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Bright Ideas

Why people stay

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Can we build email, donor and supporter lists with value and trust instead of churning through names?

Most nonprofit (and ecommerce) marketing runs on a model fraught with peril and waste.

There is a constant cycle that’s roughly so:

  • Get people on an email list via paid or sometimes unpaid methods. Maybe get their eyeballs on Instagram, Facebook or some other platform.
  • Send those people email. And/or online ads and posts. Send them more email.
  • Thank them if they give (or buy).
  • Send them more email and ads.
  • Keep sending them email and ads.
  • For those (often the majority) who never do anything you may eventually send them one (or a few) last emails asking if they still want emails. You may or may not be serious about the response.
  • You take them off your list. Or you don’t. In which case you send more email.
  • Get (more) people on an email list via paid or sometimes unpaid methods.

Many organizations have built an economy of churn (which could be, but isn’t, a portmanteau of chase and burn). The hope is to replace more names than they lose and make enough off them in the short term to pay for the cost of getting them in the first place.

Many (most?) organizations have supporter relationships that begin, live and end online. This makes it harder to connect to people, build personal relationships, and give people a reason to stick with an organization.

Let’s assume that one can do little, if any, in person or on the ground work with supporters; that we’re constrained to online activities. We can use email, websites, social media and perhaps text messaging, voice mail, print.

Community, fundraising, membership and online organizing folks should understand why people stay with an organization and how to bring this into online experience. And I don’t mean simply mean “engagement.” Clicks, pageviews and videos liked or viewed are engagement. They’re also simple indicators of attention. And attention is not retention.

A photo of ground covered by small rocks. A large rock in the middle has the words Be Here Now written on it.

Trust, value and why people stay

There’s a lot of research out there about why people stay in jobs, in domestic relationships, in their houses.

People often stay because it’s easier than leaving. A 1973 article on Why Employees Stay in their jobs pointed to inertia. Most people stay not because their happy or like the job but because it’s too much trouble to change. Their prospects are uncertain. Having a mediocre job is better than no job at all.

As you may guess, employee inertia doesn’t do much for productivity. This is a 50 year old article. But it seems possible that inertia is still a factor in staying in a job.

Email lists are probably 75-90% inertia people. Sure, those people are “staying” but they’re not helping out. Their data sends the wrong signals. They tell us we could and should have 200,000 subscribers so we busy ourselves (and our money) replacing the 20,000 people who unsubscribe or lapse off the list. And we don’t optimize for the people who want to stay.

Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, often writes about the connection between people, education, careers and the vitality of cities.

In the 2014 article, Why people stay where they are, Florida noted that housing costs, affordability and community economic strength are not, as most people believe, a driving factor in choices to leave or stay in a community. Community quality – things like comfort, safety and sense of belonging – keeps people around (or pushes them away).

Taken together, this would seem to imply that the decision to stay is tied less to quality or affordability of housing itself, and more to the quality of the neighborhood or community. … The main reasons why stayers stay, according to our analysis, revolve around social relationships and quality of place:

The ability to meet people and make friends; the quality of public schools; and the overall physical beauty and quality of a neighborhood. These were much more important than economic factors like the availability of job opportunities or the perception of future economic conditions, which our analysis found not to be statistically associated with why people stay.

We could also look at the oft-asked question: why do people stay in disaster prone cities? Gina Yannitell Reinhardt, a professor at the University of Essex, studies disaster relief and resilience. Reinhardt found that trust in government keeps people in place. Lack of trust pushes people to leave. Trust is won or lost during disasters when people rely most on institutions for support, guidance and safety.

Reinhardt also writes that people stay because “it feels like home.” This is part inertia. But it’s large part based on relationships. People build strong ties to neighbors, businesses, parks and more. If others stay we have social proof that we will maintain these relationships, jobs, customers and friends.

Invest in staying, not coming and going

How do you grow and sustain a community (and your fundraising) if you’re churning through people? You do it by buying and burning through lists. Check all the unread emails in your inbox to see how that’s going. You can do it by not taking people off your email list. That’s bad for deliverability, skews results and decisionmaking, and turns people off.

You can grow multi-channel content: social media platforms, video, messaging apps, even print or audio. This can be a step in the right direction if you don’t recreate the broadcast-only dynamics that are common in email.

Perhaps it’s possible to invest in relationships and retention, not just acquisition. What might this mean?

Look to recruit in high-retention environments

This may mean smaller or more niche audiences and lists. Partner with smaller organizations, online media outlets and influencers. Build relationships and offer value to the partners.

Make the most of your first days and weeks together

Relationships take time. But a good first impression is critical, especially in digital where the background noise is loud and distracting. Onboard new people like your life depends on it.

Create a welcome series. Test it and track it. Invite questions and conversations. Bring member and community voices to the welcome, not just staff or leadership. Make it familiar. Provide social proof.

Bring value to the table

Communicate more than asks for action or money. What would be useful to your people? Provide calendars of events, data about your issues, eye-opening visuals, explainers and FAQs. Provide insights and news, not just alerts. Invite people to a series of webinars or trainings. People remember offers of value (and proof of credibility) even if they don’t attend.

Get to know people

This is hard at scale. But why add people to a supporter list if you have no ability or intention to hear from them or know them? Plus, today’s CRM tools and multiple two-way comms channels make dialog much easier, especially when you start with what’s above. Activists, volunteers and current donors can also scale supporter contact.

Learn about community, trust and value from (and with) other groups and fields

Create networks and opportunities for nonprofit development and membership teams to learn alongside civic community builders.

Collaborate with journalists and digital media sites, all of whom are busy testing ways to find, engage and retain supporters (aka subscribers). See this from Gina Bulla, audience research director at The Atlantic, who is describing research aimed at finding future subscribers (new high-retention environments):

One of the big, important questions we’re focused on right now is: who are our future subscribers? We’ve just executed research to help us identify audiences that may be inclined to subscribe to The Atlantic in the near or not-so-distant future. We’ll use this research to ideate strategies to increase conversion, engagement, and discovery.

This sort of research and approach to audience identification could be useful to nonprofit organizations. [Madeleine White / The Audiencers]

People stay in relationships built on trust, value and passion (sure, it’s possible to love an organization and its cause or a community the same way you might your partner). We can build communications, content and organizing programs built on trust, value and (yes) passion if we choose to.

