The power of anonymity in communities
When words matter more than identity
One of the many reasons communities can be such a fun and welcoming place to hang out is because of what the members share regularly. But in these inclusive spaces, what if certain members felt left out because they felt embarrassed to ask certain questions or just overwhelmed by the sheer number of other members active in other channels?
How can we as community builders create spaces for members to feel comfortable sharing even if they don’t want something specifically tied to their profile?
One idea is to build anonymity into your community ecosystem. In this post, I’ve written about why this can be something beneficial to add to your community if you don’t already use it, what to look out for in terms of unwanted negative consequences of unregulated anonymity, and some example use cases.
The benefits
Creating anonymity in your community can be super beneficial in many ways. In particular, anonymity can:
Allow members to speak freely: Allowing anonymity in your community can enable people to speak more freely without fearing judgment and also allow for more diverse and honest opinions and perspectives.
Get members participating: Some community members might feel intimidated or uncomfortable sharing personal information publicly. Anonymity can provide a sense of safety and encourage more members to participate in the community without worrying about having a post tied to their name.
Protect their privacy: Especially in particular communities where members may not want their identities to be revealed, anonymity can be really helpful in protecting their identities.
Help reduce bias: Having anonymity can help alleviate unconscious biases and stereotypes that might be present if members knew each other's identities. Beyond that, anonymity can promote more objective views of members’ posts based on the content rather than personal characteristics of the member sharing it.
What to look out for
While there are some really great benefits of having anonymity in your community, there also is the potential for harmful consequences such as enabling online harassment and hate speech or creating an environment where members feel comfortable behaving in harmful ways.
Because of this, if you do want to offer anonymity in your community it is important to have protocols in place such as moderation of the anonymous content and also rules and plans of action laid out in the community code of conduct of what happens if this is abused.
How to facilitate anonymity
Given the benefits and drawbacks of anonymity, there are a few tools and use cases that I wanted to highlight.
Posts:
In the community where I work, we use Typeform in a few different areas to promote anonymity. There are a couple of community channels that we have an anonymous Typeform attached for members to submit posts that they have where they want our team to post on their behalf. This also allows our team to moderate the posts coming in and decide if this fits within our guidelines for posting.
Surveys:
If you’re a community builder, there is a good chance that you have sent out surveys to your community members. One of the ways to ensure members that they can be open to sharing their feedback is through anonymity. In the community that I work in, we do this by setting up an anonymous survey form (we use Typeform for this as well, but Google forms or any other builder works) and then have an option for members to attach their email to the survey if they want to chat further about their responses, but it isn’t a requirement.
Blogs:
One example that I saw recently from Rosieland was that they posted a blog article on behalf of one of their members who wanted anonymity around a certain topic. While I don’t have direct experience in doing this for a community that I have worked in, I wanted to share because this is a great idea to promote your members who might feel uncomfortable sharing on their own.
Lead by example:
Lastly, with all of the above, it is important as a community builder to lead by example. When using tools and creating spaces for your members to be anonymous, encourage them to participate by sharing examples of what good anonymous posts look like. Give your members a model to go off of to create even less of a barrier to participation.
Anonymity has a lot of benefits for a community but can have drawbacks with it as well. With anything, moderation is key. If you chose to add some anonymity to your community, let me know how it goes!