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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.

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.

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.

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. 

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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.

Community Language

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A look at how language builds community, can leave people behind and and ways to open up community language.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. Every new classroom and school meant entering a different community. There were new ways of working. Different rules. Another set of norms and pre-existing relationships to sort out.

Finding a place in the community meant not just meeting people but learning their language: the unwritten ways of being. Of course, for many kids, this process means learning a spoken language. That’s another layer that adds complexity to the inner language.

Everyone has these experiences of joining a community, neighborhood school, workplace and trying to understand how it all works. But communities often don’t consider the complexity and power of their internal language. And people who aren’t able to pick up on the language will feel their exclusion. Some won’t engage. Others leave. The community is lesser for it.

Understanding the role and use of language will help any community or membership group thrive. Language is a currency of community.

Photo of signs painted on the Tijuana border wall by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash.

Investing in language to grow community

Language grows community. Stories of community history, purpose and vision for the future are built of shared words, events and symbols. Community members speak to each other about actions, events, learning and the future. Language allows us to interact, learn, share, and build the tools and institutions that hold community together.

Language is a connective tissue and circulatory system. Like any system, language can put up barriers to entry. It can also decay if it doesn’t learn how to evolve and regrow over timer.

One challenge of community is defining not just language but its access points and capacity for change. A language that doesn’t change can’t thrive. Neither can its community.

Here are some ideas for opening community language to others in a way that grows and strengthens community.

Collective and transparent

Make your common terms, symbols, visuals and history accessible and easy to explore. Create opportunities to learn and ask questions about stories and the language used in them.

Stories and language should also be clear. A community that grows will be one that makes clear what it’s about and what it’s trying to do.

Space for difference

Growth is longer lasting when stories and people are networked together. A member who is connected to one other, or to just one story or campaign, is more likly to leave the community than a member who knows multiple people, participates regularly, and has their questions answered.

This means recognizing that not every member will agree with or engage in every aspect of community. Allow people to bring their questions and differences to the table. Look for events that allow conversation in many forms, not just broadcast messages.

Difference and change are (usually) good for community

A community can restrict difference and disagreement by controlling language. We see this in national or group censorship. Propaganda and misinformation are also used to control language and protect power.

But you can also create and shift stories by opening up language. Think of language and the opportunity to use and learn it as a source of abundance, not a threat.

Some ways to think about language that grows community:

  • Express shared principles, values and processes for engaging in community.
  • Help people build relationships and trust with multiple community members, not a single person or narrative.
  • Show people they have a role in communications and storytelling. Ensure they see themselves represented.
  • Help people participate in language formation. Community town halls, for example, can be forms of language formation. They give us reason to use and engage with community language. They expose members to language use by and with other members.
  • Accessibility. Keep language jargon-free.
    • Focus on language that fits the community, its norms, geography, vocation.
    • Language needs to be seen, heard, read, and used. Use communications platforms and methods that your community uses.
  • Teach. And do. Teaching (courses, webinars, how-tos, guides, etc.) offers the community ways experience language (and the community) to helps them meet their needs. “Doing” is similar. Do Something. Together. Include opportunities for the community to lead, engage and use language in service with others.

Content strategy for community

We hear about community strategy. And content strategy. But not much about the intersection of the two. Content strategy both creates and reflects community and the member experience.

In Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succed by Creating Belonging, Carrie Jones and Charles Vogl write about two forms of community content: media and shared experiences.

Media includes the platforms and communications products on which content is dispersed and, one hopes, both read/viewed and acted upon.

Shared experiences are the activities and events at which members engage with the community, organization and one another.

Content strategy guides the words, visuals, and stories that appear on media and in/around events. One can have a newsletter or a Facebook page or a weekly meetup. But you also need the stories, content and processes for interacting with and using that content.

Have a content strategy that is for community and meets its needs. Marketing language, e-commerce and fundraising pitches are not, usually, community language.

  • Create content that defines norms, expectations, mission.
  • Understand how and when content informs and teaches community.
  • Provide stories and content that members can use to talk to other members and people outside the community.
  • Use origin stories to provide shared history and case studies to show community working.
  • Events and other gatherings have their own language that members use to understand the event, describe it to others and engage in the event. Make this language accessible, usable and able to be shared.

Folklore and memes

Want to dig deeper? I have some questions and suggestions. It would be interesting to talk about the role of folklore and fables in creating stories, language and ways of behaving. The Stith Thompson Folklore Motif indexes hundreds (thousands?) of common stories and narratives appearing in folk tales. These are the shared stories and language behind community beliefs and norms that weathered centuries of political change. At least in (mostly) Western folk history. Community language and content strategy could learn from a study of these motifs.

Another topic: Memes and viral visual language. What’s the impact of memes and virality on community language? How does visual language and mixed visual/audio/written language impact that growth, stability and sustainability of a community? Social media, including largely visual platforms like TikTok and Instagram, shape and drive language in particular ways that impact community.

Are communities with strong visual language, particularly visuals that travel fast on social media, looser or more cohesive? Do visuals spread knowledge and experience that communities use to bind and network? I don’t know. Visual language is part of community. Perhaps the speed of memes and quickly shared photos/video can grow community. But sustaining community is another layer of language development and use.

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.

Community and mutual aid

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You’re not building community if you’re not building infrastructures for self-healing and sustainable mutual aid.