Inertia also keeps people around. This is a big part of email list size now. But we shouldn’t equate presence and action or an email list with a valued relationship.

Grief and the future of community

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Should organizations, campaigns and movements that build community or run membership programs do more to acknowledge grief and engage in ways their members experience it?

Many community and nonprofit leaders may nod to the presence of grief and offer some support. We certainly see that in response to natural disasters.

But should acknowledging, confronting and supporting grief be a strong and visible pillar of community and membership programs regardless of organizational mission? I think so. I don’t know what this could or should look like but we all benefit from building community muscle and grief, when we are often at our most vulnerable, is a time to create and strengthen community.

We don’t do grief well…

…and that’s a big problem for our communities, governments and organizations.

Grief is largely unacknowledged within our communities and communications. It’s hard for many people to find, access or feel comfortable seeking grief support.

These seem like community spaces in which people often turn to for grief support: schools, churches and online community resources like Facebook groups and posts as well as GoFundMe campaigns.

That leaves a lot of open space, a lot of missing infrastructure, for community grief. Most of us, I think, live with weak grief communities and language.

Why does this matter? Is it possible that much of our cultural hostility and narrative of polarization is borne of collective grief and anxiety?

If we can’t recognize, share and talk about grief we lose empathy. People experiencing trauma are looking for support. Those lacking empathy and support are often susceptible to extreme actions and beliefs and the communities supporting those actions and beliefs.

Is untreated grief a contributor to broken communities and broken politics? If so, we should address grief at all levels of our community work.

Grief and the future of community

This post began in drafts a few months ago when I jotted down this line:

Is grief a future of community? Would that be good or bad?

The past two years have pushed a lot of collective grief on us: COVID, climate change disasters and a drumbeat of conspiracy theories and geopolitical chaos that leave many (most?) people with higher baseline anxiety if not waves of existential dread.

And, of course, we all experience the loss of friends, parents, children and pets. It’s no surprise that Michelle Zauner’s story of losing her mom to cancer when she was in her mid-20s, Crying in H Mart, has been a NY Times bestseller for seven months now.

We’ve always sought ways to understand and process individual grief. The pandemic and (waves hands) everything. out. there. has brought us heavy collective grief.

In a recent paper, Acknowledging bereavement, strengthening communities: Introducing an online compassionate community initiative for the recognition of pandemic grief, Dr. Deborah Ummel and colleagues look at how access to shared grief support strengthens community:

Compassion and care can establish solidarity needed to center community advocacy: Individuals naturally have the impetus to express solidarity and come together to compassionately support each other and can do so in a way that also tackles wider social injustices, an issue that professionalized, privatized help cannot solve.

Dr. Deborah Ummel

Also consider Dr. Viviana Zelizer’s piece, When We Were Socially Distant, Money Brought Us Closer. Dr. Zelizer looks at the rise in giving during the pandemic. There were more donations to charity. Much more direct giving to people, including mutual aid efforts. At a time of grief and uncertainty, more people used money to build connection to others.

A possible lesson: we invest in community and we invest in others to find footholds and connection in slippery, uncertain times. Grief, personal and the communal grief of the pandemic, can be the most slippery of times in life. As community and membership people we should offer footholds people can hold onto when they’re falling.

I’m not sure what the solution is but it would be good to see community and membership leaders, thinkers and funders investing in grief and how we do it.

Reading material

A few more articles on the intersections of community, membership, solidarity and grief.

Give people stuff they can use

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In late-2021, Intuit completed its acquisition of the once wee newsletter provider Mailchimp. Intuit paid $12 billion in cash and stock.

Substack announced this week that newsletters hosted by the platform had over 20 million active subscribers and 2 million paid subscriptions.

Some folks think there is money to be made in email.

Given the financial structures needed to host, send and manage email, the culture of email is more commerce than community. Every morning your inbox has 97 new unread messages from companies and candidates that you’ll probably delete or ignore.

This is largely true in the nonprofit sector as well. Our metrics – and benchmarks – focus on response rates, donations and revenue. These metrics are at best awkward proxies for supporter satisfaction and value that email and other communications provide members, donors and others in our networks.

A commerce (or fundraising) role for email is essential for most groups. Nonprofits need money. More than once, I’ve advised organizations to build donation asks into their new subscriber welcome series. People want to give. Get them used to it. But a fundraising focus limits the scope of what’s possible with our content and community strategies.

Many people, including those creating emails in organizations, complain about email. It’s all dollars, doom and dashed hopes.

Candidates: My opponent is a bad dude who will do bad things. I’m good. Donate before tonight’s reporting deadline.

Organizations: The future is at risk. Click here to send an email to your congressional rep. Or click here to make your 5X match donation.

Companies: Everything is on sale. Click now! (person clicking: well, only the purple camo print joggers in size 6 are on sale. WTF?)

Too often we train our community to expect the least from our organizations.

Think bigger about email, content and community

If we expect more from our community could we design content strategies, including email programs, that meet those expectations?

Perhaps our metrics could be optimized for friendship or other relation-driven measures. Does this person volunteer? Does this person come to an event or invite a new supporter to an event? Does this person contribute an idea, photo or comment to a document, web page or report?

What if we viewed our advocacy and fundraising campaigns as products, like a shirt or a book, or services like visiting a restaurant or hiring a plumber? We could invite feedback and reviews. We could ask: “did this event, fundraising campaign or online action meet your expectations?” Or: “Would you recommend this campaign to a friend?”

These ideas are hypothetical. They’re a search for more informative metrics. But this product/service approach seems possible.

Most organizations occasionally send a survey to supporters asking for feedback on newsletters or other communications. But these are one-offs that reach only your most engaged supporters. Surveys don’t offer much insight into the impact or value of your ongoing email and other communications.

Content that helps people get things done

I’m most interested in how organizations are using email and other content to solve problems, meet their needs and otherwise get things done.

Email, especially when combined with hosted assets like video (and charts, maps, etc.), is a great teaching tool. Most organizations have loads of knowledge in their resource libraries, toolkits, and staff member brains. Many groups use webinars or trainings to teach volunteers. But these are events. They require someone to be there to engage in them. We’ve all registered for webinars knowing we won’t make it and will watch later but, realistically, we rarely “watch later.”

