Changing the Language Around Community
Community work is people-centric. But you don’t need me to tell you that. One thing that we, as community practitioners, are good at is explaining the value of human connection in an online space and how those connections help create a sense of belonging among those in the space. And when we talk with each other about it, you can feel the electricity in the air. The excitement of the work that we do lights up our faces and we could go on talking about it for hours.
And that’s amazing when we’re talking with one another.
However, for your leadership team, they may not be beaming as much when you walk in with slides that don’t translate that sense of belonging into dollars and cents.
It’s not that your leadership team doesn’t understand what a sense of belonging and building trusting relationships can do for members. They are human beings, after all, and get what the importance of that is in their own lives. So it’s not that they don’t get it. But when they have to justify investment to the Board, sense of belonging isn’t going to cut it. And I’m not diminishing community to a feeling because we all know that it’s much more than that. What I’m trying to do is show that we have to be more vigilant at connecting the dots between the relationship building aspect of community and what that does for member loyalty and growth. We as community practitioners must get better at talking about community’s business proposition to get buy-in from senior leaders. Here are a few ways we can go about doing that.
Consider Outcomes
Anytime you’re planning your community work, think of the objective and the outcome you plan to achieve because of that work. If I had to guess, 99.9% of the time the leadership within your association is going to want to know the end goal of any initiative it plans to invest in. When you’re putting planning in place for community work or looking for more budget/headcount, consider the outcomes that will be achieved because of that investment.When we’re talking about outcomes in the business sense, we’re looking at a defined or observable change in business performance that has supporting metrics. In a basic sense – what will the business/customer see because of this change and how will you measure success? Not only is this going to help give you language that your senior leadership can work with, but it will help you fine-tune your metrics because they are now guided by the outcomes of your program. As a heads up, this might also help you start to move away from reporting vanity metrics so it’s worth the effort.
The People-Powered Product
I used to think that community wasn’t a product. And in the traditional way that we talk about products, I still think that. People can’t buy it (unless it’s locked behind a member paywall). It’s not a one-time use experience or event. But in a recent webinar with Shannon Emery, she was explaining how community management processes can be managed using Agile principles and something she stated stuck with me – “Community is a people-powered product.” You can agree or disagree with that statement, but I think it helps put some context around how to talk about your program in ways that make sense for your leadership team.If we start to think of community as a people-powered product, we start to think about the things that occur within that community that create value and can be translated into ROI. In past reporting that I’ve done on community programming, I have included where we had touchpoints across the organization and the outcomes of that collaboration both for community and the other business teams. It was an incredibly helpful way to show what the community program enabled through collaborative efforts. Community members felt more connected to the association and other business owners were able to achieve a goal because of the community. The metrics associated with that work helped me definitively prove out business value because it showed the impact we had on some core business objectives.
Gain clarity
Sometimes, despite our best efforts, it can seem like we’re just not getting through to the people we need to get through to. And that happens. In that case, it may not be a bad idea to sit down and get clear on expectations. There are times when we think we’ve interpreted priorities correctly (or that they’ve been communicated clearly) and that hasn’t been the case. This is a great time to sit down and reset with your leadership to understand what the priorities are, what they expect to see from the community, and adjust from there.Many times we forget to go back and re-evaluate where we started to get buy-in in the first place, and how the association and your community has evolved. This is key to ensuring that your strategy and the tactics to support it are aligned. If this is not something that you’ve done since you first started your community program and you’re starting to see waning support, now would be a good time to review your program and ensure things still make sense. If it doesn’t, make changes accordingly.
Conclusion
What we know to be true about the value of community programs isn’t necessarily hard to communicate. The hard part is putting it in terms that provides your program the foundation to continue to get support for budgets and resources. If we’re not doing that effectively, it can hurt our chances for growing our communities and, in the end, your community members can’t get what they need either. Take some time to evaluate whether or not you’re doing your community program justice when talking about it with others in your association. If not, change the language.