🌍 👩🏿‍🤝‍👩🏽 Building a digital lifeline for women around the world

“Do not mess around with Facebook’s social graph, okay?”

Join New_ Public and our friends from the Integrity Institute in Washington, D.C., on February, 1, for a Happy Hour at Bar Chinois from 5-7pm. First drink is on us!

We know, through our work and our research, that public-spirited communities are often built and maintained through the efforts of dedicated community stewards. We love to talk to and learn from stewards who facilitate thriving, healthy online connection. We can learn so much from them about building and leading digital communities.

The big platforms also know the power of stewardship: In the 2018 F8 Keynote, Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said, “we’ve learned the leaders are the reason that these meaningful large groups happen.” He was talking about Lola Omolola, founder of Female IN (FIN), a private group for women on Facebook that serves as a vital lifeline for over two million women around the world.

It might seem unusual for us to feature a group on Facebook, a platform revealed to have knowingly profited off toxicity and hatred, and that seems demographically doomed in the US. And yet, Facebook serves as critical infrastructure in many parts of the developing world.

For about eight years, Meta has been expanding internet infrastructure and access throughout Africa. In different configurations — probably best known as “Free Basic” — Meta’s connectivity efforts have offered very cheap or free internet access on cell phones, and over 300 million people have logged on in this way. Even as Meta has faced criticism that these services disguise creating new customers as philanthropy, and that they sometimes overcharge users, the connection to the social web can be transformative for individuals and communities, including Lola’s FIN. 

Below, Lola, a member of our Community Stewards Guild, explains how her practices elevate women’s stories, why she thinks Facebook Groups is the best fit for her community, and how a few women can effectively manage a group of millions.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial

Name: Lola Omolola
Location: Born and raised in Nigeria, now lives in Chicago
Group: Female IN (FIN), a safe place for women to share and be supported 
Position: Founder, admin
Hosting platform: Facebook Groups
Group status: Mature, eight years old
Group size: Over two million members

Connecting millions of women

Content warning: discussion of terrorism, domestic violence, assault

Why Lola started her group:

Tragic events ignited the spark within me to start FIN. Specifically, when armed men stormed a school in northern Nigeria. This is a story that you can find literally everywhere. Everyone was talking about the Bring Back Our Girls campaign. 

They were connecting it to terrorism, and no one was talking about the girls that had been abducted, that essentially had been stolen from what should be the safest place for a person to be, in school. And so I felt that there was a bigger story here, which is related to a society that constantly othered women, to the extent where women are not seen as being of value, for anyone to go and steal, just literally take close to 300 of the girls. 

So that was the reason why I went to Facebook. I wanted to find women who were as concerned by it as me, and I wanted to create something that would remain after the news cycle had run out. When I started the group it was actually a secret group. It was just a case where I would add one woman, and then that woman would add another woman. I never, ever expected to even get 100 people to join, but do not mess around with Facebook’s social graph, okay? Everybody is on there. I did not expect it to be something that will then grow from zero to pretty much two million women who live in more than 100 countries. 

Describing the FIN community:

FIN is a community of women like none other, where we lead with kindness and compassion, and it's also highly non-judgmental. So women come everyday as their real home, where they know that whatever stories they have to tell, there are people who are waiting to hear it, people who care about understanding their experiences. It’s putting women in the forefront of telling their own stories. So we're learning to identify our own voices. What does that even sound like? What am I? 

Remember, a majority of the women in many parts of the world, including a majority of the women I serve, they literally do not have mobility. They can’t go wherever they want and go engage and hang out with their friends and go for coffee with someone they just met to try to explore their career. And our community is now allowing us to sidestep the structure that already exists, help women find their own capacity to do those things, their own confidence, their own strong sense of self — understanding what ways they can serve the world.

So that's what we do every day. From sunup to sundown, I am creating the right conditions, the right atmosphere, where women feel comfortable being able to tell their stories, and learn how to support each other as they do that. When people start telling their own stories, some things start coming out that we don't expect, like raw stories about domestic violence, ongoing issues in their family life, and issues that we were told never, ever to talk about. Sex and sexuality and mental illness are crazy stigmatized.

People get free stuff, who could not afford to take care of their own families. The woman just left the hospital, they just had a baby, they don't have anyone. They're in a different city and they just relocated. Members of the community are going to go hang out with you and help you with your baby and give you a rocker for your baby. And so on and so forth. We all want to be a part of something that is positive, that actually really helps people. We all want to be a part of something that we know will make a difference. 

We have become a lifeline for women, just because we've just organically built a place where they felt like they were supported in a way that the historical, traditional organizations and institutions have failed women over and over and over again. 

It is a Facebook group, but we do meet in person as well. We’ve had events in more than 80 cities across four continents. And those events are like, massive. I’m talking, 3000 people attended in Lagos, Nigeria. Hundreds in London. From Johannesburg to Ghana to Italy, we meet around the world.