The New York Times has grown its email newsletter options. You can get morning or evening updates and email newsletters from your favorite writers or columnists. But the real growth in content (and revenue) has been in non-news email that is useful to people (Cooking and Wirecutter) or entertaining (Games and the Athletic). As Poynter wrote about last November, its about a bundle of information:

…the Times is heavily pushing what it calls internally “the bundle.” That is an all-access product that also includes Games and Cooking verticals, audio, the Wirecutter product information site and now The Athletic, which the Times purchased for $550 million in January.

CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said that the bundle costs roughly 50% more than a news-only digital subscription. Beginning this quarter, she added, the company plans to increase the price of single-product subs to news or other products, hoping to “compel people to take the bundle.” 

The New York Times is a newspaper. But most people today call it a “media company” and, well, a media company produces all kinds of media, not just reporting. We can debate the pros/cons here (I have many arguments for and against this) but it seems that:

  1. It’s hard/impossible to fund journalism with subscriptions and advertisements.
    It’s hard/impossible to fund nonprofits with donations and/or membership fees. Most organizations need more diverse revenue streams.
  2. People are willing to pay for good information and entertainment which helps fund journalism.
    People will pay for info, goods and services they need. Payments to organizations for information, training and other services could help fund programs.
  3. Info/entertainment opens the door to new audiences.
    Many (most?) organizations are not centered in a community. Their audience may be local, state, national or global in scope but its most likely virtual in nature. Lead generation limited to specific issues unnecessarily limits growth .

Most organizations aren’t media companies with the content depth or deep pockets of a New York Times. But they don’t need to be. A one off series of emails that dives into the insights from case studies and reports sounds dry (for real) but could have an audience. It may be possible to turn a staff or volunteer training series into a set of online videos paired with emails and other content for a self-paced training series open to broader audiences.

Given the breadth and scale of nonprofits out there the options are endless. I’d love to see a funder or seven experimenting, testing and reporting back on content aimed at audience and revenue growth. And, of course, funding such work.

How scale kills campaigns

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We were told that we needed to reach everyone to create the change we need. Maybe that’s a problem.

[Photo by Daria Nepriakhina via Unsplash]

This piece started as an explainer on how nobody is reading your organization’s emails and if/how/why you might care about that. And what to do.

That still seems like a good topic. Nonprofit open rates average around 25% for newsletters. Most other message types are lower. And open rates are inflated/totally misguiding so far fewer folks are reading anything. Heck, for many groups, 10% or more of all email is going to spam.

The real issue here is that people are busy, buried in content, and have priorities. There’s no one solution. Sending fewer (or more) messages probably won’t fix this. Moving to Mastodon won’t fix it. A preference center won’t fix it. A multi-channel (or omnichannel?) strategy won’t fix it. And, good god, P2P texting won’t fix it.

We’ve gone so far with scale, reach, and attention that we’ve forgotten why we’re here: to help real people with real problems.

A list of the engaged, excited and passionate people with agency to create impact.

I propose that we see every person who engages in our organization or list as unique individuals with experiences, interests, and needs. We would get to know each of them.

This seems unlikely – and at scale downright impossible.

Why this won’t work.

We can come up with several reasons this is a bad idea. 😉

Organizations aren’t set up for this.

  • We have big legacy lists that churn through people and need volume to succeed.
  • Recruitment strategies that sometimes start with personal contact but have no ability to follow up. Canvasses, for example, start with one to one conversations at the door or in front of Trader Joe’s. Then we hand off that person to an email list with no relationship building strategy. It’s no wonder people think it’s all about money.
  • Staffing is not oriented towards people skills – customer service, engagement, organizing. We do give extra attention to large donors. Again, money earns attention.
  • We rely on paid staff for everything. We could never hire, train, manage, pay for the staff needed to engage with people at this level. It’s all hubs and centralization. People and cost are bottleneck to everything.

It hurts fundraising, budgeting and planning.

  • We have data on acquisition, fundraising and marketing costs. We more or less know how many people will respond, the average gift we can expect, and how many people we will lose or churn through each year.
  • This model is predictable and manageable.
  • Any change might cost more, lower response, result in fewer gifts, etc.

People don’t want or need it.

  • People are busy. They don’t have time to do more than click on an email or social post.
  • People join our list and give us money so that we will take care of the problem and keep them informed.
  • We already do things to work people up the ladder of engagement. We upgrade donors. We invite people to take bigger actions. We even have a volunteer program.

Or, actually, this is already how we do it.

  • We segment our list by interest, geography and donation amount. So we only send everything to most people most of the time. Not all the time.
  • We have regional offices that run local events.
  • We do surveys asking people what they think of our newsletter and what information would be helpful.

Look around (waves hands)…things are dire and we need everyone on board!!!

Problems like climate change, authoritarianism, inequality, racism, homelessness, and a health care that’s cracking up big, complex and systemic. We need millions of people to take action and press leaders for change. We need millions of people to change behaviors that uphold systems.

Reaching everybody means communicating at scale. We should grow our lists quickly. Send compelling messages expressing the importance of our solutions and urgency of taking action on them. We should encourage people to share messages and find ways to help them. We should go viral. We should spread our reach by working to change messages in art, TV, film and music. We should find and support influencers who can deliver this urgent information.

Given that, can we communicate one to one? Can we find out what people and their families need or want right now so they can eat better, get better jobs, pay their bills and access health care?

We need scale. But the way we run campaigns and organizations at scale is counter productive. We are great at creating content. But all that content is turning advocacy into entertainment instead of tangible progress.

People become wary of messages about change and progress. They hear it and see it every day and don’t see results. Change becomes faceless. Change is just another message – another fundraising email – from another organization.

Treat people as though they have agency. It could work.

The hypothetical problems listed above are driven by fear of change and a scarcity mindset. There’s little if any funding for experimenting with community building and communications, particularly when an organization’s only source of unrestricted funding is at stake.

But it’s imperative that we rethink community, engagement, membership and even fundraising. Especially when the need for action is urgent and the competition for attention is increasing exponentially.

Some thoughts on how we do this:

Only communicate directly with people who we’ve spoken to directly.

No, sending an email to someone doesn’t count as speaking to them directly.

