Community Building Is the Climate Change of Social Good

What creates higher constituent lifetime value?

Events? No.

Communities? Yes.

Why don’t we, for social good, create a better community? You are thinking, “There must be something wrong with this idea, or everyone would be doing it.” Or “I don’t know. It seems like an innovative idea, but there’s just something about it that doesn’t feel right.”

It might not feel right because you are prey to psychological biases when you think about building community. Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman had described this bias. Kahneman said, (paraphrasing here) humans are poor at dealing with the future; we tend to be focused on the short term. We tend to discount the value of things happening in the future. This combination results in a strong tendency to push things to one side.

Addressing climate change is the classic manifestation of these biases. A changed and dangerous climate is too far away to matter. We do not want to invest in something that is uncertain, even though the return on investment is the survival of humankind.

Community building is the climate change of social good. Building a community delivers future value as rewarding as the survival of humankind. Building and nurturing a community ensures your mission’s success.

But humans are very cost averse. When there is a reward, we respond strongly. But, when there is a cost, we do not want to engage. Community building delivers long-term value, as in the “lifetime value” of our supporters. The cost is upfront and ongoing; the value delivers over time. Same as having air that will not kill you and land without water on top of it.

These psychological dynamics explain why humans regard climate change as a threat, and social good folk regard lack of community as a threat, but neither rise to a level of urgency for most people.

Like climate change, systematizing community creation has an uncertain outcome that is in the future. It requires a lot of thought, planning and investment. People are more focused on short-term gains, and so our performance metrics are built on short-term goals, like revenue production for the event this fall. We have a challenging time focusing on long-term goals, and long-term goals that require group collaboration are even more difficult to manage and move forward.

With all this psychological current pushing us downstream, how can we be and do differently?

This change can only be driven by the joined-at-the-hip CEO and board chair team.

Beyond the traditional strategic plan elements of “what we are going to do” is another element to be established as bedrock — “here’s how we are going to do it.” This team must set the course and the vision.

The joined-at-the-hip CEO and board chair must demand the creation of a community to support the mission and define what that means. Here is a start.

Making a mission community means that every known touch point is evaluated for its value in bringing someone into the community or the cost of pushing that person away. You will need a trained social good psychologist because what draws people in or pushes them away is sometimes counterintuitive. Do not assign this to an intern with a good internet connection or someone with a Psychology Today subscription. This is a data-driven activity.

Making a mission community means creating new touch points — not just with the constituent but between constituents. A community is defined as a group of people who identify around some defining characteristic, goal or mission and interact with one another to share ideas. Note the last part, sharing ideas — providing them with a way to communicate with each other is key. Unfortunately, we have been shouting at constituents instead of building ways for them to talk to each other.

We have taken the path of “shouting at” instead of “fostering conversation among” for a few reasons. “Shouting at” is easier. And we can build “shouting at” performance metrics to hold people accountable. Unfortunately, we have been holding people accountable for activities that produce positive short-term outcomes but do not contribute to bringing someone into a community. And let us be frank. Sometimes we have not wanted constituents to talk to each other, fearing an uprising via collaboration. Volunteer-driven? I do not think so.

Lastly, these dynamics are the reasons that after several decades of saying, “We’ve got to get rid of these silos,” we still have firmly entrenched silos. The people overseeing those silos are still battling it out with each other every day while smiling politely in video meetings. People leading at this level do not have the motivation or power to create a community. The performance metrics to which they are held accountable require they push against the creation of community by protecting their lists of donors, volunteers and fundraisers. Our performance metrics and organizational charts create natural enemies by design. That leads to behavior by well-intentioned people that destroys the opportunity for a constituent to experience community.

This is hard. I get it. But the water is rising.