🥳 How to Run Community Events with a Gatherer Mindset
By Oana Filip
Being part of a young industry accelerated by the pandemic, we, the professionals at the helm, sometimes overdo things and miss the obvious. We complicate our lives because we want to speed up the process of proving results and getting resources. By doing so, we fall into several traps — one of which is forgetting how the most simple and obvious things are often the foundation of our work.
When it comes to running events, we often lose what I call ‘the gatherer mindset’. Many community builders are obsessed with the technicalities and miss that they deal with people with feelings, moods, interests, fears, ambitions, and the rest. A gatherer focuses beyond the operations of an event — they invest energy in designing an experience and helping people feel in a certain way, depending on the event's goal. A gatherer pays attention to creating a layout where specific moods are welcome and celebrated so that they obtain the desired outcome.
Priya Parker's book The Art of Gathering and her brilliant newsletter are excellent sources of inspiration in how to run meaningful events where the people attending find real value. Whether we're talking about a small gathering of 20 people at a birthday party, a niche community, or a massive community of thousands of folks spread all over the world, the DNA of a gatherer is the same.
In this article:
🧠 How to embed it into the planning
🏗 Why to research what a good host does (and doesn’t do)
📖 How to create experiences, not events
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