Chapter Five

Community Building Anytime Everywhere

We all know that our supporters, volunteers, donors, and advocates are integral to our success. They take action, give money and time, and help us move our mission forward on and offline. After so many examples of using multiple channels for advocacy and fundraising, it’s important to remember that you can’t build real community around your work and move the needle on your cause if you invest in doing so only during campaigns or fundraising drives. Community building has to be an anytime, everywhere goal too.

How do those supporters find us, how do donors hear about our work, and how do interested citizens become our advocates? How do you use multichannel approaches to build a community around your mission? When you continually post updates and valuable content, listen and learn, and create opportunities for engagement that are meaningful and important all year long, you develop a community that is primed for taking action when you have a larger goal to reach or a call to action to share.

There are four essential elements of a multichannel strategy for building community. The first is to build trust between your organization and your community—both old and new supporters. Second, you need to use the same language, in the same places that your community does; you can’t connect with supporters if you use language that they don’t understand or relate to and post to platforms they don’t access. Third, plan to connect the community through conversations across channels. And finally, it’s critical as you build community around your mission to recognize that practice is critical, and that takes planning and organizational support.

TRUST IS REQUIRED

Building a community that supports and promotes your work isn’t something that happens in a single day. It requires trust, and a lot of it. For your organization to succeed in advocacy and fundraising, or to build a strong community, you need to focus on building trust in a multichannel way, too. A fitting technique to use for trust-building across channels is to engage with your community in ways that show you are listening, sharing your data, and modeling your behavior to serve the community.

Listen for Action

We all know listening is important—we are told as much in school, in relationships, and in our work. We’ve heard all about listening. But what’s missing from what we do (that we may think is listening) that would help us make our messages, our events, and our conversations more effective in changing and shaping the world? Listening for action, or listening with the intention of engaging with the community.76

Most organizations are listening in the most basic ways: examining news alerts, social media tracking, blog searches, and even market research to learn about what the community and the public at large are saying about them, their programs, and their cause. Organizations track mentions, identify the most vocal contributors, and try to analyze trends and hot topics. This is listening to learn. It’s incredibly important but it is just one part of the equation. It fills you with information and data, ideas and understanding . . . and a lot more questions.

The next step organizations take is to listen enough that they can start conversations—this is a good thing. How many times have you heard someone say, “Join the conversation that’s already happening online”? We know our work, our issues, our services, and our ideas are being talked about, and we want to be part of the group that’s doing the talking. So we start commenting on blogs and posting announcements and updates to social media about our work to let people know all about the impact we’ve made, the campaigns we’ve created, and the ideas we like. This level of participation is still incredibly important, but it is just one part of the equation, like listening to learn. We are pulling everything in and then pushing everything out. But there is more to social media and mobile channels than that—they provide a way to listen to your community in a deeper way.

Listening for action is the trigger for collaboration, building a movement, and making change. This means listening to learn where the opportunities are for collaboration, then sharing the needs you have and inviting the community to shape the vision for the world you want to create. Listening to act is like thinking aloud, in public, with a community of people listening and suggesting opportunities to act together. But how do you do it?

Organizations that want to engage in community building using online and mobile tools have a great opportunity here to go beyond monitoring Twitter or tracking who the influential bloggers are that discuss your programs or issues. For example, you can ask direct questions on your Facebook Page, then stick around to respond, “like,” or otherwise participate in the conversation that follows. It could also mean that you build clear ways for people to give you feedback either as quick evaluation questions via email after transactions or participation, or social feedback mechanisms such as ratings, or a “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” indicator on your blog.

No matter how you listen and gather feedback, share ideas, and make proposals, if the organization doesn’t plan to act on what the community says, there’s little purpose in listening or trying to build community in the first place. The community will see that you aren’t making changes, aren’t communicating, or aren’t collaborating and will disengage at best, turn against you at worst.

The co-creation cycle highlighted in Chapter Two as part of the principle to build a movement is especially important with community building. Even though you may not think your organization is co-creating a product or program, a piece of content, or even a campaign, you are creating something important: an engaged community! Doing so means you do need to listen for the hot topics, areas where needs aren’t being met, or opportunities to get people involved. Listening to take action means that you take what you hear to the next level and start engaging: share back what you’re hearing and learning to see what resonates and where you can start creating something together.