We optimize for growth knowing that only a small – tiny, really – percentage of people will give money, send a petition, come to a public meeting or call their congressional rep or mayor’s office.

This means most people are being conditioned to ignore us. When something great or important does happen they aren’t likely to read the email and follow up.

Instead, place an emphasis on inviting people in through opportunities for direct action and conversation. Instead of sending actions to rented email lists, use trainings, webinars, and open conversations (online and in person) as recruiting events. Distribute online polls and surveys. Advertise training materials, reports and guides for download. Require contact info to download the material and follow up in person.

Create space for a conversation before adding to an email, text or phone list.

This could be one on one. Or in a group — a zoom call for new supporters about what we do, how to get involved, and expectations, hopes and norms. Begin relationships in community and you’ll grow from there. It’s a stronger position if you want co-creation and meaningful engagement.

“Our brains evolved to be social: We need frequent interaction and conversation to stay sane,” says Dr. Thalia Wheatley, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth College. Organizations that create conversations are offering a service that’s of value and hard to find.

More connection and less content.

Many (most!) organizations (and politicians and government offices and companies) are creating content for internal reasons. Not as the result of a considered and evolving content strategy.

Get out there and talk to people. Run ideas by people. In person. Most of your blog posts aren’t creating awareness or getting attention.

Change funding structures and incentives.

Individual contact and fundraising is usually a the only form of unrestricted funding for organizations and campaigns. It’s hard to mess around and take risks with this work. And there is no incentive for leadership and fundraisers to try something else. This puts us in the position of using crisis and urgency in messaging. And not having time to listen to people.

There’s a role here for funders – foundations and large donors. There’s also a role for leaders. We need to shoot straight with people. Maybe be more transparent about how what actually creates change. We need to invest in communicating with people, not at them. There’s also a role here for nonprofit institutions – the kind that host conferences – and companies making money off nonprofit fundraising and data. Organizations do need models, systems and tools to support their work and consultants, technologists and vendors can nudge if not push towards change.

On Imagination

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The world’s biggest problems can often be traced back to a complete lack of imagination. We fail imagine a better future. We see broken systems as unchangeable.

We fight over the meaning of history (in books, politics, immigration, economies, gender and so much more) because we don’t have the capacity to imagine the systems for living together in abundance.

Organizations, businesses and governments should prioritize the practice–the skills and work–of imagination.

An orange starburst image.

Perhaps writing about imagination seems irrelevant. An act of decadence or privilege. We have so many real problems, after all. Why dabble in imagination, a space often seen as the realm of fiction?

I’d say that our lack of imagination – our growing unfamiliarity with the art and science of imagination – grinds us down, dampens our creativity and leads us to believe we should expect, even deserve, to be surrounded by discomfort and horror.

The world needs huge doses of imagination. 2022 offered little of use. This year, sitting as it does between two American election years, can deliver the hope and organizing power of imagination. Or it can continue our fights over history that only serve to dim the horizons of imagination.

2022 saw the start of a tragic and wasteful war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine only serves to propel Russia, Ukraine and the world away from the potential of new ideas, intelligence and creativity. It is a war of small ideas – authority, money, disinformation. It is a war against hopeful futures and imagination.

The U.S. is fighting its own battles over the limits of imagination. The “Make America Great Again” slogan, white nationalism, and organized fights to ban books all use language that removes possibility and potential. These movements want us to ignore, even forget, that human difference has ever existed. It is a future without the possibility of multi-racial communities and queerness.

Organizations don’t typically consider themselves to be in the imagination business. We equate imagination and the “work” of imagination with telling stories of fantasy or science fiction. We should not leave imagination to books and movies.

Imagination fuels culture, creates possibility and lays out the framework for solutions to known (and unknown) problems. Imagination is essential to cultural and social progress.

Why prioritize imagination?

Imagination offers value to nonprofits, businesses and communities. The work and results can also be fun.

COLLECTIVE. Imagination isn’t just an individual or solitary space. It can, at its most powerful, be a collective act that fuels shared purpose and vision. Imagination is a process that can happen alongside others. It is generative and iterative. We can build on the ideas of others. Imagination is an act of abundance, not scarcity.

CREATIVE. Imaginative work isn’t bounded by the limits of expectation and practicality. Organizations are used to planning. But we most often iterate. We’re not used to reaching high and creating something new. This stasis and risk aversion leaves us flat-footed when circumstances (a pandemic? climate change? insurrection?) change quickly.

Most organizations – from neighborhood group to national government – could benefit from more creativity. And most leaders ask their teams, boards and supporters for creativity. Imagining the unknown builds the brain’s creative powers, Jane Porter reports in The Neuroscience of Imagination:

When you call to mind something you’ve never actually seen, it’s a lot easier to think creatively than if you try imagining something that’s familiar to you.

Want to dig deeper? Check out The Science of Imagination below (5 minutes):

ENGAGING AND EXPANDING Imagination creates stories and process to bring those stories into reality. These stories and their possibilities need not be restricted to your community or audience. In fact, the creative process relies on growing community. Imagination is about who could and should be there. And how to reach them, plug them in, give them footholds to climb on and how to extend arms to pull them into the conversations.

Imagination is essential to growing a community. With imagination, we can adapt and evolve. We can hone a collective and collaborative resilience. Climate change, economic shifts and technological progress are asking, and will demand, that organizations adapt, evolve and be resilient.

ACCESSIBILITY. One reason imagination expands community is its accessible nature. Done well, anyone can participate in and be valued by imaginative processes. One does not need to have gone to the right schools, lived in a particular place, have normed physical abilities, or possess a certain race, gender or values. Imagination is abundant. It wants all to engage at the level and in the form they can.

SKILL. Imagination is not exclusive, exotic, or only for academics, writers and designers. Imagination is a habit, skill, a muscle. It can be taught and practiced.

In Reversing imagination atrophy, Suzette Brooks Masters, reflects on how imagination can shrink when not used. The result is more limited policymaking, less ambition, smaller campaigns. Masters spent 2022 talking with people working in democracy to find the big ideas and opportunities.

I spent 2022 talking to dozens of these visionaries and realizing, painfully, just how small my dreams had gotten, how narrow my aperture of the possible had become. I needed an exercise regimen for my atrophied imagination muscles. Desperately.

