I didn’t begin my career in digital strategy. I spent the first five years doing community organizing on issues of affordable housing, youth rights, voter education, and political/issue advocacy. I cut my teeth as a student organizer at UMass; went on to do organizing in low income neighborhoods in Boston; and rounded out my experience organizing people both online and offline for political campaigns.
During that time, I picked up a few tenets about building community that I believe most community organizers share:
- You shouldn’t tell the people you serve what problem you need to solve for them, they should tell you.
- In order to build a strong community, you need to build strong community leaders.
- Change cannot be brought about within communities unless people in that community take ownership of creating change.
- Hold yourself accountable to the people you serve.
Community managers can learn a lot about building community from community organizers. The concept of the “consumer-focused brand” is becoming pervasive in this economy where consumers are not as loyal to brands and can be very vocal about their displeasures. We are seeing more and more brands – like American Express, Sephora, Dell, and others – seeing huge growth as a result of adopting this approach. Community managers need to focus their efforts on building community and putting consumers first in order to truly see large returns from their social media efforts.
Here’s how you can apply these tenets to your role as a community manager:
In order to build a strong community, you need to build strong community leaders.
One of the key activities to perform before developing a community strategy is to perform a community needs assessment. This process begins with identifying key stakeholder groups in your community. Talk to people in those stakeholder groups to understand what their needs are. Once you identify their needs, perform a gap analysis to see where there is overlap and where there are conflicts. If the needs of your various stakeholder groups are greatly conflicted, you will need to develop a strategy for addressing that gap.
While doing Americorps at Madison Park Development Corporation, I performed a needs assessment of the Dudley Square area by disseminating a survey to residents and business owners to identify the key public safety issues they wanted us to address. We went and met one-on-one or in groups around the community to discuss the issues in depth. Following our information gathering process, we pulled out the most commonly expressed issues and solutions to those issues, and developed a strategic plan for how we could get stakeholders together to bring about change in the area.
Community managers can do the same thing in their online communities. Start by identifying the key stakeholder groups you are trying to reach online. You can use social listening to discover what issues these key stakeholders want to address, but be more personal and reach out to people to get their thoughts. This is a great way to begin to build relationships.
Once you have gathered information about the issues people want addressed and their ideas for addressing those issues, be transparent and share how you plan to use that information to bring about some form of change within your organization or community.
In order to build a strong community, you need to build strong community leaders.
Community organizers cultivate leaders in communities. This is done by finding people who are interested in bringing about change and empowering them to do so through training and creating support networks. These leaders in turn go out into communities and begin to recruit and train other leaders. It’s the classic multi-level marketing approach.
The advantage to this model is that it is sustainable. If an organization closes down, or if an organizer moves on to work in another community, they have established a perpetuating model that (should) continue to keep people engaged in creating change over time.
Community managers should establish a program to develop people who regularly engage with the brand in a positive way into super users or brand advocates. Give this group some level of responsibility or ownership of some element of your community, whether that be helping to moderate a forum or helping to address customer questions about how to use a product. Also make it clear to this group that they are an important part of your community by bringing them together to network with each other and praising them publicly.
Change cannot be brought about within communities unless people in that community take ownership of creating change.
If people are not actively engaged in creating change in their community, the change will not last. This is a basic change management concept that many organizations overlook when making any type of overhaul.
Community organizers focus on keeping people involved throughout the change process. One way is through developing leaders to go out and be change agents themselves, as described above. The other is by providing platforms for people to get involved when and how they can – whether that be organizing events where people can come volunteer or building tools online that allow people to get involved from home.
There are great examples of how brands have used to digital technology to allow consumers to create change within their organizations:
- Domino’s Pizza Turnaround Campaign involved their customers in developing new pizza recipes and developed digital tools that created more transparency around their ordering process.
- McDonald’s Canada is addressing concerns related to their food products by crowdsourcing questions from their customers and providing answers in a public place that anyone can search.
- Weight Watchers, in an effort to help people better control their diets, created a mobile app that allows users to track their progress while on the go. They also launched an online community to allow their customers to support each other in their weight loss efforts.
Hold yourself accountable to the people you serve.
Community organizers recognize the importance of the work they do and how it affects the lives of people in their community. Accountability to the people organizers serve is key to building trust with their community. Without that trust, they cannot get buy-in or involvement from their community members in bringing about any type of change.
Community managers need to hold themselves accountable to people in the communities they manage. When you say you are going to address an issue for your community at large or a specific member of it, do it. Be transparent and keep your community in the loop on progress as you work on finding a soIution to an the issue. Lastly, if you cannot solve an issue you set out to, say that and move forward with another plan.
I recommend reading various books or writings on community organizing by great organizers such as Paulo Friere, Sal Alinsky and, my favorite, Marshall Gantz. Also, go out and get involved in your local community – building community in real life makes you better at building community online!
Image from MarinInstitute.org.