Lola meeting with Mark Zuckerberg in 2017

Why Lola says Facebook Groups is still the best fit for FIN:

So being on Facebook for us, one, I think has been very, very transformative for a lot of people because it's really cheap. Facebook allows a low data option that allows people to be able to use Facebook without having to think about it or worry about it. So that does help to accelerate people's adoption of Facebook. So that's one. 

Two is that, based on my experience, I think Facebook is uniquely positioned for relationship-building. It has its issues, huge, because of the noise and the chaos, no doubt about it. And some of it can be unbelievably debilitating. Yes, unbelievable. 

However, it also allows you to have some sort of a canvas with which to build relationships from, that has less of a bad rap than other platforms, such as Twitter. Talking from a platform strategy perspective, Twitter has an overreaction clapback culture, where you’re encouraged to say the fastest, meanest and most aggressive thing that you can say in order for you to get attention, and you get applauded for that. Facebook works differently. 

Facebook is actually more story-centered. It is more, “oh, this is my family member.” So it actually is in a good position for the kind of relationship-building that I think needed to be the foundation for what I was trying to create. So that was the reason why Facebook was just a no brainer. Nothing comes close, even today. 

When we talk about stickiness, and having the certain types of tools for moving relationships along and then getting access to parts of the world where people generally don't have access to data, Facebook is leading hands down.

Stewards have a ton to learn from Lola, an experienced community steward herself. Builders should also note that even as other well-established communities have left Facebook Groups, Lola and her team still see Facebook as the best platform for FIN.

How FIN’s community stewardship team came together:

So, for the first day, I made some certain decisions that I think were pivotal to the success of the community. One of them was that I reached out to folks who I knew cared about my subject matter. And so I identified, over months, one of those types of people. I brought her on to the community to volunteer with me, to help, to create and curate an environment like this. 

The second person I selected specifically because she was running another community that had 250,000 members. She had experienced and she understood how the platform works. So the important thing is being able to recognize what kind of people understand what we're trying to achieve, and then reaching out to them, helping them understand what your vision is.

They came on board and we just got started. And everyone we have brought on board since then were people who saw the community, saw the magic that we were making, saw women helping in real time: where we're getting people out of domestic violence situations, we're helping people with offering places to live so that they can escape situations that were untenable for them.

It’s a revolving door of members wanting to help every single day. There's been an all-volunteer team for eight years, and every single one of them come from the community. People have reached out, like, “I work with the UN, I want to help with the group.” And we're like, “yeah, no, you need to have grown in the group with us.” 

That's my story too. I didn't start off being amazing at bringing people together and knowing how to set guidelines and knowing how to hold people accountable. No, I actually got better over time. So it's important that we see people who really care about self-development, about being a part of developing other women. 

A screenshot of the livestream of Facebook’s 2018 F8 Keynote, where CPO Chris Cox presented about Lola and FIN.

How moderation works on FIN:

At the most we’ve had 30. At the least we have three moderators. This least is right now. Yes, believe it or not. We have a strong, strong, huge culture of self-policing, because we’ve had time to establish a culture. And so it gets easy as we go along. It is now almost self-oiling in terms of that. 

Imagine if you all your life, you have been raised to shut up. We've been raised with a pinch and a shush. Suddenly, you find a piece of the internet — I mean, the same internet, that super-toxic crazy-town place — and you see a woman and you feel something. You feel like you’re home. What do you think you're going to do? Your instinct will be to protect the place, and that we have channeled back to the Nth degree. Our members, they feel very, very personally committed to taking care of this community and helping it survive, and that's why it works. 

The members understand what we're trying to do. They know that there’s a grand plan. They understand the vision. They care about the vision. They’ve been able to get there and buy-in over time. They see me, they see the team modeling the behavior we want to see within the community. 

And then there are tools. The tools are a huge reason as well. We work with Facebook to give them recommendations about the struggle, and they build tools that are responding to the things that we want, in real time. Most of the tools that are on there I have contributed to the creation of, and that is helping. 

And most importantly, we let the community know that when we don't protect what we have, it dies. When we no longer want it, it stops working. It’s really multiple different things that we have done over the years that have reinforced and made self-policing in our community so good. But it is.

We get within a thousand posts being sent in every single day, but remember, about a third of that is what we consider a high-quality story. The bar of telling a story in our community is extremely high. Because the first thing on the guidelines is, tell me something significant about yourself. Why is this important? Because we care more about connection than engagement, you see, because that's the core of what the community was there to serve. 

Thanks Lola! We’re so happy to have Lola as part of the Community Stewards Guild. We’ve convened this diverse group of stewards to learn and co-design alongside, and I’m excited to give them space here in the newsletter to pass on their lived wisdom about stewarding communities. 

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Filling out our 2024 bingo card, 

–Josh