If we can’t imagine functional democracy, peace, multiracial societies, climate stability, zero-carbon energy then, oh well, we’re never going to figure out how to get them.

BUILDS COMMUNITY. The work of imagination is open to all. Through content, events, workshops and more you invite people in, connect people and build relationships.

DEFINES COMMUNITY. There is a part of imagination work that identifies and describes what’s needed to turn possible futures into reality. This is a time for identifying who is in community, who isn’t, who could/should be there, and how to connect to others. In other words, we see our current and potential networks in new ways and can identify the connections between networks.

GIF via Into Action Lab.

The work of imagination

Here are few ideas for bringing imagination into organizational programming. Some go big. Some are simply ways to bring creativity and forward thinking into the community.

10, 20, 50

It’s not unusual for leaders to talk about what an organization should look like in three, five or even 10 years. But rarely does that conversation look further into the future (20, 50 or more years) and rarer still is the broader community engaged in a meaningful way. There may be polls or surveys or even “town hall” events but the boundaries of possibility are already set.

Imagine what the community (not just the entity or organization) can look like in 20 or 50 years. What does it do? Who does it help or serve? What is it able to accomplish? Who is part of the community, leading it, participating?

Now describe what happened to get to that imagined future. Who got involved? What other communities and organizations were part of the process? What skills, experiences, resources and knowledge was acquired and used? What do we not know now that we’ll need to discover? Who helps with that discovery?

These are the themes of conversations and programs that use imagination.

How to get started with imagination

There are a thousand and one ways to bring imagination-centered conversations, plans and programs into your organization. Here are a few ways I’ve seen:

  • Use the I-word in serious conversation from top to bottom. Like I said up top, imagination is a word associated with science fiction writers. It’s a word, and process, that is all about creativity and even fun. But it can be serious work, spark big and positive change, and generate new ideas. Bring imagination into the organization lexicon.
  • Don’t use the word imagination if you can’t handle it. Talk about vision, big ideas, future, creativity, or, if you must, innovation.
  • Launch an imagination program. I don’t expect many groups to go full Pixar and hire a VP of Imagination. But seek out ways to embed imagination into different teams, cost centers, and programs. Minimally, give imagination more than a one-off or ad-hoc shot of attention.
  • Work big ideas about the future into your community conversation. Get people used to the concept of imagining what could happen. This is the ground needed so they can do the work of planning how to get to that future (or work toward a better alternative).
  • Create imagination-centered content. This could look like a section of a newsletter devoted to imagination – a section called “50 Years from Today” with a Facebook-esque ‘on this day’ image and description. It could be a one-off newsletter series imagining a future community. Do a podcast talking to community leaders and other members about their ideas. Create videos, animations, reading lists. Set up online or offline discussion groups.
  • Run imagination events. Host webinars. Set up tracks in your conferences that focus on the future.
  • Teach imagination and futures skills. Content and events engage people in imagination. But there are approaches, curriculums and frameworks for developing and using these skills in work. These can be explored, learned and shared.

I suppose the reality is that our nonprofits, governments, businesses, communities, schools and even our social movements are under extreme pressure to show progress, results and return on investment. The money invested is too great are the threats faced are too big to mess around imagining things.

But we close ourselves off from hope if we shirk possibility, potential and imagination for the perceived security of the way things were or should be. If nothing else, organizations should be intentional about imagining a better future for their community. Those that can’t imagine that future, describe it and map a path to it are wasting everyone’s time.

A dove painted on a wall with a gun painted over the dove. The words "imagine peace" are written below the dove and gun.
Photo by Zaur Ibrahimov on Unsplash. Tbilisi, Georgia.

Complete Control: The Clash on corporate social media and email.

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The Clash were known as a band who loved their audience. They also demanded control over their music. They learned that corporations control communication between band and audience. This was the 1970s, long before social media. But their experience offers insights into how organizations control (or don’t) their communications.

What do you control, really?

The story goes that the Clash wrote their 1977 punk anthem Complete Control in response to their label, CBS Records, releasing the earlier song Remote Control as a single without the band’s permission. Complete Control pokes CBS Records, and capitalist culture, in the eye for mucking up the art and content that makes it rich.

We won’t know but I suspect Joe, Mick and the gang wouldn’t have been keen on corporate social media (or Substack for that matter), an enterprise that doesn’t just rely on your content but controls the ways in which it’s formatted, distributed and archived.

Last time out I shared some ways organizations should be thinking about community engagement as Twitter falls apart. Other social networks face challenges that may not be (or could be) existential but should have us questioning their future and our use of them.

This isn’t a cry to get off social media, a suggestion to double down on LinkedIn or a plea to build an audience on Mastodon, Post or other social networks.

But I do want to make the case for knowing the difference between communications and community channels you control versus those that control your organization and its assets.

  • Do you know when, where, and why your content will be seen by your followers?
  • Is your content removed or otherwise censored?
  • Are your photos, videos and even words in your control?
  • Do you have complete access to the data you’re generating?
  • Do you control design and content functionality?

You organization can control its email channel. Sure, companies like Mailchimp or EveryAction or Engaging Networks host your content, manage your data and can be bought, sold or shut down. But you have a contract with them. You own the data. You can see the metrics. The company’s product road map should be transparent.

Using email like the Clash

Here are a few ideas for maximizing and testing email lists. With inspiration a certain late-70s English punk band. I mean, if the Clash had an email list I’d subscribe.

Welcome everyone

Complete Control speaks to welcoming and appreciating your community:

On the last tour my mates they couldn’t get in
I’d open up the back door but they’d get run out again
And at every hotel we was a’met by the law
Come for the party, come to make sure

COmplete COntrol, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones

The Clash were known for giving away tickets, opening venue windows to let people into the show and bringing large groups of friends and fans on tour with them.

The welcome message is the first step to building community and long lasting relationships. It begins to turn content into experience.

Optimize for welcome message engagement. This means:

  • Be ruthless about getting welcome messages into the inbox.
  • Track and optimize welcome message deliverability rates.
  • Test welcome message subject lines. Again and again.
  • You want everyone to click inside the welcome message. Test actions, donations, forms, anything that tells email providers that your welcome message isn’t spam and, better yet, should get into the primary inbox.
  • Encourage people to reply. Ask questions. Solicit feedback and ideas. Email replies increase the odds your email address will be added to contacts and avoid promotions or updates folders.
  • Test simply formatted or even plain text welcome messages. HTML emails with photos, fonts and colors may not cause deliverability problems but poorly formatted HTML emails can almost guarantee a trip to the spam folder.