Share Data

One way to begin building trust with both current and prospective supporters is to share your data. Sites such as Charity Navigator,77 GuideStar,78 and GreatNonprofits79 make it easy for people who are interested in learning about your organization’s data and history to find it. Do not assume that if a potential donor or volunteer wants to learn about your work, impact, or financial history they will download a massive annual report to read in their free time. Make your information—both qualitative and quantitative—easy to find and understand directly on your website.

Share stories of your impact, but make the numbers just as accessible, too. For example, CARE: Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere, Inc., provides information about its expenditures and program area financial distribution directly on their donation form pages.80 Similarly, the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) provides a basic financial expenditure chart in the footer of its website so it is accessible from every page, as well as links to download financial statements and 990 reports.81 Figure 5.1 is a screen shot of the AJWS website.

Figure 5.1 American Jewish World Service Website Footer82

Include Signposts to Your Website

While you’re being transparent on your own site, be sure to connect your various online profiles back to your main website. It doesn’t take many clicks for someone to get lost on the web—we’ve all experienced that! So, make it easy for people to find out more about you wherever they come across your presence online. Ensure that your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and any other online profiles include a link back to your official website. This signposting helps people quickly and easily navigate to your official homepage on the web, and also helps signify that your various profiles are real accounts from the organization and not those set up by others.

Even better, link your individual profiles to a welcome page (a simplified landing page) designed for people who find you elsewhere on the web, and may not know about your work. Often, an organization’s homepage provides only a generic introduction, or tries to cover everything the organization does, making it overwhelming. A welcome page gives you a chance to greet visitors who found out about you on social media with a more direct message. This can build trust, but can also increase engagement by providing relevant calls to action on the very first click.

Similarly, you can provide a welcome message on your online profiles for new visitors, encouraging them to get involved with any actions you are currently promoting or evergreen opportunities (that is, opportunities that are always available or are not going to change or fade in value or relevance). For example, the California State Parks Foundation uses a custom tab on their Facebook Page to provide supporters with direct links in case they want to follow the organization on Twitter, or even access their mobile application. Even though, at the time of this writing, Facebook no longer allows organizations the option to automatically redirect visitors to a custom tab, the option to use these tabs for custom content is still valuable.

Build Trust into the Community

There are many different ways to build trust, some of them more active than others. The approaches we have just discussed serve as a solid foundation for more dynamic communications or engagement. Next we examine options to marry trust building with active community building.

Every organization we have worked with, no matter how small or how new, has some fans and favorites (even if they are also your friends or family) that rise above the rest in their dedication or support. Invite those super fans to form a community advisory team that provides feedback, ideas, direction, and even leadership or organizing support. This doesn’t have to be something that creates more work for your staff. Do you already have a group of people outside the organization who are regularly providing feedback? Or supporters that you or your staff check in with or send updates to? Simply formalize that role and connect those supporters with each other. Try inviting them all into the office once per quarter for a lunch to discuss new ideas or hold a conference call or webinar so they can respond to possible new initiatives. You could connect them together in a Facebook Group to brainstorm about your current or potential programs. Create an email list for them and your staff or leadership team so that connecting and discussing new ideas can be done easily and quickly.

Are you releasing your annual report? Did you recently secure some new funding? Are you launching a new program or campaign? Announce it to the community with an invitation to join an open conference call or webinar where you will provide more information, allow people to ask questions, and give an overview of the next steps. Even if there isn’t a huge turnout on the call or webinar, record it and provide the video or audio file on your website for others to listen to in the future. Showing that you are available and transparent about your operations will build trust in real time on the call and going forward, and provide an opportunity for the community to have a direct line of communication with you about your work.

As much as it helps build trust by making your organization’s leadership accessible, it’s even more important that the program staff—those driving and building the day-to-day impact of your programs and services—are connected directly with the community. This connection can take many shapes: monthly community calls, an ongoing series of posts or stories on social media platforms, staff interviews and blog posts (be sure you allow for comments!), or regular program updates via email.

