Big C Community vs little c community

C is for Confusing.

I presented today at CXM 360, Michigan State University’s fantastic conference for Customer Experience professionals, about the foundational value of Community. While preparing for the event, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking through a thorny issue that has long driven me (and I know I’m not alone here!) bonkers: the word “Community.”

As anyone who has ever talked about, advocated for, or managed community programs knows, the actual word “community” muddies the waters. It can mean so. Many. Things. 

So here’s a handy distinction.

Big C, little c, what begins with C?

Having heard the terms Big C Community and little c community bandied about, and even having used them once or twice in an effort to look cool, I did some research into what the even cooler kids in the community space mean by each term so that I could use them appropriately in my talk.

What I learned: 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯.  

So, I made some executive decisions, and this is how I broke it out for my CX audience: 

Big C: The Place; little c: The People.

Whether or not these align to standardized definitions is beside the point. The point is simply to highlight that a) there are two distinct but intertwined ways of thinking about community, and b) as CX professionals, we need to think about both.

Of course, it gets more complex than two broad groupings: within Big C Communities we might be talking about events, social media, forum platforms, knowledge bases, or even training programming. Within the little c community we might be referencing user groups, communities of practice, product users, or something else entirely. Slapping a capital or lowercase letter on the front doesn’t get nearly granular enough to build one’s strategy. However, recognizing the high level distinction does get us into the right headspace to clearly analyze those complexities.  

Why does it matter?

Community as a business function is a fairly new phenomenon (which partially explains the cloudy definitions). More and more organizations, especially in SaaS and subscription-based industries where retention and renewal matter, recognize that Community platforms and programs support everything from advocacy to communication to cross-sell. But when words tangle up our efforts to envision a Community strategy, we may hear, or even tell ourselves, things like:

• Let’s just use Slack

• Isn’t LinkedIn a community?

• We already have a website, why make a separate community?

Understanding the distinction between communities – the subsets of people we serve – and Communities – the way we serve them, ultimately helps us decide if we should “just use Slack” or deliver our programming through the website.  Maybe we should!  Maybe we shouldn’t. 

The right decision depends on knowing the who – our little c communities – and letting their needs (in combination with ours) guide us toward the what.

Put your little c community first.