The goal of the welcome message isn’t branding. It’s not even fundraising. It’s about getting new subscribers to engage so that future emails are more likely to be opened, read and clicked on. Raising your welcome message click rates can improve deliverability, actions, fundraising and more.

Sometimes you have to go the extra mile to bring people into the community.

Simple can be powerful

The Clash proved that you don’t have to be pretty or even a trained musician to be (arguably) the biggest band in the world.

It’s possible that logos, photos and big headings are getting in the way of your story. Test simple layouts and plainer text. A simple structure may help the calls to action stand out.

Big logos, branding and headlines can also push a call to action “below the fold” of an email. You’ll lose a reader if they can’t get into the story or discern what you want.

Deliver

A band can practice but the payoff happens when followers listen. You can’t excited the crowd and build community if you don’t show up.

Deliverability is the email equivalent of a memorable live event. Prioritize deliverability.

  • Hire, train and support a deliverability role on your team. Give that person power to influence segmentation, testing and product decisions. You can outsource deliverability skills, too, but be sure deliverability guidance and rules have a way to seep into your communications culture.
  • Use segmentation to improve deliverability. If your newsletter goes to a million plus folks send it first to the most engaged. Check the deliverability rate. Then send to the next engaged segment and so on. You’ll learn when/where deliverability issues arise and can improve deliverability rates and domain reputation.
  • Clean the list of unengaged subscribers using re-engagement campaigns for people who haven’t responded in 4, 6, or 9 months. Also monitor cadence and frequency. It’s possible to send too often, too little or too inconsistently.

Get personal

People support people, not organizations. Share stories about doing the, people involved and communities affected, and how activism, fundraising and support changes lives.

  • Introduce a staff member, a supporter, a person/family impacted by your work. 
  • People’s presence in a story should help them tell their story, not just the organization’s story.  
  • Send emails from people, not just the organization.

Go long

Mother Jones found success with longer fundraising emails. You may not. But you may want to give it a shot with at least a segment of your audience.

Think about telling full stories with context and connection to theories of change. Look at the email as a landing page with multiple multiple calls to action and hooks. Draw people in, don’t just scare them to action. Connect on values. Share a story. Make a pitch. Deepen the story. Make another pitch. 

Go short

On the other hand, a one paragraph or two line email can sometimes say everything that needs to be said. Especially when the need is obvious. 

Give people something they can use

Almost every group has a newsletter. Every group sends action alerts and fundraising appeals to every subscriber or various segments built on factors like interest, location, and engagement frequency. 

This typical approach can fall short in a few ways: 

  • It doesn’t leave much space to deliver content that’s actually useful (or interesting, to be honest) to your supporters. 
  • You’re mostly asking for things – money, action, time – not offering support to people. 
  • It doesn’t view email and its content as a way to engage and reach new people. 

Think about short-term emails that train people on skills needed to be activists, volunteers, successful donors or something else connected to your mission. Are you protecting wildlands? Do an email series on plant identification. Talk about how tree species and how to recognize healthy trees versus those weakened by climate change.

Alternate forms of email can deepen knowledge, give supporters content to share, and offer ways in for new people.

You’re sitting on mountains of knowledge – share it

Every band needs guest artists and greatest hits albums.

Your website is full of articles, blog posts, case studies and reports that, to be honest, probably aren’t doing much good once they’re more than a couple months old. You can post links to these on social media forever, of course. But consider integrating them into a new limited series email that dives deep on a particular subject.

Your staff and other supporters can also share their experience in an email series. They could host/send the series described above or even offer content for a new series. Consider having a comms person or freelancer interview the staffer and write content for the series.

This kind of content can also help generate podcasts, video series, photo essays and more. Really, you have so much great content to share the limitation is not social platforms, it’s managing a strategy for producing it.

Boom goes the Twitter: 5 lessons about content and community as Twitter implodes.

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Two toy storm troopers made of Legos hold a mobile phone charging cord. Photo by Will Porada via Unsplash.

Many of the nonprofit-oriented email lists and Slack groups I am on have had multiple threads titled (more or less): what are you doing about Twitter? 

So far, the smart money isn’t betting against Twitter: “don’t leave…wait and see…maybe set up over on Mastodon or something…download your Twitter history…surely it will exist in some form so keep your group/personal account on there.” 

That’s useful advice though it comes with an eye-catching caveat: remaining on Twitter means engaging on a platform whose owner overtly accommodates anti-semitism and white supremacy.

Most nonprofits have put a lot of time and treasure into Twitter over the years. It’s become a way to reach supporters and the media. Here are a few follower numbers: ACLU = 1,900,000 followers / Sierra Club = 379,000 followers / Feeding America =464,000 followers / Nature Conservancy = 996,000 followers.  

My suggestion is to develop a content strategy built upon platforms you control and stories about, by and for your community. Social media platforms are advertising and marketing businesses. As such, their interests may not align with yours and their model can change or go away altogether.

Perhaps you or your organization aren’t impacted by Twitter’s changes. Chances are you’re using Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and other networks. All present the same existential challenges. We’re all at risk. 

Five Lessons

Here are five lessons for nonprofit communicators and community builders as we consider Twitter. 

[1] Understand who was in your Twitter community, what the needed from you and how they engaged with each other.

The value add of Twitter (or any network) is the people out there in your community. You could reach people and get them talking. A “viral” tweet was that moment of people talking to other people on your behalf. I wouldn’t call that community building. But it shows the value of networks.

[2] Twitter was an entrance to community. What other “doors in” do you have?

Community has doors in, doors out, and places where the work happens. Twitter was a big “doors in” platform. You could find people interested in similar topics by sharing your knowledge, searching for hashtags and engaging through replies and retweets. Communities could engage on Twitter but for most it offered an entry point or a way to stay updated.

There are a few communities for whom Twitter was a central meeting and learning place. See this about people working in the California legislature or the value of Twitter to the public health community. That level of community engagement may be hard to replace. But it’s not the norm for many nonprofits.

