Category: CommunityCategory: Community

I hear “my inbox is overflowing, I can’t keep up” all the time, and how that somehow means that your newsletter will get lost in your subscribers’ inbox and your creative project is then doomed to obscurity.

Now that’s some stinking thinking!

I subscribe to lots of newsletters. I have over 100 unread newsletters right now. But there are names in my newsletter folder that I’ll always read. Names that make me smile.

You can be that for someone else, trust me.

Some people will make time for you. Not everyone, but a handful. That’s how it works.

Alert fatigue is a real thing. Subscription fatigue, too. If people don’t open your emails, or they need to unsubscribe, cancel, or leave your community, let them.

“You need to trust your members enough to know they can decide what’s best for themselves,” said Kristen Tweedale in our recent talk (listen below).

“You’re not a mommy or a daddy—you’re an adult community leader. So act like it. You’ll be a better leader when you give your members agency. The more trust you give, the more you get back. When you treat people like the adults they are, they usually show up as the adults you want them to be.”

Send the email. Heck, send two. Who cares? You’re the artist. Make your work, and then occasionally yell about it. No one is paying as much attention as you are. If it’s too much, or too loud, they’ll unsubscribe great – bye. For everyone else, welcome home.

Kristen started her Awesome Ladies Project years ago by inviting a few people off of Instagram to be creative together on a Zoom call.

“I wanted to build like a an alt feed where people could feel comfortable sharing the art that they’re making. And that’s been the underlying bridge of everything that I’ve done is I want to have this place on the internet where people feel safe telling the stories that I’m asking them to tell because I ask people to do kind of vulnerable things sometimes and I want to make sure that they have a space where they feel like I’m not, you know, throwing them out to the wolves.” Kristen Tweedale

The internet is a big, wide open world. Building your own community is the opposite of that, where your work and the things you share exist in a smaller space, with the right group of people who can enjoy it in peace.

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During a recent Escape Pod Zoom call Jes Raymond told us how she got people to a show in a town she never played before.

“This past weekend, we had a little show up in a tiny town—St. Johnsbury. One of those places with a small newspaper. And I just decided that instead of making a bunch of social media posts about the show—especially to a town I don’t know—I’d do the human work.

I figured out who the journalist was at the local paper who writes the arts column. I wrote to them directly and sent them a press release. Then I found the local radio station—Vermont Public—and called them. I got our event on their calendar.

We ended up having about 150 people show up at this little church in a town I’d never played before.”

Yes! Doing the human work! As Jes said, “I’ve been trying this new practice of asking: Who could help me? And how?”

Posting on social media is like buying a lottery ticket, because maybe it’ll pay off. But contacting the people who can directly help you? They either write you back, or they don’t – those are 50/50 odds, much better than gambling with an algorithm and hoping it just “works out.”

And Jes hit the jackpot twice, adding 35 new people to her email list!

“Don’t leave the email list somewhere for people to come up to. Put it on a clipboard and pass it around the audience during the show. Tell them: ‘This is the email list, here’s what it’s for, we’re going to pass it around.’”

Building an email list online is great and all, but imagine the open rate for those 35 people who just joined that list? They were at a show, in the crowd, enjoying the event, laughing with friends – that’s an engaged audience!

In March, 36 people signed up for a Zoom chat about organizing our digital photos, and managing our digital files without cloud services.

Let’s do it again, maybe? Sign up here if you’d be into this!

A most gracious Michael Maupin wrote this tonight, after chatting with a stranger for a bit:

Live in the world, but your Substack (and online life) is a part of it. They feed each other. You can’t be online all the time.

OPEN UP. Git yer ass outside.

I only really know Michael via Substack, but we’ve talked once on the phone awhile ago. Online met offline, at least by way of actual conversation late one night.

Same as Michael’s conversation with someone at a closing eatery. Stories shared, and he got a new subscriber to his newsletter. It’s not all about “growing our audience,” of course, but it all takes place one person at a time, whether you’re trying to run a store front, sell a record, or live a good life.