The Importance of Niche Communities

This essay was written for the Makers of Sport® newsletter in July 2015. Monday Musings and Weekend Reads were the written editions of the newsletter that accompanied the podcast; the archived email is on Mailchimp. The newsletter's links and announcements are trimmed here.

Obviously it's Monday and the whole Weekend Reads headline does not apply since this email completely missed the weekend. The reason why it missed the weekend is what I want to tell you about. As a part of my whole "baseball is awesome" week, I attended Major Level Creative Connect as a panelist. MLC Connect is a design conference for folks working in professional sports.

While at the conference I really got to see first-hand what kinds of challenges in-house creative teams at professional sports organizations deal with. As an entrepreneur, it's easy to forget how tough it is to deal with bureaucracies that creatives have to deal with when working in-house in sports organizations.

At MLC Connect, I was reminded that many superiors in those organizations view design as a service – a service that gives them freedom to run all over creatives and have them make whatever they want with no other reasoning that than they want it done. We as designers can be somewhat responsible for this thinking as we tend to be overly strong in telling others that we believe our ideas are right because we are professionally trained designers. Sure, our aesthetic sensibilities may be better than non-designers but the issue at stake is everyone has the ability to make a subjective opinion based on their own visual sensibilities. We need to do a better job as creatives explaining and selling our ideas from an objective viewpoint. Why did we make the decisions we made from a business perspective? "It looks good because I'm the designer" is not going a good strategy and can sometimes come off as condescending towards marketing people. The objective selling mentality can help us gain respect from marketing and business stakeholders as strategic assets and partners rather than technicians that know Photoshop. It proves that we are interested and mentally invested in designing for measurable results and outcomes for the overall organization rather than making cool things.

Gaining confidence and the know-how for this type of strategic selling can be gained from partaking in niche communities geared towards our business. For example, Makers of Sport and its listeners are a niche community; along with MLC Connect. In fact, I'm building a private community as we speak for Makers of Sport listeners to gain even deeper insights, ask questions to one another in private forums and have Q&As from some of the best in the industry. I've announced it on the show before but am working hard with a developer to make this happen for listeners passionate about getting even more Makers of Sport content and bettering themselves in their sports career.

Often we get stuck in our day-to-day working alone possibly in some sports environment without much creative inspiration or people to talk with about our problems and how to face them. Even if there is nothing near you, it is important to engage in niche communities online. Just as designers working in-house in the MLB didn't realize others were struggling with the same issues, you may not realize there are many struggling with similar issues as you right now as well. Talking out these issues and forming best practices as an industry are the benefits of niche these niche communities.

So if you haven't, take time to engage online with others working in your business (be it college sports, NBA, MLB, etc.). Each faces different challenges but there is actually a lot of crossover that can be applied specifically to your area.

And be sure to join the Makers of Sport Community when it launches. More soon.