The story of building my first community | Shuknik | HM #5
How I built a community for progressive parents and their children
Instead of giving Gyan, I thought it would be nice to share stories of building and growing a brand community
So, from now onward, you will read only that
However, I will start with the stories of my own communities that I built from scratch
that way you will get to know a little bit about me and my thought process
and a little bit about community development
Do you like the idea?
I have two such stories
. . . . . actually three
. . . No, I think four
The four main ideas of communities that I have worked upon so far are
Shuknik [my first community]
EdTech NeoGurus [my first large community with 3000 education entrepreneurs]
EdMonks [my first community for school leaders]
Moksha Path [my first online community that I have just started building]
Today let me talk about Shuknik.
This is not a large story. I built it in no time.
Building Shuknik was fun but soon I realized, I had limited know-how in this space and I cannot grow it further without first learning about how education works.
So, I winded it up very fast to start my next community to learn about educational innovation
The story of Shuknik goes as here below
I got into the nuptial lock in 2009 and by 2011, I and my beloved wife became parents
Everything was going good
But we were struggling to find relevant learning opportunities for our child
We were visiting places like a Museum, a Zoo, a science center, a planetarium, and other similar places,
But our experiences were not like those that my younger sister and nephew were sharing
They were staying in the USA and always told me how big a learning opportunity these weekend visits were for them
The difference was not merely in the curation, it was also about how these places were being managed here.
pretty economic and low to no quality.
I tried talking to authorities but the response was as expected.
Someone simply said “We cannot do it”
others made excuses “come in the afternoon to talk to our director”
I thought,
If they cannot do it
Can I do it with a few more people like me?
And I simply hosted a Scavenger hunt at Zoo through my Facebook page
I was putting in my creativity and expected everyone to dutch the expenditure
The idea was taken by many people and from Science to writing to leadership, we back to back organize multiple events
Local websites and magazines started featuring the works by Shuknik without asking for any charges
Parents started partnering with us and sharing ideas for new events.
It was all fun, a lot of fun
But soon, I started getting questions around the learning analysis
And I was not sure, what to say about that
Coz I was frankly not having any knowledge about education
And I knew, I cannot take it forward
Instead of running from the problem, I decided to learn about it and a possible solution.
And so I winded up Shuknik only to start another community
that was then called ‘Education for tomorrow’ and after multiple name changes, now it is being built as ‘EdTech NeoGurus’
In the next issue, I will share the story of ‘Education for Tomorrow’
I think this was the best thing that happened to my life, must-read stuff if you want to start a community.
If you know about the story of building and growing a Brand community, please do write to me at kausho@gmail.com
And it may get featured on our future issues