A megalist of tools for building community

55 platforms + tactics for connecting off social media

hacking the planet

Something very cool is happening alongside our supposed dependency on social media as our only gateway to other people: we are doing much of the actual work of community building off of these platforms.

Invitations, listbuilding, archives, fundraising, wikis, getting headcounts – the social platforms are quite bad at all of this. What they’re better at is promotion (or at least the sensation of it!) I think it’s worth detangling these two things – promotion and the actual work – to celebrate our creative, scrappy solutions in the way they deserve.

What’s collected here is a megalist of tools, methods, and systems being used for community building right now. It is by no means exhaustive (please comment what you’d add) but is trying to cluster together resources that are often siloed away from one another. I hope you find at least one cool new thing!

A few other notes before we get to the good stuff:

• Patchwork is a beautiful thing! While some community tools offer all-in-one features (i.e. a chatroom and a wiki and event integration) I find that a patchwork is usually what works best for unfunded, emergent, and/or independent community building. It allows us to knit together what works best. Most tools here are small, single purpose, and meant for knitting (or in tech parlance, ‘stacking’!)

• Haven’t tested all of these but have included examples where possible

• No social media included here (and only one product by one of the main platforms), though of course plenty of organizing (i.e. neighborhood groups) still happens on these apps. You know where to find it. But even while this is true, we mainly link off-app anyway for the important stuff. Plus, going off social media allows for more ownership of lists, customizability, and ensures that the good information we’re building doesn’t get trapped in the algorithm. These generally also don’t include AI (though some platforms might leverage AI within certain features, usually paywalled) because not using AI is cool.

• Consider privacy and security. All tools below have varying levels of security, and you’ll obviously want to choose more carefully if organizing around a sensitive purpose. The Surveillance Self-Defense resource from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is an excellent starting place.

• Finally, remember this: all tech is sortof a finger trap. The more you use it, the more dependent you are on it. While digital tools can be truly magical, it is important to remember this even if not using social media at all. Some of my favorite local gatherings rely on nothing more than a monthly flyer and promotion in a few local Signal groups. Are we able to walk away from our tools if we need? What would it look like to be techless? Or change up the tools used depending on purpose?

Onto the megalist!

For invitations and event listings…

• Luma is an event hosting platform that is best for event series under one umbrella. Great for embedding on a site, including multiple hosts, and tracking RSVPs

• Partiful is an invite app better for smaller gatherings like birthdays or dinners and less useful for event series. Mainly uses text to communicate, tracks RSVPs, and has a terrifying infinite +1 option which you might want to turn off

• Paperless Post is a more aesthetic invitation app (who can forget the iconic envelope animation reveal!) that allows for lots of design and is maybe best for more formal situations

• Google Calendar is a straightforward place to list events, times, and details. Is embeddable, does not include a way to track who’s going (but maybe sometimes that’s a good thing)

• Momence is for activity classes like dance or wellness, is embeddable, and allows for online class recording sharing

• Eventbrite is an event platform that is also good for serial hosting and has the added bonus of aggregating your event with other nearby events when searching by location

• RSVPing by emoji is a personally beloved tactic for any messaging platform! Drop a “dinner at 7, react with a 🐎 if you’re in” and watch the horses pour in

For signups…

• Signup Genius, in addition to always sounding like a biting “Sign up, genius” in my head, is great for getting volunteer signups across multiple time slots and/or days, like here

• Jotform is highly customizable, allows multiple people to access responses as a team, and also can encrypt entries (she’s HIPAA compliant y’all)

• Google Forms are a great way to solicit signups and port over results to a spreadsheet for easy management

For promotion…

• Carrd is a one-page sitebuilder that’s great if you don’t need something so complex as an entire website and link out to other tools (personally I think this is a great first step off social media for organizers)

• Kit is a lightweight listbuilding tool that can be used when launching classes, offerings, events, content, etc through landing pages. Has a newsletter feature!

• Posting in your community event listing resources like your local newspaper calendar, town website, social groups, or through the kind work of other local organizers like this

• Making your own calendar infrastructure and sharing it with others, like this!

