Do you practice CUWI (Community Unscripted With Intention)?

Community Unscripted With Intention (CUWI) is the practice of proactively creating moments for community members to discover more about themselves in realtime and ideally in the same physical space.

When was the last time you actually met up in person with fellow community members? You might've chatted quickly online or joined a webinar. Both were likely helpful yet was something missing? Maybe.

How often do you have a casual chat with someone in a community and it helped you realise many things about yourself? Always, sometimes, never?

Now think back to the last time you gathered with a subset of your community and genuinely realised some things about yourself. It was something someone said in a deep one to one conversation that triggered a moment in your mind to reflect on. For example, you might've realised you're not alone on a particular problem, have similar or completely different views on a topic or landed on a idea which was bubbling away yet was brought to the surface. It's yourself who did the work in all those cases yet it happened because of the other person or small group of people in front of you.

I had this today at a Community Heroes Breakfast in London. Francisco Opazo asked us many questions around our experiences, hopes and fears of using AI as Community Managers. We had a tip top discussion. Everyone had space to share and riff off each other.

I had a step back moment thinking how much more powerful synchronous connection can be over asynchronous activities. At which point I realised that none of us were using AI to speak for us or write for us or come up with ideas. It was just human. Our own voices and ears. Plus my manual note taking to help me cement my thoughts and ideas from the room.

How weird to have to write that. But it's important. We were practicing CUWI, Community Unscripted With Intention. It felt great.

More than ever I think we need to practice CUWI. It's so easy to reach for your favourite AI chat bot buddy to solve all your problems, to think for you and become your voice.

I shared an example of how much success we've had with Call for Insights, part of our Community as a Service offering to all our professional members. 60+ 1-2-1 video conversations, mostly between myself and a professional member. They choose their topic of choice and we record for 30 or so minutes. I publish a supporting article with the video and it appears on that person's MoT profile page automatically. We promote it on our homepage and across our community.

I emphasised how our professional members often wonder how they are invited, given they assume they have nothing to share. I have to reassure them that they do and 30 or so minutes later my claim becomes truth. This level of service is just part of their professional membership. 30 or so minutes later and they've articulated something they've not articualted before in this way, they've given themselves permission to have more faith in their capabilities. And I get to sit back and smile at how awesome these people are.

This is CUWI. We can't fake it. We have no script. We aren't outsourcing our thinking. We're not prompting AI and there are no AI video avatars in sight. 😅 It's just real unrehearsed conversation with action. Action comes from the informal, the ability to accept that we might say something that doesn't make sense. The action is the video and the supporting article plus access for all other professional members to take what they like from the video. We encourage participants to make more use of the transcript. And that's where AI can help. But it's just a tool afterwards. It's not the thing.

Asynchronous CUWI is possible. Francisco shared a great example where he'd spun up an AI profile card creator tool for his ambassadors to use instead of him doing it manually twenty five times over. Instead of telling them to use it, he sent them all a video explaining reasons why he'd built it and how to use it. Another example, Jaz Marfo has been using AI to create reports yet instead of blindly sharing these reports as yet another text post with her colleagues she'd put a little video together to explain the report and why it matterered to look at it. No faking those updates, it's Francisco and Jaz's voices encouraging people to take action.

I'd love to gather more CUWI examples. Feel free to share them as a comment. 🤩