER 6 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 7. 7 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 8. ARE WE HAVING FUN YET? 8 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 9. 9 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 10. Refe Tuma Everything you can imagine is real. 10 Pablo Picasso #BetterInCommunity
- 11. 11 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 12. MOST IMPORTANT MEAL Refe Tuma INTIMACY MUST BE EARNED 12 OF THE DAY #BetterInCommunity
- 13. Refe Tuma INTIMACY MUST BE EARNED 13 DON’T WORRY THEY’RE ORGANIC #BetterInCommunity
- 14. 14 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 15. 15 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 16. WHAT WERE YOU SAYING ABOUT MY TINY ARMS? 16 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 17. 17 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 18. Chapter Two: SEEDS of COMMUNITY 18 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 19. Refe Tuma INTIMACY MUST BE EARNED 19 YOU DO NOT LOOK LIKE DINOBOTS TO ME #BetterInCommunity
- 20. MOM AND DAD WOULD NEVER DO THIS 20 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 21. 21 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 22. 22 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 23. 23 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 24. NOTHING CAN STOP US WELL, ALMOST NOTHING 24 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 25. 25 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 26. 26 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 27. CREDITS before DEBITS 27 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 28. 28 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 29. • 50 countries • 268k likes on Facebook • 6k messages, posts, comments • 3.5 million readers on Medium • 2.8k recommendations 29 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 30. Chapter Three: CONTEXT creates MEANING 30 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 31. Refe Tuma As humans, reality for us is largely based on other people’s perceptions. 31 Dan Harmon, Community #BetterInCommunity
- 32. 32 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 33. Refe Tuma Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated somehow because your own are so immediate, urgent, real. 33 David Foster Wallace #BetterInCommunity
- 34. 34 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 35. Chapter Four: EXPERIENCES are better in COMMUNITY 35 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 36. MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCES to 36 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 37. 37 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 38. Image submitted by Patti Haas 38 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 39. 39 Refe Tuma Photo credit: Lorraine Loots #BetterInCommunity
- 40. 40 Refe Tuma Copyright Gareth Pon and Lorraine Loots #BetterInCommunity
- 41. Refe Tuma At the end of the day, communities own themselves. 41 Sarah Judd Welch, Loyal #BetterInCommunity
- 42. TAKE A PART and LEAVE A PART 42 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 43. 43 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 44. 44 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 45. Creating Meaningful Shared Experiences 1. Have an idea worth spreading 2. Share ownership with the community 45 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 46. 3. HAVE FUN 46 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 47. 47 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 48. Refe Tuma If you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong. 48 Groucho Marx #BetterInCommunity
- 49. 49 Refe Tuma AP Photo/Elise Amendola #BetterInCommunity
- 50. 50 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 51. TODAY’S DELIGHT is tomorrow’s EXPECTATION 51 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 52. COMMUNITY BUILDING is EXPERIENCE DESIGN 52 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
- 53. Stay in touch: twitter.com/RefeUp facebook.com/Dinovember Preorder WHAT THE DINOSAURS DID LAST NIGHT: bit.ly/DinosDidBN 53 Refe Tuma #BetterInCommunity
Editor's Notes
- This morning I’m going to tell you the story of Dinovember, and the lessons I’m learning facilitating the community that has sprung up around it.
- Community can be something of a white whale. Many people seek it out — whether to find a place where they can belong, or to support a product or idea that their trying to market — but few find it. When they do, it’s often where they least expect it to be. The same goes for organizations; businesses, products teams, charities. Individuals want the benefits of community: camaraderie, a sense of belonging, support, fun. Organizations want to offer these things in a way that associates them with their products and causes.
- Last year, my wife and I unexpectedly found ourselves at the center of a budding community, which I’ll tell you about in a moment. It was through this experience, and my parallel life in product design, that I realized: designers are, in many ways, the unsung architects of community. Design thinking and the UX disciplines are perfectly suited for community building, and if community managers and those in similar roles started thinking more like designers and designers thought more like community managers, we’d all be a lot more successful at building and maintaining healthy, productive communities.
- Community rarely develops where community alone is the goal. Think about networking groups you’ve attended. Put strangers into a room and tell them to “do community,” and you’re likely to find a lot of awkward silence, or conversations about the weather.
