#160 Why This Local Event Keeps Selling Out
This week I went to a new local music competition, Brew Tunes, and it was so cool to see local artists performing original work. The concept is that 7 artists performed two original songs, and then the judges panel chose 2 as finalists to perform 1 more song to determine the winner.
Madison Bailey won the competition and she was AMAZING. Also (if you watch below) can we just take a moment for the quality of recording of this event? Wow. They really came out of the gate with a super affordable, high quality community event. Kudos to the organizer.
It felt so good to be in a room supporting these unsigned artists in their craft, and I already can't wait to go to the next one! Isn't that the goal when creating a new community experience?
I've been thinking a lot about the importance of purpose in community. It's not enough to say "we're bringing together local musicians"... there needs to be a true purpose behind it.
This new community series was sold out for the first event, and packed for the second event. If you're building community – hi, that's probably why you're here – you know how hard it is to get early adoption to a new community experience.
I believe it's because the premise is so strong. Here's how Brew Tunes describes their goals:
"The aim of Brew Tunes is to encourage local, regional, and touring acts coming through to sign up to perform at a monthly open mic competition. We want to provide an active audience who want to witness quality unsigned artists. Our hope is this will help grow the Baltimore music scene, provide songwriters a chance to shine, grow artists’ fan base, connect musicians to industry folks, and provide music lovers an ear to folks they don’t yet know."
And it doesn't hurt that they're tapping into an existing network. The organizer, Michael Ivan Schwartz, has built strong relationships all over the city. This is what I mean by community builders have to start with 1:1 relationships in order to build something really amazing.
The number one thing people struggle with, whether they're starting or stalling to grow, is not having a clear enough community purpose.
This starts with spending a lot of time 1:1 with your community or prospect members. You start to notice the patterns, and that helps you craft a clearer message about purpose, values, and culture.
Once you have the purpose, we need to layer in all the other pieces like framework, facilitation, and member journey. That's the other reason the Brew Tunes event brought everyone back again... we get addicted to the format! It's just like reality TV that way.
It's not just, "come hear live music", it's "an original songwriting competition". That's way more specific and measurable each time. Eventually, after what they're calling "Season 1", you can go to their YouTube channel and watch all the winners from all events. That's something really special and hard to replicate.
Your Next Step:
(1) Take a few minutes to journal on this prompt:
My community exists so that ___
(2) If you want help nailing the purpose of your community and taking it up a notch, book a free discovery call here.
We worked with a client this week whose idea for their community was way too broad. They needed to nail down their framework, way of thinking, and get really specific with their positioning. Without these things it was going to fail and we were blunt about that... which they thanked us for after. Sometimes you just need another set of (highly trained) eyes 😉.