🎹 Brooke Parrott: Head of Community at Sofar Sounds
🎹 Brooke Parrott: Head of Community at Sofar Sounds
The Power of Listening, Building Relationships and Pursuing Professional and Personal Passions
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In This Edition
What Communications and Culture Can Learn from Community
How User Research Can Help You Understand Your Role
Ways Personal Passions can influence Professional Paths
About Brooke
Brooke Parrott is currently the head of community at Sofar Sounds. She studied songwriting and piano at Berklee College of Music, and did a little of everything during her 8-year tenure at live music startup Songkick. She is a solo artist and plays in several bands, most often touring with her group Loch Lomond in the US and Europe, and spends any other spare time she has writing young adult speculative fiction novels
What sparked your path into your current field?
My role is a mix of community, communications and operations. My background is in music — I’ve played in bands for as long as I can remember. I went to college to study music. Initially, I began working for startups 15 years ago because I found a music startup with a mission that inspired me. At Songkick, I was the first non-technical hire there so I did as many of us have done at startups, a little bit of everything that taught me a lot at a really fast pace.
As the company evolved over my 8 years there, we launched a new tool for artists. As I began working with artists and agents, this led me deeper into the field of community. I’m at Sofar Sounds now which is a really community-driven company that puts on intimate concerts in 400 cities worldwide work a lot with the artist community and advocate for them internally and externally.
I also focus on our Curators, who are independent concert organizers that use our platform and our brand to put on shows in hundreds of cities around the world. In addition, there are hosts, audio teams, and other important groups who make our shows possible.
What is one project you are particularly proud of accomplishing over the years?
When I was at Songkick, I helped launch Tourbox— a tool for artists to use across their website to manage tours and publish tour dates on places like Spotify. I'm particularly proud of this project because I did a lot of internal education and communications to help folks within the company better understand artists and what their needs were for this product to succeed.
I also had an opportunity to do user research with the artists and work closely with the tech team on crafting the product roadmap, which was incredible to see the concept go from idea to reality. To know that our work was really making a difference in artists' lives made me so happy. I've always been very mission-driven to build tools and provide resources that make artists’ lives better.
What are the skills that are most important for someone to succeed in community management?
Listening is important. It’s connected to empathy because you need to have the real ability and willingness to listen to what a community wants.
Great communications empowers you to be the translator between the community and the company. You always need to be thinking about your audience, what they care about and ways to turn what the community is saying into a compelling story internally to accomplish work cross-functionally.
You need to have initiative —working in community at many companies is either a solitary or a small team endeavor so you usually need to be able to think at both a strategic high level, but also be able to execute on the ground.
Finally, organizational skills and project management are important.
What do you think Communications and Culture can learn from community management?
There is so much overlap. Both are really about maintaining an ongoing authentic engaging relationship with various stakeholders. Listening is crucial in both areas. It’s important to understand the needs, feelings and concerns of your audience to help shape messaging in a way that resonates.
Communications needs to be consistent but also tailored for each group for it to be effective. In addition, authenticity and transparency is what builds trust and relationships. It’s important to have channels for dialogue to manage the flow of information both ways so that it’s not just talking to someone, but having a conversation.
How do you continue learning about your field?
I constantly learn so much from the communities that I work with and my peers. Externally, I stay in close touch with other people working in the community field, and especially ones that work with creatives.
I also really try to make sure that I'm part of professional groups across sectors, since there’s so much to learn that you can apply to your own role. I’m part of a group called Old Girls Club, which I highly recommend for any women in tech who want an incredibly supportive space to help you grow.
What’s your passion outside of work hours?
Music is my first love — I started playing piano when I was six years old. I’ve been writing and singing since then. I attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, and studied songwriting and piano. Afterward, I moved to London where I found a music startup that I wanted to work for there.
I started playing gigs all over town in London. I've been playing with a band called Loch Lomond for 12 years, and also play in a band called Completions with my husband, and have a solo project of my own.
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