How To Build a Decentralized Events Organization without Going Crazy
I’ve built two event empires that each served over 100K entrepreneurs in six countries: Women Grow’s Signature Networking Events and Women 2.0’s Founder Fridays. I learned a ton during my journey and totally burned out trying to do too much. After going on a healing journey to rebalance myself, I wanted to offer you the things I would have done differently if I was setting up a new international community.
Here’s my 2018 speech on how I burned out leading and what I learned about myself personally to come back. Below the video I share the professional tips to creating a sustainable international community to make stuff happen.
WHY SPREAD COMMUNITY THROUGH EVENTS AT ALL?
Even though we are digitally connected, the average human feels more disconnected than ever. Specialized communities create a place of belonging for people to grow and thrive. A hundred years ago we would have all belonged to a church community, a village community, a professional guild, and so on. Today, we have many more communities to choose from but most of us are disconnected.
I write about this topic because I believe co-created communities and decentralized communities are our collective future. If you’re curious what comes after top-down leadership, this is it!
TERMINOLOGY
Depending on the legal structure you choose and your community vibes, you will probably use different terms than me. Here’s how to translate this article for your organization.
organization = your corporation, LLC, school, or non-profit
members = affiliates, leaders, teachers, co-creator
attendees = customers, participants, contributor
experience = event, party, festival, Zoom room
CONTROL & CONSISTENCY VS. INSPRIATION & ITIRATION
You’ve created something awesome and you want everyone in the world to experience it too. Perfect! Now you need to decide what level of control & consistency your experience requires. Does your event benefit from the innovation and creativity of each team who produces it or are you just looking for people to perform what you’ve already created?
If you want complete control and consistency of your experience, you’re probably looking to build a corporation or franchise. If you want your experience to be co-created, you can do that with a licensing agreement, a school/certification, or membership.
Here’s the skinny on each way to spread an event from most to least controlled:
Corporation or LLC: In this model you would hire employees and manage them to consistently create your experience. This model works best for people who are used to traditional capitalism. Meow Wolf is opening one new city a year using this model.
Franchise: You create all the experience assets and then franchisees pay an annual fee and portion of their profits to operate your experience. Most states have STRICT franchising requirements because there has been some shady franchises in the past. This model works best in one state at a time or with lots of legal help. McDonalds is probably the most famous franchise in the world.
Licensing: You may license your experience assets for a fee and set requirements for being able to use the assets in that contract. (I explain assets later in the article.) This allows you to partner with new members without being responsible for their business. TED created the TEDX license to allow organizations to produce smaller versions of their event.
School/Training/Certification: In less than 50 years, Yoga became available in every town in America because of teacher trainings with certifications. The availability is amazing but the quality is all over the place. I’ve taken classes that surpassed all my highest expectations and I’ve taken sh*t yoga classes too. If you want to impart as much knowledge as possible AND give your members creative freedom, start a training.
Open/Community: You’ll find a community theatre in most towns but that’s where the similarities end. Every community theatre is owned and operated differently. Community theatres are inspired by commercial theatre and touring acts but produce their own shows. The regional Burning Man festivals are inspired by Burning Man but do their own thing. If you just want to inspire but not control, try an open/community model.
Not sure how much control you want yet? That’s totally normal. Keep going and we’ll get into it.
WHAT IS YOUR MISSION?
Your mission may be obvious to you when you’re a solo producer just making it all happen. As soon as you add anyone to your team, you’re going to need a defined mission. Write it on every related scrap of paper you create for the event.
Making sure everyone understands the mission up-front is time consuming but it will create a cohesion that will save you time in the future. Deciding what NOT to do for your events is actually harder than deciding what to do. There’s always many more things that you COULD add than you’ll ever be able to add. The mission defines what is in-scope for this event and what you can decline. Syncing your members on the mission will help them proactively make these decisions with the core purpose in mind so you don’t always have to be the person saying no all the time.
Here’s an example of a specific mission from a healing festival: The Free Self Healing Festival serves 1,000 women a day with self healing workshops from 50 teachers, supported by 150 volunteers.
The easiest way to create enemies is to say you’re gong to do something and then not follow through. I know it’s harder to tell people ‘no’ up front but it saves you oodles of time and effort later. The clearer and more intentional you are, so will be your members. And if you love trying scattered side projects, your community will too. No judgement either way, I ran a weed empire where I scattered everything to the wind, consolidated back, got blown away again, and so on. Your mission may be perfectly specific or generally open, it’s all up to your style.
WHAT ARE YOUR VALUES?
You can think of your mission as WHAT your event is here to do and your values as HOW you will do it. Your values affect every offering at your event. For example, here is how different values would be reflected in your registration area:
Values: Professionalism & Clarity
Lots of clearly branded signage from parking lot to registration area. Straight line of color-coded tables with rows of staff dressed in matching t-shirts. Extra volunteers to direct traffic.
Values: Underground & Secret
Unmarked entrance from the street, secret password to enter, checked off guest list by candlelight, given charm bracelet to enter.
Values: Beauty & Relaxation
Sumptuous reception area filled with overstuffed furniture and soft fabrics. Each guest personally led to a private salon where they are served decadent beverages and bites while they are languidly registered and adored with a flower crown.
Your values might be single words or principles like I’ve written below. I encourage you to choose no more than five values to focus on. You’ll need to train every person in your community on your values, the more you have, the more training required.
