Friday the Thirteenth – a foreboding date yet it was rather in great anticipation that the tech community in Singapore looked forward to its coming this June.

Why? Because of none other than Walkabout Singapore of course – A city-wide open house event for technology companies where office-hopping is embraced for a day amongst the well-established tech giants like Facebook and Twitter to the emerging and ambitious startups like Voyagin and Gametize.

Being a part of the local tech community, we at Peatix (an events management and ticketing platform) hopped on to the bandwagon to be a part of Walkabout and in conjunction with it, hosted our sixth session of Backstage Pass – a community event for organisers!

Related: Find out what happened at our previous sessions of Backstage Pass: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5

It is commonplace for many in the tech scene (and beyond) to use events to build various communities – Grab A Supper by GrabTaxi for their drivers, Hootups by Hootsuite for social media managers, Mobile Monday for the mobile savvy, Matchbox Mayhem for the arts, Travelshoppa Talks for retailers, Creative Mornings for creatives and many more.

At Backstage Pass, three women in tech – JFDI.Asia, Twitter & Google – shared with us on how we can use events to build a community based on their experience in doing the same.

3 Key Lessons Learnt
1. JFDI.Asia – Building a community passionate about startups and technology with Open House, Demo Day and more.
Top Tip: Focus on the whys – ask yourself why building a particular community is important. An event is a by-product of the main motivation behind building community – Are you driven to provide a platform to collectively share knowledge? Are you trying to create a place for people to network at or collaborate? What are your whys – ask yourself that before going on to the how and what.

2. Twitter – Building a community passionate about social and real-time marketing with #Twitter4Women
Top Tip: Communities are about shared experiences – it could centre around an event, a common interest, or a rallying point. Who makes up your community? How are you connecting your community together?  What is the shared experience you’re creating for your community? Events centred around a particular topic of interest to your community makes for a great tool to pool your community together offline!

Online, Twitter can be used to help connect your community before, during and after an event. In using Twitter for events – content is key to capturing, holding, and engaging with the attention of your community. Plan to connect with a proper calendar of content, get your community to rally behind a hashtag, get everyone on board especially your speakers, listen in on conversations on Twitter and get ready to respond.

3. Google – Building a community passionate about utilising technology to scale and kickstart their businesses with Google Business Groups.
Top Tip: Build a community by using events to get to know who they are, and beyond that, keep in regular contact and engage with them on social media. After each event, seek for feedback and actually use that information to help in tweaking your event to better suit their needs and wants. In this way, it’s truly an event for the community by the community!

Women in Tech
With that, three women in the tech scene (coincidentally so, yet taking up on our own pointers for organisers) demonstrated how they’ve all effectively used events to build a community here in Singapore passionate about a particular common interest.

Building Communities Using Events
Beyond the tech context, these three top tips can also be applied to community events in other genres too – Why are you doing it? What is your shared experience? How are you understanding, engaging with, and involving your community?

Ask these questions before jumping head on into organising an event – with valuable resources and time invested into events, having a clear aim, structure, and benefit to your community will certainly be of value to everyone involved be they organiser, attendee or speaker.

With that in mind, are you thinking of organising an event to build your community in Singapore? Try Peatix out! We’re free to use for free events.