Build something before you invite anyone

Put in what you have before you send anyone a link. An invitation to contribute to an empty page gets ignored, because there is nothing to react to and no evidence anybody else is going to bother.

This inverts the usual advice to gather first, and it holds for a specific reason.

Nobody wants to go first

A blank shared space asks each person to define what this is going to be. That is a much larger request than adding to something already underway, and people handle large requests by postponing them.

Two or three photographs and a couple of sentences change the ask entirely. Now the question is not what should this be but what is missing, and that one has an answer people can produce in ninety seconds.

It also sets the register

Whatever you put in first is read as the standard. If your two entries are casual and specific — a bad photograph with a good line attached — what comes back tends to match.

If you start with the most formal picture you own and a carefully composed paragraph, everybody writes carefully composed paragraphs, and the result is noticeably worse. People calibrate off what is already there.

The organiser goes first because they can

You are the only person with the whole thing in your head. You know why this is being made, who it is for and roughly what shape it should take. Nobody else has that, and asking them to supply it before you have is asking them to guess.

How much is enough to start

Two or three entries. Not a finished thing — a visibly unfinished thing with a direction.

Adding everything you have before inviting anyone is the opposite mistake: a page that already looks complete invites nothing, because there is no obvious gap for anyone to fill. The useful state is clearly begun and clearly not done.

When it is a surprise

There is a version of this where the buyer wants to build something good before showing anybody — including, sometimes, their own household. That is a legitimate way to work and it is the same rule taken further: make it worth looking at, then show people.

The mechanics of the ask itself are in how to get relatives to actually send you the photos, and what you are asking of them is in do the people I invite need an account.