- Intimacy and camaraderie have to be earned before they can be expected. People are wary of inauthentic communities. And rightfully so — we’ve all been burned by promises of community that turned out to be false. So, I’m going to talk a little about some community building lessons that Susan and I stumbled into through Dinovember, and how those lessons can be used by some of you to begin designing for communities yourselves.
- When Susan and I started Dinovember, community really wasn’t on our roadmap. We had no roadmap.
- We were tired; up all night, every night with our one-year-old son. He had a few complications early on that weren’t life-threatening, but meant he was up every couple of hours in a lot of discomfort. If you’ve ever lived on only a few hours of sleep, especially sleep that’s interrupted so often, you know what it can do to you. It has a way of making you more than a little useless during the day. Your brain doesn’t work like it should, you forget your keys, you get lost in normal conversations.
- It was hard on us, but it affected the kids, too. Our daughters were bored, cooped up for days at a time. They new their little brother was having a hard time, but they were too young themselves to really understand why our family life had all but ground to a halt. We wanted to find a way to put what little energy we did have toward reconnecting with our kids.
- One night, Susan and I were cleaning up after putting the kids to bed, and Susan found some plastic dinosaurs. Most of them were from when she and her brother were kids. On a whim, she set them up in the sink with toothbrushes and toothpaste as if the dinosaurs were trying to figure out how to use them. There was no grand plan — it was just something to make the kids smile. We went to bed without giving it another thought. The next morning, our daughters burst into our room and dragged us out of bed, shouting, “Mom and Dad — the dinosaurs came alive last night and we caught them brushing their teeth!” After the girls pulled us into the bathroom and we woke up enough to figure out what was going on, we remembered the toys.
- At first glance, the dinosaurs looked to be exactly where Susan and I left them — standing in the same places, frozen in the same positions. But when we looked closer and saw our kids’ wide-eyed faces, we realized that — sure enough — the dinosaurs HAD come to life.
- And we knew they would have to do it again. It all began innocently enough.
- After that first night in the sink, the dinosaurs got into the kitchen and tore open a box of cereal.
- They scavenged for eggs, just like in the good old days in the prehistoric jungle.
- Then, they tried to use those eggs to bake cookies — unlike the good old days in the prehistoric jungle.
- Once the dinosaurs’ hunger was satisfied (for the moment, at least) they got into a little role-playing.
- Things would only escalate from there. This continued for the rest of the month. Then, on December 1st, the kids woke up to a clean, quiet house. No broken dishes, no splattered food.
- The dinosaurs were back on the shelf and Dinovember was over.
- By the time November rolled around again the following year, our kids were daily asking whether or not the dinosaurs would be up to their old tricks. We told them we didn’t know. We hadn’t really thought about whether or not Dinovember would be a recurring thing.
- In the end, Susan and I were powerless against the coming invasion. So, on November 1st 2013, the dinosaurs returned. This time around, the dinosaurs made bigger messes than ever. It’s almost as if they knew that our eldest daughter, who was six at the time, was starting to grow skeptical, and they pulled out all the stops.
- (If you think this one is a little extreme, don’t worry…)
- (We were able to hide it with a chair.)
- Our kids weren’t the only ones who were excited about the return of Dinovember. Our family and friends were interested in what the dinosaurs were up to as well. They heard our kids talking about Dinovember and wanted to join in. This is really where the first seeds of community were planted. This shouldn’t be surprising. If community is a collection of actual relationships — not just a hallow marketing term — family and friends are a natural place to start.
- So, we created a Facebook page where we could post our dinosaur photos and invited our friends to join. I also wrote up a quick Dinovember primer called Welcome to Dinovember and published it on medium.com (which is a great platform, by the way). That way, I’d have somewhere to point people who were wondering what in the world was going on at our house. Fast forward 3 days. Susan and I were busy dealing with living-room graffiti, play dough fights, and frozen dinosaurs….
- But, all the while, something strange was happening. Stranger, maybe, even than plastic dinosaurs coming to life and messing up my house every night.
- Almost overnight, Welcome to Dinovember was read and shared over 2 Million times. It was syndicated by major news sites like the Metro UK, Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. More than 250k people liked the Dinovember Facebook page. Community had found us.
- We were amazed at the response. Of course, we had our skeptics. Here’s an article someone wrote about Dinovember, suspecting it was all a clever marketing play by a toy company. The blogger writes, “What really makes me critical about Dinovember is the amount of effort put into this by the so-called parents.”
