Can You Put a Price on Community?

This summer I’m participating in a neighborhood accelerator to unlock hyper-local community on my block in New York City. You can read a bit about how that program is going here.

My personal goal is to get my building a little more connected to each other, host a block picnic in the park to jumpstart relationship building, identify “ambassadors” from some of the bigger buildings on my block, and get about 3-5 people “activated” who want to keep up some sort of continued cadence of local meetups or shared initiatives. 

I am not getting paid to do this work. In fact, like a lot of things, I’m investing time and some of my own money in exchange for what I can only assume will eventually get paid back to me in some sort of squishy antidote to loneliness. 

Maybe this isn’t inherently a bad thing. After all, there’s something more authentic and genuine about an intent to bring people together that dissipates a bit as soon as you start to get compensated for that work. Some of the best communities I’ve observed (online and offline) are all bootstrapped by people in it for the love, rather than for the paycheck. But it is an existential risk of any open source network or community. Once you’ve got it going, how do you keep it maintained?

So far I’ve sunk about $400 into this endeavor. $100 for fliers and other marketing materials, $100 for food and drinks to host neighbors in my building on my roof deck, and $200 for a pop-up lemonade stand on July 4th which operated at a massive loss but hilariously got visited by the local FDNY.

It’s fun for now, but I do wonder at what number I’m going to decide I’ve hit my upper limit of donated time and effort, and then slowly trickle off. 

Investing in community puts capital in relationships, not bank accounts. The interest accrued isn’t quite as easy to measure. So what’s it worth to have a squeaky clean, well-organized neighborhood association or block community? Can you put a price on that?

For many years I was actively involved in my university alumni association. First, as a local leader for alumni chapters in my city, then as a regional director ambassador to many club leaders, and eventually, as a member of the official alumni board of directors for the university overall. I’ve written quite extensively about this before. 

With 200,000+ living alumni, the executive director of the alumni program used to tell us that galvanizing large-scale community was a little bit head, and a little bit heart.

Stuff from the head tends to refer to the things you can measure. How many people show up at events? But most important for alumni: How can we get them to donate to the school?

Stuff from the heart is all the immeasurable stuff. The feeling people got when reconnecting with friends they hadn’t seen in years, the way you could be sure a fellow alumni would nearly always return a cold email from a recent grad, the little bits of “purple pride” that eeked out anytime Northwestern had even a minor athletic achievement. 

People tend to assume that people show up and engage based on the former. But in my experience, the secret sauce for best-in-class community management is that you need to find people who can lead from the heart.

By the way, that’s what makes hiring (and retaining) community managers so hard.

Initially, I’ll admit, I was initially pretty keen on making back the money we sunk into our pop-up lemonade stand this weekend. 

At $1/lemon, the costs spiked pretty quickly, particularly when we factored in other costs like additional beverage and snack options (for the kids). 

We set the starting price of lemonade at $3/cup. There was mild outrage, but people paid it. (And a quick poll of other New Yorkers indicated I could have charged as much as $5/cup.)

We had a good system – I’d dispatch my four-year-old down the street to literally chase pedestrians our way. While she gingerly poured lemonade over a cup of ice, I’d chat with them a  bit about their hopes and dreams for the neighborhood, and then get their contact info.

About 2 hours in, we’d only made $35. Things were not looking good.

But then a delivery guy got stuck in the elevator in our apartment building and the fire department showed up. They parked right in front of our lemonade stand. 

I pulled Lydia in close and whispered in her ear.

“Sometimes, a really exciting business opportunity literally just shows up. We’re about to have 6-8 firefighters who I’m sure are all VERY THIRSTY on this REALLY HOT DAY pull in. Do you think you can make the sale?”

As she stood waiting for the firefighters to dispatch from the truck, it suddenly struck me that there was a poor delivery guy stuck in the elevator. And 6-8 people literally saving lives walking our way.

We can’t charge these people money for being heroes. We can’t take advantage of a poor bike messenger’s bad luck.

So we pivoted. Rather than make the sale, we filled up a tray of ice-cold lemonade and offered it to all of the firefighters and the delivery guy. They were all quite appreciative.

In the end, I decided to look at our lemonade stand endeavor as less of a capitalist play and more of a community lead gen initiative. We netted out around $6.50 CPN: Cost per Neighbor.