[3] Craft online community to outlast platforms.

Building a community that outlasts a platform means meeting people where they are, providing tools and training that let people use your content on the platform, and acknowledging people and their efforts.

The role of content and platforms in a community is not dependent on what you put out there or how many people you reach. What other people say and do is what turns a list of people (or subscribers or members or followers) into a community. People look for social proof and social cues. One is more likely to talk about an issue if they hear/see friends talking about it.

[4] Communities and their content, stories and legacy need control of the space in or on which they operate.

Communities don’t thrive over time on rented land. You can open the door to people on a proprietary platform like Twitter (or TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or even Slack). You can use a platform to distribute information and help organize people. 

But a platform can change owners, change terms and even close. This puts community connections at risk. It also means the loss of content, stories and community infrastructure like stories, documents, links and more. 

What content and communications channels can you control? That probably includes your website (articles, reports, hosted videos and more) and email (including advocacy, fundraising, newsletters and other material). It may include videos on a YouTube page, though that hosting and its interfaces are not under your control. It could include webinars and in-person content – material delivered at events and meetings.

[5] Running social media without a content strategy is irresponsible.

At least it’s a fixable problem. Support a cross-department team to develop, implement and iterate content strategy.

Almost every organization using Twitter and other social media platforms rely on them as a marketing channel. Organizations create content and they tweet about it. The goal is to let followers know and, hopefully, get followers to tell others about the content. This could be web posts, online reports, events, video, or just native social content – tweets or Facebook posts, for example.

The demise of Twitter, constant questioning of Facebook’s ethics and algorithms, and the potential political perils of TikTok are just a few examples of why organizations can’t equate a social media program with a content strategy. Creating content and posting to social media without an underlying content strategy is at best reckless and at worst financial malpractice.  

An orange starburst image.

“What should we do with our organization’s Twitter account?” is not the question to ask right now. Instead, ask who was getting value from your Twitter, what was that value and how was it delivered? The answers to those questions will give actionable insights to immediate next steps. More important, those answers help inform a content strategy that connects your storytelling, audience and the impact you and your community need to have on the world. 

It’s possible that your content strategy will point towards investing in content you own on platforms your community accesses and can use to engage with your organization and others. This could mean rethinking email to make it more personal, deliverable and successful. It may mean investing in programs that look like organizing so that you have a better picture of your community, its needs, interests and skills. You may create more how-to articles and videos, webinars and volunteer training programs. Perhaps it’s something completely different. So long it isn’t investing in followers on a platform you don’t control simply because it is there.

Why We Need a New Organizational Operating Language

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The case for community-centered languages that help groups succeed in chaos and complexity.
An orange starburst image.

Organizations exist in a complex landscape. It’s hard to make sense of economic, political and climate chaos. How do you make plans for hiring and fundraising when you face existential questions about the ability, even the need, to meet your mission? 

The nonprofits/NGOs with whom I typically work are staffed by creative, sharp and high performing people. But organizations struggle amidst complexity. Collective sensemaking is tough. And coming together to solve big problems is impossible when you don’t know how to describe the situation.

There are ways to assess and meet complexity. You can build listening, learning and new “operating languages” into your organization’s culture. This means investing in community and mutual aid, learning to really listen to people instead of market to them, and understanding the deep narratives that are influencing systems. 

Chaos

Organizations aren’t built for chaos, complexity and rapid change. We have human resources departments and budgets, payrolls, multi-year fundraising strategies and big investments in data, marketing and communications. The budgets of most NGOs are tied up in people and their skills, salaries and expectations. Organizations, even small ones, are like the Titanic steaming headlong into a million icebergs of chaos and uncertainty.

The economic and political climate are much different than just five or ten years ago. And so is the “climate” climate. We’ve experienced a pandemic that, so far, has killed well over a million Americans and disabled many more. We don’t, frankly, have any idea of the long-term impacts of COVID on American public health. Fewer living humans means fewer people able to work. Far more humans with health problems means fewer people able to do the same work as before.  

We also have a political system turned inside out by disinformation, white nationalism, protests and even political violence. Political change can be good. But long-term political uncertainty puts the brakes on innovation and investment. The effects wash over nonprofits sooner or later. 

We’re also seeing climate change creating systemic changes to the natural environment. More frequent extreme weather is producing flooding, wildfires, hurricanes and 100-year events that pop up every couple years. Whole towns have been lost, fire and flood insurance is unavailable in many places. Conversations about city rebuilding versus abandonment are no longer hypothetical. 

Throw some inflation and big tech sector layoffs into the mix and it’s no wonder we’re seeing dropping charitable donations. Whether it’s fear or falling incomes, people are hunkering down. 

Language

Organizations that are slow to adapt or learn are often viewed as having structural problems: too many layers, too much internal hierarchy, too little collaboration, not the right skills, too many managers. Such critiques may have merit. But they’re assessments that frame organizations as entities independent of the community and systems around them. 

Language is part speaking, of course. Language is also dependent on listening. Organizational operating languages guide what we say. And what we hear. Our collective ability to listen to and learn from the community can and should ground organizational language and the planning, responses and systems built from that language.  

Community, Listening and Narrative

Language is the foundation of our organizational structures. We talk of human resources, leadership, power, evaluation, deliverables, products and hierarchy. And so we have organizations focused on managing those organizational components. We may talk of analytics and data that informs marketing. But this is aimed at getting attention, selling a product or getting a donation. 

What if we use a community-centered operating language that rebuilds or at least redirects the focus of our structures? This could allow us to see crises in advance, engage more people in their resolution, and weave together bigger and stronger networks that can experiment, innovate and share the progress (and problems) of complexity and chaos. 

A community operating language could have three pillars: 

[1] Turn outward.

Prioritize your community of supporters, families, clients, neighbors and employees instead of owners, board, products or endowments. Consider how cooperative ownership structures work: a community of people is responsible for product and process. This spreads risk, value and profits (sometimes to the chagrin of capitalism). But it engages new ideas and innovation from a broader field of people than just board, staff and consultants.

Membership groups used to offer meaningful elections on board members and big decisions like budgets and executive leadership. Some still do. Associations and volunteer-driven groups often offer training and skill-building.

