Summary of "The power of community"

The power of community, a great topic that we could talk about for hours. During this Webflow Conf' 2022, we had the right to listen to an exchange between Claudia Cafeo (founder of the Floxies community), Melissa Mendes (founder of the Flow Party community and Eurecah) and Emily Lonetto (Director in charge of the community at Webflow).

Here is a short summary of the points discussed during this conference.

Claudia Cafeo & Melissa Mendes' Webflow communities

First, the two discussed their community:

Floxies by Claudia Cafeo: Community for women

Floxies is a community that was created for women in theUX/UI Design and Webflow development community. The goal of this community is to bring together women from all over the world and to support them in their projects in a web world that is still very masculine.

Claudia was originally an elementary school teacher in the UK. Covid went through that, pushing people away and it was during this difficult time that she started to want to train by herself in UX and UI Design first, then Webflow.

During her apprenticeship, she was looking for mentors to help her develop her skills and to share knowledge. She then posted a message on Facebook to find people to learn together. A post that probably changed her life, as she received many responses and went on to create Floxies, a community of women to close the gender gap in the web design community.

Flow Party by Melissa Mendes: Develop your skills in Webflow

Melissa Mendes also created a community(Flow Party) starting with finding help to progress through a post on Instagram.

Today, she has managed to federate a community of several thousand people around the world to teach them how to use Webflow. All with the aim of allowing people to develop any project they imagine from design, to development, to marketing, etc.

She summarizes this community as Developers and Designers who enjoy discovering and learning to use new tools

Tips for creating a community (Webflow)

First of all, Melissa and Claudia insist that it is not easy to start creating and federating a community.

But here are some tips they give for successfully creating a group of enthusiasts:

Being a good person
Be kind
Supporting the community
Have a desire to help people
Allow people to feel included in the group
Maintain consistency and coherence
Understand what people need
Create content for these needs
Be 100% committed when creating a community
Be willing to share
Know & be able to give as people come to you

Through these tips, we find the notion of the need for people to belong in order to develop their full potential and create ever more advanced projects. This is the most important need that must be managed in a community. Everyone must be able to find their role and not remain isolated, but be able to exchange and share with other members (to help or to be helped).

What are the feelings shared by the community, the impact?

Both of them say that creating a community is an incredible experience. There is a great satisfaction in helping people. Being able to help people who have experienced the same problems as you when you first started learning is a wonderful feeling.

In addition, the fact that each person has a role in the community, each member brings his or her own expertise, offers a tremendous sharing of knowledge and skills.

What is even more magical for them, is the fact that some of the community members meet in real life to share good times (even if they are not invited 😅). Getting selfies from people who meet is a magical feeling. It is rewarding to see people meeting and working together. It is motivating to see people create projects together and it contributes to the well-being of the group.

The notion of collective growth

Being a member of a community is not just about receiving. Indeed, in a group, there is as much to give as to receive, that is the state of mind behind these communities.

When you create a community, you must be able to give without expecting to receive in return. When you learn, understand something, you have to be able to give back.

Claudia and Melissa's communities were created because they noticed that people needed guidance in their learning journey, in their training.

If I can help someone I do. I may not be an expert, but if I can help I do it

By sharing our experiences and skills freely, we can only be surprised at what we can receive in return. This is really the spirit behind the Webflow communities.

Plans to grow the community?

The goal in the coming years is to continue to grow these communities and continue the sharing of knowledge. Here are some of the plans that will be put in place by Floxies and Flow Party:

Development of the mentoring system
Continuing Education
Continue to support members
Creation of certifications
Keep something organized
Continue to create and share content
Create events in real life (IRL)

So much for the important points that were made in this very interesting discussion. If we were to retain only three words about the power of community, we could sum it up as:

Education, Collaboration, Support

To grow this community of Webflowers, Webflow has recently set up the Community Grants. A total of $10 million that will beshared among community members that helps to spread the word about Webflow and helps the community.

Our Webflow agency, Digidop, also aims to help the French-speaking community to progress on Webflow, Figma via the sharing of freely accessible content. If you want to learn more about Digidop's vision of content sharing, I invite you to watch the video above of Finsweet's live"Community Day" where Joe Krug (Finsweet's founder) interviewed Florian (Co-founder of Digidop) :