- It wasn’t a marketing ploy, of course, but a lot of people were telling us to cash in. Sell t-shirts and prints, agree to those corporate social media tie-ins that were beginning to trickle in. This was when the Dinovember community was only a few days old! Steve Jobs used to say that everything an organization does is either a credit or a debit to its brand. Every action either adds something or takes away. Asking the community for their money at this point would have been a serious debit—they didn’t sign up to be pitched and sold to. The community was too young, too fragile. Many for-profit endeavors get this wrong. They go for the conversion before the community has the kind of self-sustaining strength to support it. Even now, as Susan and I promote our book WHAT THE DINOSAURS DID LAST NIGHT, we always get a little nervous every time we hit “Post.” It’s not that we don’t believe in what we’ve created — we do. I haven’t been prouder of anything I’ve made since my kids. But, we have to remember that the community isn’t all about us and what we do. Before I get into any of that, though, I want to share some stats.
- Today, the Dinovember community has grown to reach nearly 50 countries. Our primary hub is still Facebook, where the page has about 267k likes. We’ve received over 6,000 messages and comments, including photos from dinosaur invasions in Oslo, Helsinki, Berlin, Sydney, and London.
- The interactions we’ve had with these people — and the interactions we’ve watched them have with each other — have been so inspiring to us. One thing we’ve heard over and over is that many of these people, especially parents, had never considered themselves creative people. But, they felt like Dinovember gave them permission to be creative with their kids. A lot of us in this room probably take creativity for granted. Of course we’re creative — that’s our business. But, there are people who have been taught from a young age that there are more important things in life to focus on, more practical things, and now here they were realizing that they had the tools to create all along. It’s been incredible to see the unexpected ways the Dinovember community has developed.
- Community makes our experiences more meaningful by providing context. Varied perspectives come together to influence and inform one another so that we each have the opportunity to understand our shared situation better.
- Dan Harmon is the creator the TV show Community (which obviously makes him an expert on this topic). He says it this way: “As humans, reality for us is largely based on other people’s perceptions. If there are 20 bodies in your crawl space but you haven’t been caught yet, you tell yourself you’re still a birthday clown, and that’s how you keep doing it.”
- Ok, maybe that’s a terrible example. The positive way of looking at this is that the presence of other people with their perspectives, their wit, and the joys and hurts they’ve lived through which now inform their reactions — all of these things frame our experiences differently. Without them, all we’re left with is our own subjective, unreliable, slow-changing self.
- David Foster Wallace said, “There is no experience you’ve had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated somehow because your own are so immediate, urgent, real.”
- When we include others in our experiences, the movie of our lives becomes less a star-vehicle and more an ensemble production. Everybody brings something together and the whole is elevated.
- Experiences are better in community. That’s why communities rarely thrive as simply a means for community — or, more cynically, as a means to market products. Instead, authentic communities spring up, often unexpectedly, from meaningful shared experiences. That doesn’t mean communities don’t require cultivation. If you want to build a community, and community is built on meaningful shared experiences, what do you think it’s your job to do?
- Community is a living testament to meaningful experiences. So what makes a meaningful experience? For us, it began with a box of plastic dinosaurs and a desire to ignite our kids’ imaginations. Others embraced Dinovember because it turned out that we weren’t the only people who felt this way. We weren’t the only ones who wanted this for our kids and for ourselves. Imagination and play became the rallying cries of Dinovember. It was the idea that drew in like-minded people from around the world.
- Ideas are powerful and, when it comes to community, vital. The idea that we should value our children’s imaginations enough to spend an entire month actively encouraging them to play and to believe in something fantastical — that’s what gave Dinovember meaning, beyond the funny scenes and likable dinosaurs. That’s what inspired people to participate. I can tell you from experience that Dinovember can be a lot of work. Why spend the time and energy to grab your own dinosaurs and join in if you don’t see value in the reason behind it? What is the reason behind what you’re doing? Why are you building the products you’re building, or the services you’re providing? Why should anybody on the outside care? If you’ve got a story that inspires people to care, they’ll want to join you. If you don’t, you’ll always be pushing your boulders uphill.