Nonprofits can also model and teach community engagement. Organizing groups can build community or political power, of course. But they also teach people how to build their own networks to offer mutual aid and solve community problems. Think about how feedback from people and groups in these ripples of community organizing can inform your organizational learning and planning.

[2] Build your listening muscles.

Sit down, slow down and listen to your community, including your team, partners and networks. And don’t assume listening only exists in the marketing, sales or fundraising channels. 

Any mention of listening usually launches a conversation about analytics and data. If we examine and really (really!) understand our web, email and social analytics then we’ll know what people do and want. If we run smart tests we’ll learn more from the data we’ll learn more, optimize our pages and form and sell more products or raise more money. 

Sorry but page testing and analytics gathering are cool and useful but they’re not listening to your community. 

Ask for feedback. Invite community leaders/members in for real conversations. Ask questions. Expose the gaps in your understanding. Give people a chance to tell you something, guide you and gain value (compensation, ownership, skills, etc.) from an active listening process. 

[3] Identify, understand and engage with narratives.

Narratives are the core programming language of community and society. The central stories we use to make sense of the world – things like individualism, freedom, meritocracy, racism and religion – shape who influences communities and how communications works (or fails).

A single organization probably can’t control the impact of narratives or shape and drive new narratives. But an organization can and should recognize the narratives, stories and values operating in the community. An organization can operate in and learn alongside networks of groups. An organization, better yet a network, that is facing, conversing with and engaging the community can listen for narrative shifts and signals. A network engaged with community can even help shape new narratives. This could support short term fundraising, long-term existence and simply help an organization plan and manage its future. 

An orange starburst image.

How community drives narrative change

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Discussions of narrative and narrative change work often refer to communities as having a sort of viral role. Narratives exist when a community has enough stories that common themes and values surface and start to bind together. And narratives, like a virus, are transmitted across communities. 

In the narrative world, communities are the hosts. We monitor and measure for narrative spread but we don’t often try to understand how a community works. We may see a narrative spreading or weakening but not know why. This short ciruits our learning and strategic thinking over time. 

We look at what communities are talking about. But are we understanding how communities talk, why communities adopt or share some stories but not others, and how communities manage storytelling? 

Defining Narrative and Community

People define narratives in many ways. I’m talking about narratives as ideas, themes and values gathered together in the stories a community creates, shares and sustains over time. These stories are about community origins, leaders, events, rituals, and ways of being. Perhaps most importantly, these stories explain power in a community and how members are impacted by and access power. This could be the power to lead, power to take action, power to receive benefits, the power of individual and small group agency and so on. 

Communities can be expansive and connect people who don’t know one another and will never meet: a country, city, association, company, political party members or British Bake-off fans. Communities can be small places where most people know one another: a neighborhood Facebook group, school PTA, customers of a small business or conference attendees.

Narrative Change in Community

In 2020 I worked with Narrative Initiative to develop a couple case studies of groups doing narrative change work by understanding community needs, how their community functions, and building narrative tools and strategies to fit the community. One group, IllumiNative, is built to serve a single (yet broad and diverse) community: Native people in the United States. The other is a coalition of groups in Minnesota collaborating to advance equality and social justice. 

IllumiNative’s mission is to “build power for Native peoples by amplifying contemporary Native voices, stories, and issues to advance justice, equity, and self-determination.”  In 2018, IllumiNative released Reclaiming Native Truth: Narrative Change Strategy. 

Reclaiming Native Truth was a community-centered research project aimed at defining the gaps in Native narrative power, why these gaps exist, and how to work with the communities that hold narrative power. Research identified how traditional education curriculum and TV/film stories perpetuate harmful narratives about Native people. It focused on how typical non-Native communities interact with educational curriculum – creating it, teaching it, using it – and TV/film. 

People have an understanding that dominant narratives about Native communities are incorrect, even damaging. “We knew, anecdotally, about much of what was in Reclaiming Native Truth,” IllumiNative’s Leah Salgado told me for a 2020 article about the project. The research didn’t restate what the bad narratives are and the new narratives should be. Instead, it offered ways to use community behavior like educational curriculum and TV screenplays to deliver narratives and stories to non-Native communities. 

Minnesota’s Narrative Justice League (yep, that’s what it’s called), is not an organization. It’s a working coalition of communicators, organizers, program leads and more from 30+ diverse community groups. In 2020, I spoke to JaNaé Bates, Communications Director at ISAIAH, and others working with the Narrative Justice League for an article about its design and operation. The lessons were all how to sustain collaboration in a coalition with generally aligned goals but very different budgets, capacities, missions and skills:

  • Build and continually tend to infrastructures that support relationship building.
  • Understand that diversity presents challenges. But it also builds muscle if you establish practices that reinforce trust while communicating about these differences.

These community-centered lessons for running a coalition of groups seeking to change narratives also apply to how communities interact with narrative. Every community has a structure that manages (formally or informally) communications, storytelling and narrative power. Every community has infrastructure such as communications platforms, leadership identification and development, and even access to or removal from the community. 

Narrative changemakers can recognize how communities operate to create stronger strategies for driving new narratives and weakening old ones. 

Bringing Community to Narrative Practice

Here are some questions to ask about a community if you want to seed new narratives and help them grow. 

  • Who influences and leads the community’s storytelling? Understand who the community listens to and know that it isn’t necessarily the people in charge. There could be written or oral stories passed along from member to member. Figure out their origins, role and use in the community.
  • Why do people join? More importantly, why do people stay in the community? Understand if this is a community of shared values, a shared sense of isolation, shared skills or needs. Maybe this is a community defined by geography, political boundaries, racial or cultural heritage.
  • What events and/or rituals does the community use to bind people to it? Rituals, from an annual conference to saying the Pledge of Allegiance or something similar, are often built around shared stories and used to perpetuate and deepen one or more narratives. A new narrative may need to accommodate or even challenge ritual and it’s important to know if that’s needed and how it happens.
  • What opportunities do people have to act in and with the community? Is it light engagement (being on an email list or making an annual payment) or does the community offer skill-building, volunteer opportunities, leadership growth, support for basic living or family services? Lived experience makes a story real and helps turn stories into lasting narratives. Understand how your narrative change will be lived within the community.  

This is just a start and not all that could or should be done to bring narrative into a community. But deep understanding how a community functions is needed to give new stories and narratives a chance of taking root and spreading.