Beyond accessibility, you build tremendous trust with your community when you are accountable to them. In the summer of 2012, while record-breaking heat waves were sweeping across the United States, 350.org president and cofounder Bill McKibbon announced a new action and a call for donations to fund it: putting large pieces of ice that spelled out “hoax?” in front of the White House. It was intended to make the statement that these heat waves were just another sign of global climate change’s impacts and that the idea of climate change was not a hoax. The community responded, saying that this wasn’t the kind of action they wanted to support and that they wanted to donate funds to help communities hardest hit by the heat and storms. McKibbon sent out a message the following day apologizing, and explaining that through the community’s feedback the 350.org team was able to understand their perspective and would cancel the action, sending all funds to relief efforts.

Whatever you do to build trust, be sure that you operate transparently, and operate in an authentic way with your community, knowing that you will continue to find opportunities to do even more. Social and mobile technologies are changing and evolving every day, which means you will discover new ways of sharing, new ways of collaborating, and new ways of understanding your work. Often, our communities start using new tools before we figure out how to adopt them as organizations. This gives you great potential to build deeper connections with your community when you, too, begin using these new tools, knowing your community is already there when you join them.

Focus on the Needs of the Community

In Chapter Two, we outlined the guiding principles of operating in an anytime, everywhere world. Understanding your community—especially recognizing who is in it, what those people are like, and what kinds of content and actions resonate with them—is critical if you want to be able to interact and engage with your advocates and supporters. When it comes to building community using multichannel strategies with an anytime, everywhere goal for engagement, knowing your community’s preferences—and acting on them—can help catalyze passive followers into active supporters.

SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE

Imagine you’re at home, it’s early evening, and like many Americans, you’re multitasking: the television is on, you are checking email and Facebook on your mobile phone, and sending texts to a friend or two. Then you receive a text message from an advocacy organization urging you to share an update with your friends and family about a national issue that could impact you. One more thing: the message is not in your first language. Do you share the message or just go back to your other conversations? Or perhaps the message that you received from the organization is in your preferred language, but it came as a Facebook message instead of a text or an email. If you rarely check or respond to Facebook messages, what are the chances that the important information really reached you?

Those are the kinds of questions many organizations ask themselves when evaluating tools and applications, designing their communications plans and campaigns, and even when setting up their subscription forms and communication opt-ins. Building community through anytime, everywhere communication (especially two-way communication) is achievable first and foremost by knowing your community members’ preferences for where, when, and how you communicate, which we also discussed in Chapter Three.

Some organizations create separate online or communications spaces based on language, location, or content type, allowing individuals to opt in to the one that matches their preference. For example, if you have diabetes and want to connect with others to share your experience, there’s a social network for you; actually, there are two: one for English speakers (tudiabetes.org), and one for Spanish speakers (estudiabetes.org), both created by the Diabetes Hands Foundation.83 Alternatively, some organizations choose to maintain just one channel and use a growing set of options and functionality that platform providers are creating, like Facebook’s ability to filter posts and updates by language or location.

Recognizing the language preference of individuals in your database or community is the first step. What comes next is ensuring that you have the capacity to communicate appropriately in that language. Simply translating word for word can get you into trouble, sometimes in a big way. Here’s an example from Immigration Reform for America (IR4A):84

IR4A offered text message alerts in both English and Spanish to connect mobile phone numbers to other user data in the database. They regularly tracked message response metrics such as opens, replies, and so on. Just as with email, organizations are legally required to offer opt-out or unsubscribe information to recipients as we discussed in Chapter Three. Though, when you have such a small space in a text message to begin with, it can be tricky to figure out.

Jed Alpert, the CEO of Mobile Commons, shared that one of IR4A’s text messages read:

Immigration Alert: BIG White House meeting w/pro-immigrant advocates tomorrow. Text 2246 your question now. Top Qs will be asked! Txt STOP to unsub Please Forward

The message received the highest number of opt-outs of any message in the campaign (about five times more). As they analyzed the data, IR4A realized that the vast majority of those unsubscribing were from the Spanish-speaking list. They revisited the Spanish version of the message and noticed that the word “ALTO” was used in place of “STOP” in English. In their community, especially during this campaign, that word had been used as a rallying cry against certain immigration legislation, and its use in the text message was mistaken by the recipients. Many thought they were sharing support for a stop to a certain political action, not to stop receiving the text message updates.

