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“I forgot that people need to belong in their personal lives first,” said author Dan Berger, founder of Assemble Hospitality Group, who says his main mission is helping people find a sense of belonging.
Belonging has always been an existential question for entrepreneur Dan Berger, who immigrated with his adoptive parents from Israel to the U.S. when he was nine years old. “Between immigration and adoption,” he told Convene, “I’ve kind of always struggled with belonging.”
Dan Berger’s The Quest: The Definitive Guide to Finding Belonging
And at Social Tables, the event-planning software company that Berger founded in Washington, D.C., in 2011, “I was obsessed with creating a belonging environment,” he said. The company was built in the startup culture mold, Berger said, where mostly 20-something employees “drink the Kool-Aid, eat the free snacks, and don’t do anything else other than live and breathe work.” Berger had the company’s logo tattooed on his arm and scheduled regular happy hours with his employees, paying attention to who showed up and who didn’t, he said.
But as the company grew, Berger stopped having fun, he said. “I was going to work, trying to connect with younger employees and that wasn’t really happening. And I didn’t really have anywhere else to fill my tank. I stopped belonging in the place I created.” He’d been so focused on creating a belonging environment at work, he said, that “I forgot that people need to belong in their personal lives first.”
After Berger sold Social Tables to Cvent in 2018 for $100 million, and left the company the following year, he realized how much of his identity and sense of belonging had been wrapped up in his role as its founder and leader. Berger spent the first 18 months of the pandemic reflecting on his own experience and researching what others have discovered about belonging and then wrote a book about what he learned — The Quest: The Definitive Guide to Finding Belonging, was published this November. Berger has since founded Assemble Hospitality Group, an event venue and event service company based in Boise, where he now lives, but his real mission, he told Convene, is helping people find a sense of belonging.
One of the key ways that Berger has come to think about belonging is as a tank that needs to be filled. There are numerous ways to fill it, and everyone has their own unique combinations of fuels, he said. (See “5 Ways Meetings Fuel Belonging”) Meetings and events have an inside track to creating environments where people find belonging, he said, because, as he writes, although people find belonging without being social, “the primary paths require people.”
But just showing up at a meeting doesn’t guarantee that participants will feel like they belong. “Belonging means different things to different people,” Berger said, a lesson he learned at Social Tables when he failed to give employees space to find their own paths. His message to event professionals is that they’re already creating environments that support belonging. “The mindset is there‚ it’s not turned on,” he said. Organizers, he urged, should “really think about the fact that different people find belonging in different ways.”
In his book, Berger shares a matrix of four archetypes for belonging, based on the kinds and frequencies of interactions that people prefer. They range from those who seek out and thrive in social settings to those who like to balance social interaction with solitude. “It’s not necessary to do personality assessments for every attendee” to create belonging, he said. “All you need to do is make sure there are options for different people,” and to provide different activations and programming that meets their needs.
When people feel like they genuinely belong, “it creates a positive feedback loop,” Berger writes in The Quest, as they seek out more experiences in environments that validate them. The benefits can go beyond the effects on individuals, Berger told Convene. Research published in 2022 in the journal Nature, based on events including Burning Man, suggests events can increase participants overall feelings of connection, he said. “When people go to multi-day gatherings and events, they leave with a better moral compass. People literally are kinder.”
Barbara Palmer is deputy editor of Convene.
Emotional Engagement
- How Events Can Foster Emotional Engagement
- At Conferences, We Trust: How Shared Experiences Break Down Cynicism
- 5 Ways Meetings Fuel Belonging
- Convention Centers Get Cozy With Intimate Meeting Spaces
- How to Make Belonging the Centerpiece of Your Events
- Social Connection: There’s an App for That
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