Future Community is a blog and newsletter dedicated to sharing experiences, ideas and stories that define how we build and manage community. We looking for innovation, inspiration, case studies, lessons from history and efforts to redefine the future.
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Articles
- Boom goes the Twitter: 5 lessons about content and community as Twitter implodes.
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 […] - Why We Need a New Organizational Operating Language
The case for community-centered languages that help groups succeed in chaos and complexity. 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 […] - How community drives narrative change
Narrative change happens in communities. Here are key questions you need to answer about community when doing narrative work. - Community Language
A look at how language builds community, can leave people behind and and ways to open up community language. - Grief and the future of community
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? - Community and mutual aid
You’re not building community if you’re not building infrastructures for self-healing and sustainable mutual aid. Potential and problems for a mutual aid focus in community. - Membership architectures to create power
We talk with Ben Pollard, the founder of London-based Local Welcome about building community, crafting leadership, learning and resilience. - Five questions to ask about membership
Five questions you can use to get to the center of your community’s who, what and why. - Too much content. Too few storytellers.
The internet and social media disrupt the relationship between story and how we understand the world around us. The other day I wrote this about storytelling and content strategy in a project brief for a potential client: The candidate (or party, group, movement, government) who controls the narrative has an inside track on guiding people’s hearts, minds and passions. Even […] - The incentives are all wrong
It’s normal to be exhausted by endless crises, a President who throws tweet bombs at 6 am every day and the non-stop punditry cycle. Unfortunately, wearing you out is a valuable, sometimes intentional, benefit to those who disagree with you. A crisis a day makes good information go away There’s a lot of fallout when multiple political and social crises […] - Content is a forest. Don’t just count the trees.
One piece of content strategy is knowing why, when, how (and if) you need to post your content in multiple places. That seems like a lot of extra work. A version of this topic about this popped up last week in a Slack community for nonprofit/NGO folks with which I’m involved. Someone posted this question: Does anyone have any useful […] - Change happens when people tell their story – not yoursAn intention for 2019 In addition to helping the nonprofit community speed up membership innovation, let’s create a framework for helping people find, create and share their own stories in ways that build community, grow power, and strengthen their ties to organizations as well as one another. Never before have we had so much content, so many stories, so much […]