IR4A issued a clarifying message to the Spanish list to allow those who did want to opt out to do so. Since the opt-out language was clear in English, IR4A has since continued to include the same unsubscribe language in messages to the English-speaking list, while separating unsubscribe notifications from other communications to the Spanish-speaking list to ensure the message is clear.

Let the Individual Pick the Platform

Whether you’re using text messages where space is limited, or have unlimited options on your own website, blog, or even email, providing language options is a great start to building community. Just like any content in any language, though, the message needs to be clear, relevant, and appropriate. When new supporters sign up to hear from you, just like language options, you can provide them with options for the platform of their choice. Some of that comes with the territory: if they connect with you on Facebook, they are saying that’s where they want to engage, or if they sign up via text message to keep receiving messages that way, you know that’s the platform they prefer; but you can also provide a sign-up link from your Facebook profile or embed a sign-up form directly on a custom Facebook tab so those that find you there but don’t prefer to get your messages on Facebook can opt in to your emails, blog, or other types of message alerts.

Preferences for various technology or communication channels are not established solely by you sending messages out, but also by supporters sending messages and updates back to you! For example, the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) educates high school students on the science behind climate change through school assemblies and classroom presentations and inspires them to take action to curb global warming. At the end of assemblies, often with hundreds of young people all in one place (and equipped with mobile phones), ACE teachers ask participating students to share a “DOT” or a way that they will “Do One Thing” to help the environment.

Many students share their DOT via a text message short code, while others do so on the web.85 As students text to share their pledge, they also sign up to the ACE list, where the organization can send them reminders and helpful information for successfully completing their action. ACE aggregates and shares the pledges on the web so students new to the network can see what their peers are doing and get inspired to take action, too.

The students pick the channel they prefer not by signing up just to get messages from ACE, but by sending the organization their pledges, plans, and results. The channel they choose, whether text messages, email, or the web, then becomes the method ACE uses to support them, provide them with more opportunities to take action, and to move them up an engagement ladder to develop leadership and make more local impact. The results? At the start of 2012, ACE reports over 173,000 DOTs pledged from students across America.

What is crucial about ACE’s approach is that it starts with the students; they are the ones that take the first action by texting in their DOT or signing up on the web to be a leader in their school. Instead of the organization prescribing what actions to suggest to students and how to communicate with them, ACE puts the community in the driver’s seat to pick a communication channel and tell the organization just what they want to do.

You may not have the chance to be in person with your community the way that ACE has. And you may not have such a hot topic as immigration in the news like IR4A. Regardless, start asking your community how they want to communicate with you and build those options into your registration and sign-up processes. It can make a huge impact on your success if you communicate with your supporters the way they want to hear from you.

Keep Shared Goals Prominent in Communications

One of the principles discussed in Chapter Two was the need to stay focused on real impact and goals, despite the shiny-new-thing attraction with many social and mobile tools. Ultimately, the action we want our community to take is not to “like” something or “download” something but to learn, share, and change. When it comes to using these tools to build community, this is especially important to remember. You will not be able to bring people together and keep them connected to your mission if they do not see value in the work you do and the way they contribute to your impact.

The Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) aggregates the DOT ideas students submit via the web or mobile phone to inspire other students to take action. They also count them up. The DOT ticker is a prominent part of the action center on ACE’s website, making it easy for any visitor to see how important the number of actions is to the organization and community.

ACE’s approach has two catalyzing moments for the students to truly become community members. The first is at the initial assembly or presentation when they are invited to text a DOT and take action. Many organizations use the same approach when they have a fundraiser, a live event, a rally, or even a local government meeting where they can invite potential supporters to join them. The second opportunity is when the students see their DOT or the pledges from other students and are inspired to do more. This second opportunity is critical because this is where community members can see ACE’s focus on the impact they can make together.

CONNECT THE COMMUNITY ACROSS PLATFORMS

When you create opportunities for your community members to connect with you in the languages and channels they prefer, you present your staff with a challenge. In an anytime, everywhere world, where supporters are communicating with you using various technologies, you can’t just write one message and push send. Instead, you need to work across platforms, crafting relevant messages, listening to the various subgroups of your community that congregate in each area, and responding accordingly.

