To Build a Community Sustainably, You Have to Run It Like a Business
(that doesn't mean you have to charge)
To build a community sustainably, it must take on the qualities of a small business.
When people hear the word “business,” they immediately think of money. And the moment “money” and “community” share a sentence, people get uncomfortable. I’ll save that topic for another post, but the important word here is “sustainably”.
Time and time again, we see the same thing happen. Someone starts something small: a dinner party, a walking club, a craft club, an event series. A few people show up to the first one, and each of them brings a friend the next time. Momentum starts to build. People begin recognizing familiar faces. It starts to feel like something real. But then the organizer gets busy at work. Or they get sick. Or they skip a week and lose momentum. The venue falls through. Turnout dips. Planning starts feeling more stressful than exciting. And slowly, the thing that people were genuinely excited about starts to fade. Not because people stopped caring. Not because there wasn’t demand. But because the person running it burned out.
Most people who start a community don’t realize what they’re actually signing up for. It feels casual at the beginning. But very quickly, it starts to look a lot like running a business.
What does that mean?
Like a business, the first step is deciding who you want to build for.
Like a company defines its ideal customer, a community organizer has to define their ideal members. Who are they? What do they care about? What are they looking to get out of joining? Where do they exist, both in the real world and in all the other places you can reach them?
Once you know that, you have to figure out how to reach them.
Marketing isn’t optional. You need to get your community in front of the right people and understand what actually works to get them to show up. Which channels drive turnout: is it IG or TikTok or email or text or newsletters? And which messages resonate on those platforms? With limited time and resources, you must know where to double down to make sure your efforts are worth it.
Then comes the experience itself.
Your community needs an identity. But more importantly, it needs consistency. Each event should feel like part of something bigger. And if you expand to multiple chapters, that consistency becomes even more important, especially when you can’t be everywhere at once.
At some point, you can’t do it alone.
You bring in help. Often from your most engaged members. But that only works if people have clear roles, responsibilities, and ownership. Otherwise things start to break.
And people notice when things break.
Members need to know when and where to show up. People are making time in their lives to be there. You’ve locked down a venue and spent time and money to organize it all. If you get sick or a conflict comes up, the event still needs to happen. That means having systems in place and people who can step in.
To make any of this repeatable, you need structure.
Clear ways of doing things. How you run events. How you work with venues and other partners. What “good” looks like. Without that, everything depends on you, and nothing scales.
You also need to actually know your members.
You need to know them at a personal level: Tyler is an extrovert, Franc prefers smaller events, Terry is from Seattle. And at a data level: Ankita shows up every time she says she will, Robin came once but never came back, Luke used to come often but hasn’t shown up to the last 3 events. A community doesn’t exist without its people, but most organizers are operating without that visibility.
And underneath all of this, whether you like it or not, there’s money.
Even if you’re not charging, you’re spending. On space. On time. On effort. If you want something to last, you need to at least cover your costs. It’s worse to burn out and shut something down than it is to charge for real value.
That sounds like a lot of work
Reading all of this back, it sounds a little ridiculous. Most people still think of community building as something casual - a side hobby of just getting people together. But the reality is that running a healthy community requires an enormous amount of emotional, operational, and financial work.
The thing is, this work matters more than people realize.
A research study from 2025 found that up to 80% of Gen Z respondents reported feeling lonely.1 Another found that more than half of people experiencing loneliness struggle to ask for help because of the social stigma.2
At the same time, every time we turn on the news we see stories of division. Politically. Socially. Culturally. It’s easy to think the solution has to come from the top down. A new administration. New policies. Some massive societal shift.
But the real solution starts much smaller.
It starts with someone deciding to host a dinner. Start a run club. Organize a game night.
Bring strangers into the same room consistently enough that they stop being strangers.
More than 25 years ago, Robert Putnam saw where this was heading. In his book, Bowling Alone, he warned about what happens when these kinds of gatherings disappear and social capital begins to erode. Without these spaces, we lose the opportunity to meet and build relationships with people of different upbringings, backgrounds, or perspectives. And those kinds of connections matter. They are what rebuild neighborhoods, increase civic engagement, and strengthen democracy.
This is why community builders matter. They are building the spaces that bring us back together. The spaces that turn strangers into friends, neighbors into communities, and cities into places we actually feel connected to.
Right now, the people building community are doing it without the support and infrastructure they deserve. Some organizers have fought through the friction by duct taping together spreadsheets, group chats, ticketing platforms, email tools, and endless manual coordination. But even the ones who make it work are overwhelmed. And for every organizer who pushes through, there are countless others who never start because the barrier is too high.
That needs to change. Community builders should have infrastructure designed for the way communities actually operate. They should have tools that help them grow sustainably instead of burning out. And they should be recognized and invested in for the value they create.
That’s what we’re building at week nights: infrastructure for community builders to create, grow, and sustain in-person connection.
 |
|