- Designing meaningful experiences also requires a little letting-go. For an experience to mean something to someone, that person needs to have some skin in the game. There need to be stakes. That person needs to have some ownership. One of the first things we did after Welcome to Dinovember started getting so much exposure was to invite the world to participate. Don’t just wait for us to post our photos, grab your dinosaurs and join in. Make your kids believe.
- Let me give you another example. Lorraine Loots is an artist in Cape Town. She challenged herself to paint one original piece every day for an entire year. The pieces are tiny — about the size of a quarter — and recreate their subjects in incredible detail. Here’s what she has to say about letting go of part of her creative process for the sake of community:
- (Lorraine Loots video clip).
- This letting-go is hard. We think, this is my experience. This is something that I created, that reflects on me. We don’t want other people to taint the purity of the experience as we conceived of it. But, is there really any alternative? You might initiate an experience, but once others begin to participate, it can take on a life of its own. Sarah Judd Welch of Loyal said, “The funny thing is that these Fortune 100’s think they’re building community for themselves, for their own bottom lines. But at the end of the day, communities own themselves.”
- It might be helpful to define what we’re talking about when we talk about ownership. We’re not talking about leadership. I’m not advising you to hand over the reigns to your community, though in certain circumstances that may be exactly what you should do. When I say that members of a community should have some ownership over the shared experiences that provide the foundation for that community, I mean this: Each member of a community should be able to take some part of the community experience and leave some part of themselves behind. That’s a bit esoteric, so let me give an example.
- Danny is a young boy who lives with his family in London. (For privacy's sake, I'm not using Danny's real name.) He attends a therapy group for children who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. One of the biggest challenges Danny faces has to do with what's called social imagination. He can perfectly re-enact situations, but has trouble imagining new ones of his own.
- Danny's mom had been looking for tools to help her son develop this skills when she saw Dinovember. She showed the photos to Danny, and helped him to imagine how the dinosaurs might be interacting based on their expressions and actions. She ended up doing Dinovember in her own house using Danny's toys. When Danny responded to this, she told his therapy group about it, and they decided to make it part of their program. They blew up the photos Danny’s mom had taken of her dinosaur scenes and put them up around the therapy room. She took what we had done for our kids and she made it hers. She used the toys Danny already liked, and taught him something wouldn’t have occurred to Susan and I. It’s Dinovember, but it’s Danny’s.
- We’ve been talking about designing meaningful experiences and the importance of a central idea or story. We’ve also talked about the importance of sharing ownership with the community. There are so many other factors to consider, but I want to take the rest of this time to talk about just one of them:
- Fun.
- When someone shares a Dinovember photo, they do it because it made them laugh. People want to have fun, and the thing about fun is that it so much easier when you’ve got other people around you having fun too. Fun is contagious but, more than that, it practically demands to be spread. What’s the first thing you do when you find something that makes you laugh? You show it to someone else. Fun experiences take possession of us and compel us to share. Who laughs at something and then hides it away?
- With Dinovember, fun played a dual role — it was both the idea (part of it, anyway), and the experience. We wanted people to have fun and spark their imaginations so that they’d understand the value of doing that for their kids and communities. But, even when the idea behind your experiences are more serious, fun can still be appropriate and valuable.
- ALS is a serious disease. Approximately 5,600 people in the US are diagnosed with ALS each year, which amounts to about one in every 100k people. Yet, until recently, very few people knew much about it. That began to change this past summer, when videos of people pouring buckets of ice water on their heads started showing up in every news feed in the country. Celebrities participated in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Kids got in on the action. Entire fire departments. By the end of August the ALS Association had raised over $111 million through ice bucket challenge donations. That’s remarkable.
- One of the primary reasons the ice bucket challenge was as successful as it was, was because it was fun. People liked watching videos of their friends and family dousing themselves with ice water. People liked having the chance to participate in something bigger than themselves and share their own videos. It was fun. And, because it was fun, it was an enormous success.
- But, fun is fleeting. Something that makes you laugh today may not make you laugh a month from now. Something that is a big hit with your community may fall flat tomorrow. Communities are made of people, and people’s needs, desires, and tastes are never static. As soon as your community is delighted, it’s time to move the experience forward.
- The bottom line is this: community building is experience design. Because, whether your experiences are built around a social cause, mobile applications, designer jeans, or plastic dinosaurs, they’ll mean much more in community.