Make It Easy to Find All Your Channels and Chapters

It may be that your organization has chapters across the state or country, maybe you have volunteer groups working at a local level, or even state affiliates. A common question we get from organizations or groups that have partners and affiliates serving other areas is how to direct people to the right place for local content.

One great example of a multichapter organization that is doing this well is AARP. There are benefits to connecting everyone in the United States, for example, with the national AARP presence online. Often, individuals can benefit more from a direct connection to the local chapter versus the national organization. AARP recognizes this value and includes a custom tab on its Facebook Page so that visitors, even without “liking” the AARP Page, can quickly find the appropriate link to the Facebook profile for their local AARP organization.

By creating an easy path for visitors to find the organization or chapter profile that they are most interested in, the AARP hands over the control to the visitors to decide what kind of relationship and content they find most valuable. It also creates an opportunity for community members to opt in to the community group they want to be part of, whether it’s national or local. As such, staff managing the profiles for their chapter can speak more directly to the community members there, knowing they are interested in the AARP work and news related to that level of the organization.

Another example is the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), based in New York City, which epitomizes the idea that various channels present entirely new relationships with the organization. The AMNH gets around four million visitors each year86 entering the physical museum across from Central Park. The Museum describes itself and its mission this way:

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is one of the world’s preeminent scientific and cultural institutions. Since its founding in 1869, the Museum has advanced its global mission to discover, interpret and disseminate information about human cultures, the natural world and the universe through a wide-ranging program of scientific research, education and exhibition

The Museum is renowned for its exhibitions and scientific collections, which serve as a field guide to the entire planet and present a panorama of the world’s cultures.

It would be easy to assume that an institution like the AMNH, where the focus is on its physical space, including 46 permanent exhibition halls and over 32 million specimens, would have only one offline channel for connecting with the community and serving its mission. However, thanks to social media and mobile technology, the AMNH has a way to let people that are standing in front of a dinosaur fossil in the New York museum, as well as those who have never been to the United States, explore exhibits and learn about our world anytime from their Apple iPhone or iPad.

The AMNH has four applications for the iPhone and one specifically for the iPad.87 With over one million downloads so far, these applications are helping the museum reach its mission to provide information about the wonders of the world to people everywhere. The applications cover topics including the physical planet, dinosaurs, outer space, and even the inside of the Museum itself through a guided tour. The museum’s community can now be defined not just by those four million people physically walking through the exhibits, but also by all those downloading the mobile applications and exploring the AMNH’s exhibits and collections from anywhere—geography no longer impacts a visit to the Museum.

Support Smaller Groups Taking Action

For many organizations, building community across platforms means creating relationships with supporters, and helping community members create groups and connections between themselves. For the organization Do Something,88 young people can find or create actions they want to take locally that don’t require a car, an adult, or money. The DoSomething.org website houses thousands of actions created by the organization and community members, as well as nearly 50 national campaigns each year.

Do Something encourages members to grab their friends and take action together, even if those friends haven’t signed up yet. Participants act locally, donating used jeans, starting petitions, or even educating others about an issue they find important. While they are out in their local communities, they can use their mobile phones to take pictures and videos, and are encouraged to share their experience back on the DoSomething.org website. By 2010, Do Something had engaged over 1.2 million young people in campaigns, and in 2012 it set a goal of hitting 5 million participants by 2015.89

The only way to reach that number was to expand beyond their website, and that is just what Do Something has done. Community members share the responsibility of building community and maintaining connections across platforms with the organization by using the website, text messages, and offline action interchangeably. Maybe you sign up for an action one day and complete it; six months later you receive a text message about a similar action and recruit your best friends to show up with you. Three more months go by, and you send a text to the organization telling them that you want to do something at your school and they send you materials that you and your friends can use to start up a canned food donation drive. And so the chain of actions and engagement continues.

For many organizations, Do Something included, the community is actually made up of smaller groups. We don’t want to focus on only connecting with the community as a whole, but need to also create ways to nurture the smaller subcommunities separately, and help them connect with each other. Do Something shares the accountability with community members for connecting supporters and making impact across platforms. By encouraging participants to create their own group and lead their friends in an action, Do Something supports forming subgroups and gives over responsibility for making an impact to group leaders.

Ultimately, we are building community around our work to increase our potential for impact. Building community is the first step to building a movement.

