Scaling empathy and feature suggestions for the Clubhouse community and founders
Part two of the Clubhouse & Empathy series.
Through attending many different conversation rooms and moderating over fifty Social Play Club rooms, I’ve been able to make observations on how to create an inclusive environment inspiring empathy and connection. Here is what I found:
Suggestions for Clubhouse moderators
How to improve the art of conversation:
Creating synchronicity in the room:
- Number counter — All participants need to count from 1 — X(number of people in the room) chronologically without saying any number at the same time as another participant. Each person can only say one number in the sequence.
- Three words each — talk about a subject where each participant is limited to three words or a sentence each. In an effort to limit long monologues, choose a topic or idea and have people popcorn in the room to create a shared thought or narrative. Here is an example:
Person A: Every time I
Person B: Wake up in the morning
Person C: I come onto clubhouse
Person D: Which makes me feel
Person E: Popular, happy, addicted.
Creating clarity in your room:
- Set shared intentions beyond the title of the room — what do you want the outcome of the conversation to be? What do you want the mood to be? Include your intentions of the space when you reset the room so new people joining understand the purpose and container set for the conversation taking place.
- Create a text crowd-sourced log by audience for audience: As host of a room, create a google doc, and link it to your social media bio with the time of the session. You and the audience can add conversation notes for anyone in the room. This can support listeners who are new to the room to catch them up on the conversation and creates a way to share your thoughts if you are not speaking or in the audience.
- It’s not about me but about we: Encourage speakers on stage to use inclusive language and behavior to nourish collaboration and stray away from self-promotion.
Creating Empathy in your room:
- Unmute mics: allows for more vulnerability and equal power distribution
- Encourage all speakers to keep their microphones unmuted and see how it affects the energy of the room. How does it make people feel to keep their mics unmuted? Hearing the human breath and soundscape of your home helps create an intimate environment shared by everyone in the space.
How to build trust in your room:
- More trust exists in rooms that hold space for silence
Next time you are moderating a room, invite all participants to play a game where they measure the time of silence between each person speaking. You can also test out different time intervals and challenge speakers to wait 5–10 seconds before talking. It’s like listening to the group’s collective pulse.
How to build inclusivity in your room:
- Compliment and acknowledge people
When people are entering your room, acknowledge them by name and welcome them to your space. If it’s a small room, open their profile, and find something sincere to compliment them on. This builds inclusivity and creates a safe welcoming container for the room.
- Create a “question from the audience”
With the current clubhouse platform, the audience is disconnected from the stage. In order to bring a deeper sense of inclusion, audience members should be able to log questions to the stage or refer links to enrich the conversation. Encourage people from the audience who don’t want the spotlight to submit questions via dm on social media to bring them deeper into the conversation if time permits.
- Present moderators as mediators and not influencers or experts
As the room creator, explain to the audience how moderators are not gods, but are people who are present to help curate and carry the conversation to find a deeper connection between participants.
We’ve talked about human technology.
Now let’s talk about digital technology.
Feature suggestions for the founders of Clubhouse
Moderator toolbox — I imagine this as a marketplace for room templates and experiences. It would function as a tool-box to support the “art of conversation.” The moderator could choose templates that introduce defined rules of engagement, conversation etiquette, and “play” tools to help facilitate conversation, deepen empathy, and create more space for inclusivity and vulnerability.
Automated moderator templates:
- Q&A: Invites one person to come up at a time to ask speakers and moderators a question or will give a person 30 seconds to ask a question once brought on stage.
- Soundscapes: Automated soundscapes for your room such as a fire crackling or the sound of the waves against the shore.
Creating a more balanced conversation
- Time limit: A sound cues after X seconds like in the Oscars , to remind the speaker their time is up.
- Conversation meter: You can see the time limit of every speaker around their profile photo like a round progress bar.
Help speakers feel the room:
- Develop real-time data analytics to help everyone understand the dynamics of the room such as average speaking time of men vs women, or repetitive keywords mentioned in the room.
- A word cloud generator that shows the mood and tone of a room — everyone in the space gets to choose their current emotion on a mood board about how the room is running.
- Raise hand with intention (select if you raise your hand to either ask a question or give an answer on stage). In some cases, users could add text with a statement for the moderator to know what they are going to speak about (helps to summarize your thoughts into a sentence)
- When you change the room title, present the room title history — allows members to see how the conversation and room developed.
Creating a moderators training program for digital intimacy and empathy creation
- The School of Moderation: In my eyes, moderators are here to “mediate” between our ability to listen and our urge to speak in order to confront the influencer/celebrity follow4follow culture that cripples other social media platforms; we need to support the culture of mediation.
Discoverability and Credibility Questions
- How do we support discoverability, measure accountability, and review moderators?
- How can we find the right people to moderate? Who should I trust as a knowledgeable source in a particular field?
Some possible solutions:
- Hide following numbers from other users; only you can see how many followers you have. This will eliminate followers as criteria for credibility but will still maintain the user retention created from a feeling of development.
- Implement a feedback pop-up survey once a member has left a room they’ve been in for more than x minutes. Ex: “How was your experience with this Mod/user?”
- Expertise Tagging as used in Linkedin: Example: “Twenty people agree Michael is an expert for Tech and Play”
- Listeners reward badges to moderators to appreciate their effort. Ex: badges for politeness or inclusivity or empathy etc. etc.
- Asking listeners how they are feeling in the moment. Ex: they can answer with a color code: Green — playful, red — worried etc. etc. — Then you can present the heat maps of a room such as “This room is 80% people who feel happy and 20% who feel worried” etc. etc.
Tagging rooms with mods
- Moderators can also set a room intention not only with a subject of conversation but with a state of mind. For example, opening a social room with a blue color code for “just chilling” energy. This way people know the atmosphere before they enter.
- It would be great if users could search the mood(s) they’re seeking and then be directed to relevant rooms per the suggestion of the algorithm
I hope these tools can be helpful when you are moderating your room or will inspire you to think of new ways to bring empathy to your spaces or innovation ideas to the Clubhouse founders. In order for us to truly scale empathy on Clubhouse, we must be in solidarity with our intentions.
Come play with me and Kyle Kaminsky (Co-founder of PLAY) in the Social Play Club!
Follow us Clubhouse: @SocialPlayClub @michaelronen and @kylebkaminsky
If you want to bring more play to your corporate team or virtual conference visit Wonderland Social to schedule a call!
