Community Builders & Dunbar’s Law

Excerpt from Intentional Event Design, Our Professional Opportunity

Community Limits using Dunbar’s Law

“Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary anthropologist whose work has shown that we have ideal community sizes, with a maximum at any one time of approximately 150 people, no matter how many connections you have on social platforms! These communities ebb and flow to meet our life needs, based on time and place, and include our immediate and extended families, work colleagues, and yes, association and event communities.

Whether at a live event, in an online community or with our immediate social circle, this number is an indicator of the amount of people we can interact with effectively. As we design our events, from 100 to 100,000 participants, understanding the need to build smaller, accessible groups into the overall experience is a critical skill with both practical, logistical implications and opportunities to increase any event’s impact and legacy.”

Our responsibility as event designers is to understand we are not creating an event for one community of thousands, but for multiple communities within each event and opportunities to find each other. Finding and forming their tribes will maximize their overall positive experience.

Through 2021 with our team at SITE and our many partners we have produced such a wide variety of events all designed to build community with the restrictions in place that continued to evolve. Live, digital, hybrid, indoors and out, with folks from across the city and around the world, we adapted and were able to bring people together.

• 2021 SITE Global Conference (digital), originally we hoped this could be a hybrid, but the world was not prepared and we created a fabulous digital event in three parts to meet the time zones of a global audience. With the support of GatherTV we pre-recorded more than 50 sessions, and had the speakers come on live to be available to chat with the participants during their time. From Awards presentations to fabulous keynotes and thoughtful breakouts we saw an ongoing engaged chat stream and CEUs were earned.
• SITE Incentive Summit Americas (live!) was our first live event and it was planned with the team at Unbridled and the deep support of Aspen Snowmass and its many partners on the ground. The planning took us through red – orange – yellow and back to orange zones – meaning we ended up being able to host 75 people safely at a variety of physially spaced indoor events and many glorious outdoor activities and events. You can only imagine how thrilled people were to be together live again – it was all that!
• SITE NITE all nite (digital!) was created as a reponse to the reality that global travel was not returning as quickly as we would like – and the 15 hours that connected our community as we followed the sun (and in some cases the moon) and where every chapter and many partners brought together Extraordinary Stories from Extraordinary People in Extraordinary Places. What we remembered is that we do have friends and colleagues literally everywhere and seeing the sharing and connections was incredibly energizing even from my desk! Thank you to Meptur Online for literally being up all night to make this happen.
• SITE Classic (live)- at last it’s September and for a small window of time the world, or at least Coronado Island and the Hotel Del opened up. More than 250 gathered again and with modifications to meet the safety guidelines we had three days of fantastic events, education and connecting that harkened back to how it used to feel to meet – the dialogue, the elbow bumps… the gorgeous starry skies and ocean setting the stage, it was a bit magic.
• SITE – together live at last – we had a special reunion and meetings in Paris with our IBOD and IBOT Board Meetings at the Pullman Tour Eiffel with the SITE France members showing us the warmest hospitality. After 18 months of regular Zoom meetings to move forward the business of the association, it was incredibly wonderful to have the conversations, debates and presentations, and yes the breaks overlooking the Eiffel Tower was really special
• SITE NITE North America and Young Leaders Conference (live) both take place during IMEX America and we were all thrilled to be back in our community again, vaccinated, verified and once in the ‘private’ space of even the trade show floor, or at the gorgeous Ayu Day Club at Resorts World for SITE NITE able to be face to face again with friends and colleagues, rebuilding our community one smile at a time. Caesars Resorts and Encore Global were once again wonderful partners and it truly is about community and partnership, every step of the way.

Like the rest of the world, we assumed we would continue meeting live, then Omicron which has delayed for a second time our Incentive Summit Europe and the SITE Global Conference. What we are learning is resilience, adaptability, and most of all patience. We cannot possibly outrun a virus, they don’t work that way, and the safety of our community is paramount. We know we can connect in many ways and will continue to build our community.