I say it in nearly every presentation I make on communities — online community is ultimately about people forming relationships with each other. It doesn’t matter if you are a technology community, a knitting community, a cancer support community, a product reviews community, or a large social network like Facebook. It is people and their growing and changing relationships to each other that drive your community forward.
Community members come and go… new people join and other people stop posting for a while. This is normal, and most people don’t really pay attention or make a big deal about it.
But when community members pass away, it deeply affects the community. Each community reacts differently, but there are a few things in common, and a few reminders and best practices for community managers.
1. Understand the pain and sorrow that your community members feel. Even if you didn’t know the person well, chances are good that at least some in your community did. Losing an online friend is just as painful, and in some ways more painful, than losing someone you knew in person. This is a large community event, and you should give it the proper care, space, and sensitivity it deserves.
2. Show your support by participating and supporting your community, but let the majority of the effort come from your community. You should support your community in whatever they want to do to memorialize or remember the person (within reason), but don’t take over. As I said, this is a community event and although you are part of your community, you are just one part of your community.
3. Create a memorial space. How you do this (and where you do this) will largely depend on the organization of your community. One community that I belong to has a dedicated Memorial forum for discussion threads about community members who have passed away. It’s not used often, but it was created because we needed a place for that discussion and it didn’t fit into any existing forum. If you have a space for general or off-topic discussion, that would be a good place for it. Work with your community members and leaders to find the best way to create this space. This dedicated space is necessary to channel everyone’s emotions and remembrances in one place. Think of it as the online version of a wake or funeral.
4. Don’t delete the person’s profile or contributions. In an online community, your profile and contributions are your identity. Deleting someone’s profile is like deleting their existence. It’s ok to edit a profile to indicate that the user has passed away, to remove the ability for people to send private messages to the user, etc. It would be a good idea to include a link to the memorial space. But don’t just delete it. You will hurt and anger the community members who were close to or appreciated that person.
Although I have dealt with this situation in the past, as you may have guessed, this entry was prompted by a recent real-life event. My good friend, former colleague, and former roommate John Wampler passed away on December 21st from cancer. John and I were also members of an online community, and it has been interesting to me to watch how the community reacted. As I mentioned earlier, we created a memorial space within our Memorial forum, and people posted photos, told stories, and posted words of kindness for his widow, who is also a part of our community. Many people who had never met him in person had strong words and memories to share about what John meant to them.
We may be more close-knit than your community, but the general reactions will be the same if it happens in your community.
Having been involved in helping create a cohousing community, and working with other (asynchronous, not obvious) communities: right on, Cheryl.
I think there are parallel patterns that need similar attention, which often fall into the “everyone knows that!” bin, in the same way that appropriate grieving rituals do.
Bringing in a new person works better when there are rituals. And these rituals (IMO, even if not formal) require the new member to do something that is symbolic of becoming part of the community. In my online experience — where I’ve felt people in the community showed me how I could help — I’ve become part of the community. Other places, I’m still pretty much a watcher.
Acknowledging when a person in the community has a “life event” — a birth, a death in the family, a marriage, any of the major stress items that have been listed in too many places: that too (IME) makes a very large difference in whether the people hanging around feel part of a community or a faceless pawn in the crowd.
Community grows, again from my viewpoint, when someone seen as part of the community reaches out to say to someone else “You’re part of our community and you’re welcome here.” The unspoken part: “Warts, kinks and all. You, as you, are welcome here”. That doesn’t mean that violating the community agreements is okay — within the community, agreements are important. Critically important.
And we grow as a community when we find out where those agreements haven’t yet become explicit. And then make them explicit for the future, without blame for what’s happened before, as long as what was done was done with some kind of assumption of goodwill and a minimal amount of malice.
Tom, I think that communities with some sort of entrance ritual do make the community more tight-knit. In the realm of online communities, this is usually either a monetary payment to join (most often found in business communities or as a separate layer on top of open, public communities) or a request to join with a mini-essay on why you want to join.
However, these entrance rituals (for a large brand-oriented community, anyway) can cause smaller membership numbers and can be counter-productive to the business goals of the community. There are some models that work, but they are few and far between. Most open, public communities are like any other social group — participants make themselves known through their own words, and build a reputation for themselves.
However, none of that really has to do with what happens when a community member dies. The more well-known the member, the more outpouring of emotion there will be. Companies that have communities, and even the people who run those communities, may not understand the depth of those emotions or what to do about/with them. This is another subject where the community manager must ride the fine line between “It’s my community because it’s my job and it has our brand on it” and “it’s your community because we gave it to you when we opened the doors”. This post was intended to be helpful to those community managers who may not have any idea what to do (or may have thought to do the wrong thing) when it happens in their community.
Thanks for reading –
Kellie
Glad to read you anywhere, Kellie!
I think this discussion has a lot to do with what happens when a community member dies. On a basic level: this is about how one defines who a member of the community is. And how one decides how well-known someone is within the community. For years, I’ve been claiming that the functional definition of fame is “more people know me than I know”.
Rituals are important: and they are very significant around both entry and exit for a community. Growing communities have a lot more people coming in than leaving; entry rituals are thus often neglected, as it’s really easy to succumb to “welcoming fatigue”. Some people will leave the community without any obvious reason. Some die.
I think having rituals for entry and exit makes a community stronger. And I have strong views about just how big a community can be before it loses the status of being a community — it’s somewhere in the low thousands. Beyond that, it becomes a confederacy at best.