Connect Impact Across Channels

We need to connect our community across platforms and campaigns. We also need to connect the community by our impact, reflecting the total influence of the community’s efforts; after all, it isn’t the work of just your Facebook followers or only your newsletter subscribers when you have success. It’s the combined influence of all your subcommunities. Some people often mistake the total size of a community for the ultimate impact it can generate. Creating the most impact in the real world, versus signing up the most people, should fuel the growth of the community. Using multichannel communication and collaboration technologies, you can support your community in catalyzing change within their networks, sometimes without even bringing those new constituents into your community.

Survivors Connect is a nonprofit organization that empowers survivors and grassroots activists working against slavery, trafficking, and violence by leveraging the power of innovative information and communication technologies. Survivors Connect uses an online social network to bring activists and supporters together from around the world.90 They describe this online group, Freedom Connect, as “a web-based public meeting place that provides survivors and activists with a shared calendar, discussion forums, member profiles, photo gallery, resource library, subgroups, and more.” They use a white-label social networking tool called Groupsite. Instead of creating a group within a commercial social network like Facebook, the Freedom Connect social network is its own social space, and Survivors Connect can set the permissions for the entire network and designate certain site functionality and shared resources as private or public as necessary for the group’s goals.

By creating a space where all of the members of the community can see and connect with each other, the organization is able to step out of the way as a gatekeeper or roadblock. Don’t make collaboration between members of your community difficult or time consuming by trying to facilitate every interaction. In this case, Freedom Connect allows activists to share their experiences and knowledge with each other directly, which in turn strengthens the entire community and increases the effectiveness of activists’ work locally.

Similarly, Do Something supports their community’s impact by encouraging young people that sign up for an action to grab their friends and do it together. Knowing you have a friend to participate with increases the potential for community members to complete the actions. After these small groups make change together, those that were not already signed up on the DoSomething.org website may register to show that they participated. At that point, they are encouraged to complete the cycle again, with more friends—those that are and are not already connected to Do Something.

The way you connect with and create connections within your community is less important than the fact that you do it. There are organizations using combinations of public pages and private groups on Facebook, others using white label vendors to build custom online networking spaces, and still others that have built-in functionality on their own website. If you know your community and the subgroups well enough from the very beginning so that you can set up various tools at the same time, great. But most organizations will need to focus on creating the overall community connections and then work with their supporters to find the additional groups and tools necessary to keep everyone engaged.

EXERCISE YOUR VALUE IN THE COMMUNITY

We’ve all seen the infomercials where a couple of people have sculpted their bodies into ripples of muscle and it seems all they’ve done to achieve such impressive results is use a Shake Weight. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. The point is, you can’t compare your organization and your community to the ideal; create opportunities to practice and improve using benchmarks from your own community and the goals you’ve set as an organization.

From time to time, you may run a campaign focused solely on building your list, getting more people signed up for your content or alerts, and registering potential supporters and donors. These kinds of community member drives are valuable as opportunities to grow your list and exercise in engaging your community, and can also add more data to your benchmarks and give you a good check-in point for goals on larger campaigns. Efforts to find and connect with new potential members should also be part of the way you operate year-round. Community building with multichannel tools should be something that you build into your practice anytime, everywhere, too!

Staffing to Support the Community

There is no way that you will be able to recruit and engage your community, or manage content across platforms (especially considering that you need to tailor messaging for each) unless you have the organizational support for that work. Social media has spurred a fast increase of community manager and social media staff roles and jobs, specifically focused on managing and engaging (and promoting the organization or brand) on social media channels. Increasingly, these roles are truly focused on multichannel engagement by supporting content and interaction across the web and offline, as well as by identifying more engaged members that may want to take on more formal volunteer roles with the organization.

If your organization does not have a formal community manager role of some type, other departments or staff need to have the capacity to take on those duties. When we say “capacity” for those duties we really do mean full capacity. Monitoring, managing, and operating strategically with multichannel community building is not something that you can add to someone’s plate unless you’re taking some other duties away. The duties should be included in their job description and evaluation. Working with your community takes time. Beyond staff time and salary, it can also require a budget, especially if you are using or building your own tools.