Like many, I suspect, my holiday week was spent in a COVID daze broken only by periods of coughing, sneezing and trying to sleep. Eventually, late last week, I was considering the idea of cleaning my home office when news popped up of a wildfire that would soon be whipping across neighborhoods 20 miles northwest of us.

I later opened up What’s Better than Charity? by Tressie McMillan Cottom. When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to catch up on Cottom’s writing.

The essay is a masterclass on how mutual aid can be at the center of a community’s daily existence. Not just something to wind up in a crisis.

Cottom writes of a childhood immersed in communities that practiced mutual aid. Giving was a collective act. You gave, helped and taught because you knew you would receive aid, learning and support from others.

My great-grandmother was fond of reminding all of her children and their children of the two rules of giving: Always give better than you would buy for yourself, and never call attention to your giving. It was implied that doing so for others — giving your best and affording people their dignity — would mean that when our time came to be on the receiving end of someone’s giving, they would afford us the same. This reciprocity is what distinguishes mutual aid from other types of giving.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Last Thursday’s Marshall Fire destroyed nearly 1,000 homes in Louisville and Superior, Colorado. The majority of the damage was done in the 10-12 hours between the fire’s start around 11 am and the winds dying down in the evening.

People woke up that morning with no idea they would soon evacuate and possibly lose their home. Nobody expected the fire. Nobody was prepared.

This is when people turn to their community and government aid for help. If we live in mutual aid communities we can expect aid from others. Just as we would provide it when needed. And it’s working, at least when it comes to fundraising. The Boulder Community Foundation raised over $12 million for its wildfire fund as of January 4.

It’s GoFundMe, though, that seems to be the modern incarnation of mutual aid. At least in disasters and other crisis situations. Probably because it can fill short-term needs. Fund disbursement from a community foundation takes time and nobody knows where the money will go.

My Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of friends sharing GoFundMe pages: families who lost their homes in need of money for clothing, food, shelter. The most basic necessities.

GoFundMe is mutual aid. But its application is mostly individualistic. Someone with the best photo, biggest personal network, good hashtag game or a bit of luck may receive more. GoFund e is powerful, useful and a lifesaver to many. It’s also a reminder that while we live in communities we are essentially alone. Aid is often individualized. We make a pitch. Hope for the best.

How mutual can community be?

What does mutual aid mean to those of us who work in community building and membership? I think it means building community habits, infrastructures and systems grounded in mutual aid. What if we see aid (and support and solidarity) as a first principle? Not as a thing to be extracted or provided at some future date.

A provocation: you’re not building community if you’re not building infrastructures for self-healing and sustainable mutual aid. You may be building a membership list of people who can donate money or goods when needed. But is this a mutually beneficial relationship.

Mutual aid and community: Possibility and problems.

I’m always interested in how we transform the work of “membership” into building stronger communities. Societies have more opportunity and potential when individuals are able to see, act with and feel for the collective benefit. Too often, membership is defined and operated in the context organizational, not community, needs.

Grounding membership and community in mutual aid would be a step forward. A mutual aid driven community would be open to others. It would be more able to self-sustain in times of challenge (disaster) and transition (economic shifts and slow changes like climate change…which are slow until, like a wildfire, they’re very very fast).

A mutual aid perspective doesn’t come without concerns and questions.

  • Exclusivity. Is mutual aid for the community or membership only? Is that defined and exclusive? Are boundaries built on race, gender, class and other definitions that divide rather than grow community?
  • What are the values on which you base community? Who do these values exclude and include? Why and how is that good or bad for the broader community.
  • Will there be a sense of (or actually doing) mission creep. Most organizations and communities don’t have a history or mission of mutual aid. Is what you’re doing a fit? Good for the budget? Fundable?

Some ideas:

  • Build connection before you “need” connection. View mutual aid as ongoing, part of the community culture and DNA. Not something that is cobbled together as needed.
  • Make giving and receiving aid accessible to different people and their needs, personality, location, technology.
  • Serve people and value their needs. Ask the community. Talk with people. Invite them into action and leadership.

Many of the strongest civic and community institutions are (or were) focused on mutual aid. And politics often enters into their work. Or did. Or could. Political parties, unions and churches organize members to support educational, social and even financial needs. An advocacy organization that strives to build, create and sustain community can, perhaps should, embed mutual aid in its programs and values.

The need to lead and teach mutual aid has never been more important.

Other links

Some interesting bits on community and language.

The importance of language in gathering by Erin Mikail Staples. Shared language shapes and sustains community.

Implicit Feudalism: Why Online Communities Still Haven’t Caught Up with My Mother’s Garden Club by Nathan Schneider. The importance of norms, expectations and language to talk about them.

“Not supposed to happen in your 20s”: Grieving young adults find support around virtual dinner tables by Elizabeth Hernandez. The Dinner Party helps people grieve together.

The antidote is always turning deeper towards each other. Anne Helen Petersen’s conversations with Garrett Bucks about community building and white grievance snake oil salesmen.

Cancel culture: Why do people cancel news subscriptions? by Nieman Lab. People are cutting local news subscriptions. But that’s not all. A great look at what people value and pay for when it comes to news. And why they leave.

A 2021 narrative reading list to launch your 2022. A curated look at articles and research on narrative change.

Photo by Tim Dennell via flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)