The following post — like many of my favorite vlogbrothers videos — is divided into parts. 

Part 1: Be patient 

If your goal is to grow your activism-based community beyond the friends in your favorite group chat, patience is more than a virtual; it’s a necessity. No amount of networking, emergent strategy, nor content marketing will make your metaphorical tree sprout overnight. Relationships build over time. People trickle in. Internet influence accumulates slowly. A single post might go viral, but a community won’t. 

Part 2: What to do when you inevitably run out of patience

Communities can become stagnant. While exponential growth is not necessary for any community’s success, without any growth, most groups will dissipate down to nothing. Plus, patience isn’t worth much without persistence. Here’s some tips for how to deal with a community stuck in its infancy:

1. Host events open to the public. I recommend events — such as live streams — that require little interaction on the part of the audience. This way, no one will feel intimidated, and if they like what they see, they will be motivated to join.
2. Use social media and brag openly about your work. I talk about this in a previous post for a reason: If no one knows your community exists, no one will join. 
3. Encourage your current members to invite their friends.
4. Build bridges with other activism-based organizations and attend their events. Most of FtGU’s recruitment happens when Mylo — who is even more extroverted than I am — attends protests or online social justice events and connects with people there. 
5. Vary your events. Not everyone is going to be interested in the same activities. That’s a good thing! It helps us and our activism be more well-rounded. To diversify your community, diversify what your community does. 

Part 3: What to do when your efforts are too successful

Suddenly finding yourself with 100 people asking to join your community is exciting but also poses dilemmas. You don’t want to let every random stranger into your community. You want to make sure that not only are potential members a good fit personality and political-viewpoint-wise, but also that they also have the time and energy to give to the community. 

To do this, you need an intake process. FtGU’s is a simple 3-step affair:

1. A potential member fills out an online form. The information from that form appears in a Discord chat run by our intake team — a subgroup of FtGU members in charge of the intake process. 
2. The intake team emails the potential member and schedules a meeting. During the meeting, two members of the intake team interview the potential member about everything from their availability to how they handle conflict. The goal is to have an organic conversation and avoid it feeling like a job interview. It’s not one. We don’t want to weed out as many people as possible. Instead, we think of these conversations as a form of match making: Is the person a good fit for FtGU? Is FtGU a good fit for the person?
3. If the interviewers determine that the person would make a great new member, and the person still wants to join, they attend their first community meeting! 

FtGU’s intake process isn’t ideal for every community in part because it depends on having enough members to have a separate intake team. You must devise a system that works for your community. Regardless of your system, it is important to have it in place before you are swamped with requests. The longer you wait to intake people, the more likely they are to lose interest. 

Part 4: I have to end this post somehow

Patience, persistence, and passion are key whether you have a waiting list of 526 potential members or you haven’t seen a new face in six months. Ultimately, different communities thrive at different sizes at different times. Focus on quality not quantity. If your current members are happy and thriving, you’re doing your job, even if there’s only two of them.