You're Invited summary

Who do you trust the most in life? Is it your best friend since childhood? Or perhaps your family doctor? 

Humans are wired to build trusting relationships with other people. After all, it’s how we’ve survived for so long. But trusting other people can also make us vulnerable to getting hurt. So we’ve developed handy screening mechanisms and biases to make it easier to know who to trust – and who to avoid. 

We have a tendency to shower people we want to impress with expensive gifts. Surely, if they see how generous we are, they’ll start to care about us or our business – right? The thinking is understandable, but it’s also completely wrong. The truth is that people value the opportunity to give more than they value the opportunity to receive. 

That’s something Benjamin Franklin knew very well. He once wanted to gain the support of a political rival. But instead of trying to flatter him, or buy his loyalty, he tried another tack: he asked his rival to lend him a rare book from his library. In those pre-Amazon days, locating the book and getting it to Franklin took quite some effort. The rival gave him the book – and then became a lifelong supporter. 

In 2008, Iggy Ignatius was a Florida real-estate developer who’d just built a community of retirement homes. It seemed poised for great success. But then America experienced an enormous financial crash. The property market in Florida plummeted, and much bigger homes sold for a fraction of the price that Ignatius was charging. He feared the worst, but, in the end, all of his homes sold out – in spite of the fact that they were so much more expensive. 

But why? Ignatius’s development was targeted at Indian retirees who would have loved to move back to India but were bound to America by family ties. Ignatius created a retirement community that offered Indian food, yoga, and Bollywood movie screenings. In short, it offered the promise of allowing retirees to connect with an Indian community and culture right there in Florida. That prospect was so compelling that it was worth the extra money.

Let’s say you’re designing an event, and you’d love for Oprah to be a VIP guest. Or perhaps you want to invite the CEO of a Fortune 500 company you admire. Or a community activist. But none of these people are in your immediate social circles. So how do you go about connecting with them? And, even more importantly, how can you make sure that they’ll actually want to come to your event?

The truth is, you can connect with anyone if you approach them with empathy and consideration. But you need to understand the unique social pressures that different groups of people face – and then develop tailor-made invitations that contribute to their lives. 

The word “community” is bandied around all the time. But what does it actually mean? Communities are more than just groups of people. They’re people who feel a special sense of belonging to one another – and to a common cause. 

Researchers David McMillan and Davis Chavis studied all kinds of communities and defined four key pillars. 

If you go to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, you’ll notice something strange. After you pay for your tickets, you can’t walk straight into the park. Instead, you need to take a 23-minute boat or bus ride that ferries you to the main gates. 

Why would the park designers have created this seemingly impractical setup? Because they understand behavioral psychology very well. Tickets to Disney World are expensive. Specifically, four-day passes for a family will set you back around $1,200. 

Traditionally, organizations that are looking to attract new members, or businesses seeking customers, have a recruitment model that focuses on three moments. First, there's the moment of discovery, when people first encounter the organization. Then there’s engagement, where people get to know it. And last, there’s membership when people sign on to become part of the community. 

These phases are very important, but there’s a problem: they’re usually approached in the wrong order. 

The prospect of creating your own community might be intimidating. You may be thinking that you could never mobilize a network of thousands of people or start a multimillion-dollar business. And you might be right. 

But, remember, many of these movements started out very small. Jean Nidetech simply invited a few people over to talk about weight loss. Tina Roth-Eisenberg looked for a way to make more artist friends. These communities grew from an authentic personal need, and they expanded because lots of people shared that need.