Here’s an example of values I wrote for a healing festival:
Collective Creation - everyone is asked to give & receive to create the experience
Healing not Hurting - non-harming all living things including self, nature, animals
Seeing not Solving - listening with attention, skip offering solutions or diagnostics
Uplift instead of Judge - uplift everyone from exactly where they are instead of judging
WHAT ARE YOUR METHODOLOGIES & OPERATING PROCEDURES
What’s the difference between how you do it and how someone starting from scratch would do it? You have probably figured out a special way to do things that create a special result. That ‘specialness’ is your core asset. You’re going to need to be able to write down and teach the methods that you’ve created.
WHAT ARE ASSETS?
The experience that you’ve created is probably defined by a feeling, not a logo. Our legal system hasn’t figured out how to license good vibes so your experience will be reduced to tangibles.
Here are some examples…
Trademark and Logo
Website & Domain Names
Social Media Accounts
Email Lists / Newsletter Templates
PR Lists / Press Release Templates
Text Message Lists
Branded Colors & Copywriting
Photos or Videos or Graphics
Methodologies/Operating Procedures
Contract
For each asset you want your members to use, you’ll need to decide how the assets are licensed or taught.
GETTING LEGAL: DO I HAVE TO?
Let’s say you start an event series like Women Grow, which are local monthly meetings for cannabis entrepreneurs. What stops a stranger from piggy-backing on your hard work and launching their own Women Grow without permission? A bunch of legal and trademark stuff.
Your legal agreements should be the foundation of clear understanding of shared agreements. Unfortunately most legal agreements are about tricking the other party into agreeing to loop holes (so you’re happier paying those high legal bills when something happens). The fastest way I’ve pissed off my members in the past was by creating hard-to-read contracts that only protected the organization.
DON’T use a lawyer to draft your original agreements. When you ask a lawyer for an agreement template, you get a laundry list of every clause they’ve ever put in to protect a client. Get the clearest writer on your team to draft agreements and then let your lawyer suggest changes.
The truth is you can get A LOT done without a single agreement in place. The agreements come in handy when someone does not fulfill their promises or makes a super bad judgement call. I like to think of my legal agreements as having three reasons:
Create a foundation of understanding between the organization and members. If your contract is hard to understand, you’ve added difficulty to every new relationship.
Make each person’s responsibilities, rewards, and boundaries clear. If these are unclear, you’re going to experience lots of missed expectations here.
Protect the organization and members from legal action.
Since lawyers are paid by the hour, you could spend tens of thousands drafting agreements (I have!) My advice is to go with the simplest and shortest agreements you can use.
Anything you put it into a legal agreement has to be upheld 100% of the time. Don’t put ‘nice-to-haves’ like having branded tablecloths in your agreement. Only write in the ‘must-haves’ like events must provide water free of charge to attendees. Put all the extras into your training methodology.
Here are the legal agreements I use…
Incorporation Agreement
Operating Agreement – you can skip this if you’re the only one who owns and operates the organization and your incorporation agreement specifies what happens if you die or go crazy
Employment Agreements - you’ll need an HR Manual too that they sign off on reading. The HR Manual isn’t a legal contract but has your policies on sexual harassment, expense reimbursements, etc.
Volunteer Agreements - have them sign the HR Manual if they are supervising other people, have all Volunteers sign a media release as well
Vendor / Independent Contractor Agreements - often provided by vendor
Licensing/Teaching Agreement - core agreement licensing your event assets to members, spend your effort on making this awesome because it sets up the core of how your event will spread
Trademark filling with US Patent Office
Event Waiver for participants
Media Release for using participants photos or video
WHO OWNS ASSETS THAT ARE CO-CREATED?
It makes sense to keep ownership of assets that the organization creates. But what about assets that are co-created with the members? Nothing will piss off your members more than asking them to help you build your brand without giving them benefits.
Let’s look at three examples of a national mailing list that both the organization and the members have helped build.
TIGHT - All mailing lists & newsletters are compiled and maintained by the organization.
LOOSE - Members build their own list and write their own newsletter. There’s nothing to prevent members from using this list afterwards for their own purposes.
TIGHT with LOOSENESS - The organization runs all mailing lists but members can submit their own advertising content.
LOOSE with TIGHTNESS - The members run their own newsletters but do not have permission to use the list for other purposes.
The #1 email list problem I’ve had is members emailing everyone in the “to” field, essentially giving every email you have to everyone on the list. I recommend creating a way for previous members to advertise to your list (so they don’t steal the list and email them anyway).
WHAT IS YOUR RECRUITING & ONBOARDING PLAN?
The absolute best time in your members lives is when they are planning or training to become a member. When they are planning it’s a blue sky of possibility. Nothing has gone wrong and there is no one pressuring them for results.
Based on the psychology of meeting thousands of excited volunteers that only turn into handful of reliable humans, here’s what I recommend...
Have an application that takes a little effort to complete. Many people volunteer verbally on an impulse and expect you to follow up. I recommend having an application that they must complete to start the process.
Have a training that you ask all interested humans to complete first. This could be as simple as a free workshop or a paid intensive over many months.
Have a coordinator who is obsessed with getting to know your members and their special talents. Humans will do just about anything to be seen. Make sure someone on your team is looking.
That’s should get you started. Add your thoughts or questions in the comments and I’ll follow up with you.