Not everyone in your organization may be directly connected to or working with the community. Regardless of the number of staff you have, there are bound to be different perceptions of who the community is, and how the community should be engaged, from staffer to staffer. As such, there should be staff with community engagement in their work plan and job description, and there should be opportunities for all staff to come together to discuss the community’s role in the organization’s work to ensure that all staff can provide input and insight from the segments of the community they know and connect with most. We will cover more details about staffing in Chapter Seven.

The Need for Flexibility

Creating ways for your existing community members to stay engaged and to recruit new community members outside of a specific campaign or action requires flexibility. We can apply some of the same thinking we use with specific actions for more open-ended engagement opportunities. For example, if we have an action campaign running, we should know just which action we want people to take, and what we will ask them to do once they take that action. Maybe we want them to sign an online petition, and then we follow up via email with a prompt to share their story in video, photo, or text. After that, we encourage them to post their story and the action to their network via social media channels.

Like focused campaigns, year-round engagement should align with your mission and goals; the difference being you can continually maintain relevance and promote mission-appropriate action without a break because the campaign is over. Say you are an organization working on providing more affordable and safe alternative transportation options in your city. This might involve creating an online space for members to report unsafe intersections or transportation issues. In this way, you can keep your community engaged, tap them to stay on top of any newsworthy issues, and have an opportunity to leverage user-generated content across your online channels.

People may come across your organization on social media and want to learn more about your work elsewhere. Links that connect your various social media profiles and your website, as well as links from your email messages to those same channels, can help funnel people toward the kind of engagement they want to have with you, without your having to know (or, more likely, having to guess) from the beginning. In a multichannel approach, you can also start identifying the subgroups within the community and crafting the kinds of year-round engagement options on each channel to the group or groups in that space.

The Role of Customer Service

The role of customer service in community building is one that many organizations overlook, thinking “customer service” is only for companies selling products or utilities and trying to please its customers. As Paull Young at charity: water has said, “Giving your constituents the best customer support is undervalued by nonprofits.” It is actually a core component of building community, especially in day-to-day communications outside of campaigns. Customer service for many nonprofits means answering questions and providing support on various channels, from navigating the website to using the blog, finding resources or identifying other organizations, and even responding to questions that aren’t about its work with information that is relevant (even if it isn’t pointing people to the nonprofit’s website).

Providing quality customer service is a terrific way to build trust. It also creates a positive cycle where you are actively connecting with and helping your community, which keeps them busy connecting with you as a reliable resource. Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and craigconnects, has spent over 20 years in customer service. He puts it this way:

Customer service is about the people who provide a service or product fulfilling their commitment to the community of their customers. It means treating their customers like they want to be treated. Personally, I regard it as a kind of public service, since when you provide reasonable customer service that raises the bar for everyone.

Providing great support and customer service to your community, in a public way on social platforms and on your website, sets the tone for the community. By engaging with people, sharing resources (whether they are developed by your organization or not), and generally helping them succeed in using a tool, learning about issues, or taking an action, you lead by example, and indicate that the community can and should do the same.

Plan for Churn

As we discussed in Chapter Four, churn (the number of subscribers and supporters who leave your database or other list) impacts email, direct mail, social media, and anywhere else people may be directly connected to your database or communications. Despite our best efforts to create flexible and valuable engagement opportunities for our community, and no matter how great our customer service and interaction is, churn is inevitable. Even though it is unavoidable, it is something that good community managers should plan for, pay attention to, and try to decrease.

Consider the Legal Concerns of Building Community

Just as with advocacy and fundraising, using technology for community building comes with risks, liabilities, and legal parameters. You may have donors or supporters that are more informed (and more vocal) about issues that relate to the way they donate, their personal or payment information in your records, or the way you track the actions they take to support your organization. Even if your community is not versed in the issues enough to ask about them, you need to consider potential risks associated with building community in the ways we’ve described here to ensure all that work you did to build trust wasn’t for nothing.

Buy Contact Lists

One of the biggest potential risk areas for organizations using social and mobile technology for community building is around selling and buying lists. Churn is a real issue, as we discussed above, so organizations sometimes consider buying a list of potential supporters from a likeminded organization. Some organizations share (sometimes this means buying or selling) lists with similar or partner organizations, especially during a shared campaign. These lists usually contain information about people’s email, phone, or mailing address.

