Is your community a “low-effort” family?
What we’re unpacking today:
what low-effort families can teach us about community building
the engagement misstep we often see CMs make
the real formula for creating authentic closeness
We—Carrie and Kelly from Team CMJ—use these interviews to explore trends, tensions, and issues related to community building (and those em-dashes are human-written; no AI is used in creating these newsletters).
We share more about our goal for these conversations in our “community newsletter experiment” post.
KELLY: 👋🏻Therapist Dorcas Asuming Opoku recently introduced Carrie and me to a new term: “low-effort family.”
In a low-effort family, for a variety of different reasons, real closeness is not valued, or sometimes only the public appearance of closeness is valued. As a result, sibling relationships never really develop or fall apart in adulthood.
Learning about this phenomenon from family systems, we couldn’t help but think of how it applies to communities.
The truth is, communities are like family systems in their own right, each with its own culture and values. Authentic ones center real relationships where members share mutual concern for one another.
But many communities promise closeness without actually offering the conditions for closeness to occur. They don’t facilitate authentic sharing, reciprocity, or repair.
We see the same pattern unfold again and again. Community builders want to create meaningful connections but instead generate transactional engagement.
CARRIE: Absolutely, our clients often scratch their heads at why it takes so much work to get people to go deeper in conversation or to establish relationships.
It often seems like members are just focused on, “What’s in it for me?”
KELLY: Yep, but it’s more nuanced than that, right?
Often, people join a community in a moment of need: They’re looking for short-term help, wanting to get unstuck. They don’t usually enter with the intention of giving back, at least not at first. That’s just not the moment they’re in.
It’s our role as community leaders to show members how to go deeper, rather than just extract from the community and leave.
That’s not easy to do. And it’s not exactly encouraged by engagement metrics.
CARRIE: That’s it. The solution a lot of builders go to is: “I’ll make it easier to participate. If I remove all the friction, that will increase meaningful engagement.”
But that just encourages empty engagement. Or worse, your community becomes a content repository where people just consume and stop thinking about relationship knitting. You might as well share a Google Drive folder with everyone, not have a community.
It’s no wonder community leaders so often feel like they’re failing.
Here’s the real deal: It’s not a personal failing, my fellow community builder. Not at a time when our public commons are eroding (see: Bowling Alone or the excellent associated documentary, Join or Die) and our online spaces are not really communities at all (see: social media). We’re also witnessing the mass, accelerated erosion of social skills, and many are turning away from human connection as a whole, which shows up in our communities.
KELLY: Oof, yes. We’re forgetting that so much more is possible in a community and in human relationships. And, as community builders, we need to be the ones to protect the conditions for meaningful engagement.
CARRIE: Yes! Our brave new role in this brave new world is to facilitate spaces where relationships can form and be maintained. And we have to be realistic.
We recently spoke with a community leader, for instance, who said she is always striving for 100% participation because she cares deeply about every member. That is wonderful, in theory, if you can do that and not beat yourself up when you fall short – and you will fall short, my dear friend. It’s human nature. In practice, we need to remember that 4-20% of members participating in a community is great. This is just facts, as we have discussed in previous newsletters. So we need to be kinder to ourselves when things feel quiet.
If you focus on 100% participation, you’ll unintentionally prompt empty engagement. My suggestion instead is to focus on those who are showing up. Put energy and celebration there. Give to them abundantly. And ask them to step up alongside you. Your care deserves limits.
Just like in a family dynamic where one person is doing all the relational labor for the family (usually the mother figure - because care work is feminized and drastically undervalued!), we need to spread out the work. It’s radical and difficult to ask for others’ generosity, but our other option is burnout and resentment at the thought that people aren’t reading our minds and stepping up.
And here’s the thing: People want to be asked. They want to help. So ask others to host, uphold rituals, show up, and reach out to others. They likely need to practice these social skills, and they need someone to model them and hold them in high regard as they practice.
We have a community leader in the CMJ Community, for example, who does exactly this. He has a group of 4 core ambassadors who are thrilled to be asked to help. They are his lifeline. Just 4 people make all the difference.
KELLY: And what about those who aren’t part of the 4-20%?
CARRIE: Part of our role also needs to be modeling what it looks, feels, sounds like to be part of a community system where the presence of everyone else is felt and valued, where they can give more of themselves without breaking, and where they have a clear role to play.
A lot of people have no reference point for what that feels like, especially in a business context.
KELLY: It seems to me that every time a community builder defines and demonstrates their values, demonstrates transparency and imperfection, and invests in real relationships with members, that is making a difference, even for lurkers who may never make a comment. Those efforts have ripple effects, as you often point out.
And by focusing our energy on the 4-20% who are showing up and asking them to share in community-tending responsibilities, we can prevent burnout—and the community is better for it.
CARRIE: Exactly. And this goes for our community systems as much as it does for our family systems.
So, in your personal life, look around for where those you love need more support, or where you can use more support, and ask for it (kindly, clearly).
And in your communities, observe where you are carrying the burden for everyone else, where you care more than anyone else seems to, and then clarify a role or an ask for someone else to step up beside you. You were never meant to do this alone.
These vulnerable asks are the key to creating real closeness in a community in a sustainable way. And they’re what really connect us to one another, beyond the superficial, low-effort ways we’ve become coldly familiar with.
In what ways is your community like a low-effort family? Let us know by replying in the comments.
With care—
Kelly and Carrie