• Making It A Thing – this might seem very basic, but giving a name to whatever you’re doing (ie if you’re hosting a series of parties, give the series a name!) is a great way to elevate action out of a one-off pigeonhole (even if you indeed only do it once), or tie it to your personal accounts in ways that limit its reach. It just elevates the Thingness of it which makes it less like “Elise is doing a thing” and more like “Woah, this thing is happening, have you heard?” Like this!

For resource collection, archives, and wikis…

• Notion supports wiki building, databases, directories, archives, and so much more

• Linktree, a collection of links that can promote personal links or collect other resources

• Linkstack, an open-source alternative to Linktree

• Padlet is for organizing lots of different resource types: directories, to-do lists, and even crowdsourced maps. Limited visual presentation mostly constrained to a card format.

• Roam is for notetaking and research organization that references back on itself

• Are.na is a block-building knowledge collection site

• Digital gardens are something I’m still trying to understand but are so appealing in their webbiness – tools like Obsidian might make this possible to the layuser?

• Really long Google Docs which can be organized by linkable table of contents and a side navigation bar

• Giant binders! Remember binders? They are still just as good as ever for housing many pieces of paper, and ideal for physical gathering spaces where reference is needed (i.e. front desks, volunteer tabling)

For communication…

• Signal is an end-to-end encrypted app for chatting, calling, and creating group threads

• WhatsApp Communities allow for many topics to live under one umbrella, like a neighborhood group with subgroups for events or donations

• Discourse is a discussion platform that basically enables a custom message board, with moderation, badging, and realtime chat possibilities

• Discord is a group chat app that is geared towards voice, video calls, and streaming

• Matrix offers decentralized, secure conversation across chat, calls, and chatrooms

• ASL Interpreter hiring services, like this and this

• Zello is a push-to-talk app that connects teams of people like a walkie talkie, on your phones

For financial support… (membership, ongoing funding, etc)

• Withfriends offers membership structure for independent organizers (and recently, mostly bookstores) like this

• Kofi supports one-off donations (i.e. “buy us a coffee!”) all the way up to membership tiers

• Patreon is mainly for supporting creators with membership levels and perks, but can also be leveraged to support ongoing community building work too

• Givebutter is a fundraising platform that integrates with all payment types and can been leveraged as an ongoing giving page

• Collections of links to payment apps of choice like Venmo, Zelle, etc can’t hurt…

For finding times that work for everyone and scheduling…

• When2meet, a classic tool that requires no sign-in to use and share, a go-to!

• Hobnob is a lightweight and textable way to poll availability and get sign-ups, and no account creation is required for participants

• Doodle, a more robust resource for polling availability, though I find it slightly humiliating to say “i sent you a doodle/did you do the doodle?”

• Google Appointments which integrate with your google calendar to share availability and book meetings

• Emoji react based on the time that works for you, another classic that can be used across messaging apps where different options have corresponding emoji, and people react based on preference

For mapping…

• Mapchecking helps you estimate the maximum number of people who could fit in an outdoor area, helpful for festivals, actions, gigantic barbecues, etc

• Crowd Source Rescue connects volunteer rescuers with people who need support in disasters (a gem from their site: “spontaneous volunteer is not a dirty word”)

• Native Land shows you the Indigenous land you are on

• Fridge Finder maps community fridges near you (and even has a ‘last updated’ note! WE LOVE!)

• Mutual Aid Hub lists mutual aid groups and offer to offer resources or receive them

Amazing miscellany!

• Freebie Alerts notifies neighbors giving free things away to neighbors

• Live Near Friends helps you and your friends navigate co-living, buying property, and moving to be closer together

• Adopt A Station connects donors with local public media stations by showing them how much funding they stand to lose

• Build IRL has an app that supports clubs in building out their own pages, membership options, events, and more

• Buy Nothing networks gifting communities, especially cool because these have historically lived on social media apps. Hopeful for where this goes!

• Laundry Love connects local laundromats and laundry-doers with people who need financial assistance to clean their clothes

• Neighbourhoods is a peer-to-peer group network platform

• Shareable collects hundreds of community-building resources into how-tos

• You Can Make A Website, a refreshingly simple guide to building basic sites

Huge gratitude to resources and friends that helped collect some of the above, like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, Supernuclear, Tony Bacigalupo, and Deborah Tien (whose start-up Common Agency will happily walk you and your local group through setting up the right stack of tools!)

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