These practices are not illegal, so long as organizations inform individuals upfront. We recommend providing an option for people to elect (opt in) to have their information shared with similar organizations, instead of doing so by default. We also think that a double opt-in process is best, especially if you hope to convert these new names into real donors or community participants. A double opt-in process means that although these individuals checked a box with the first organization, authorizing them to share contact details with similar organizations, once you receive the list you should message them with an opportunity to sign up with you.

Create Clear Ways to Unsubscribe

That kind of opt-in process brings up another sticky area for organizations using these tools to connect with the community: opt-out. Especially when we are working to build community, it’s hard to imagine anyone would want to unsubscribe. According to NTEN and M+R’s research,91 unsubscribe rates can actually be an indication of an active community—the community had to pay attention to the fact that you were sending messages, recognize the ones they wanted and didn’t want, and then change their subscription settings. There are legal parameters to providing opt-out information in your messages and it is important to understand the options before deciding on the messages themselves.

During the IR4A campaign, the unsubscribe information was confusing when put together with a call to action in one message. But in the effort to provide that opportunity to subscribers, IR4A sends opt-out messages independently of other actions. Many email marketing tools, databases, and even third-party applications provide you with the functionality to manage lists related to message types. Using these options you can encourage subscribers to sign up for the types of messages that they would like to receive from you and, consequently, encourage them to unsubscribe from the messages that they aren’t interested in.

Receiving too many messages from you or a similar organization is a small complaint for many nonprofits compared to the issues around privacy. No matter how big or small your community, it is important that your supporters know what kind of information they’ve provided you and what information is stored in your database. Many organizations provide community members with the option to create a profile on the organization’s website or microsite for a campaign. It is important in these cases to provide information and guidelines about the public or private levels of profile information, who has access to the network, and even how people can protect themselves from spam (even if it isn’t associated with your organization).

As we said at the beginning of the chapter, trust is crucial. Being transparent and proactive when it comes to helping members of your community protect themselves and control their information means you will build more trust with them. And as our tools continue to evolve, the legal risks and potential pitfalls do too.

So far, we’ve showcased advocacy, fundraising, and community building separately. Not only do multichannel strategies include the integration of various platforms and messages, they also connect the kinds of engagement—from a fundraising ask that leverages an action alert, to advocacy appeals tied to hot topics in the news asking people to join the organization in building up the community. In Chapter Six, we dive into two real case studies for an in-depth look at how multichannel strategies come together.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Spark a conversation with your team or organization about these core principles with the following questions:

NOTES

76. Based on the essay Amy contributed to Thrivability: A Collective Sketch—thrivable.wagn.org/Book+listening

77. Charity Navigator: www.charitynavigator.org/

78. Guidestar: www2.guidestar.org/

79. GreatNonprofits: greatnonprofits.org/

80. To see CARE’s donation form and financial information, visit: https://my.care.org/site/Donation2?df_id=9140&9140.donation=form1

81. AJWS financial information and downloads are available at: ajws.org/who_we_are/financial.html

82. Screen shot from: ajws.org

83. Diabetes Hands Foundation maintains tudiabetes.org and estudiabetes.org on Ning.com platforms. Learn more about Diabetes Hands Foundation at diabeteshandsfoundation.org

84. Learn more about this case study from Mobile Commons CEO, Jed Alpert, on the Nonprofit Technology Network’s blog: www.nten.org/blog/2011/05/05/listen-your-data-lessons-multi-lingual-text-message-campaign

85. View up-to-date data on the number of participating students and explore the DOT actions at www.acespace.org/dot

86. Visitor data and other information about The American Museum of Natural History from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_museum_of_natural_history

87. Information about the downloads and usage of these apps is available from Xyologic: xyologic.com/search/iphone/

88. Learn more about Do Something and review campaigns and actions at: www.dosomething.org/

89. Waiting on updated stats from George Weiner at DoSomething

90. Learn more about the Freedom Connect online social network from Survivors Connect at: www.survivorsconnect.org/get-involved/freedomconnect

91. List churn and unsubscribe information can be found in the eNonprofit Benchmarks Report conducted by NTEN and M+R Strategic Services, available at nten.org/research