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May 15, 2026 • 9 min read

Infrastructure and messaging walk into a bar...

Making connection, not just content. And how to measure the difference.

Ted Fickes Ted Fickes
Infrastructure and messaging walk into a bar...

👋 Hello and welcome to Future Community Michelle, Chris and Alessia!

Make connection, not content

To paraphrase a well known nursery rhyme, All the king's content and all the king's views couldn't pass a bill protecting clean air and water.

Change, lasting change, is made in the behaviors, choices, homes, and words of millions of people. We like to ascribe power to a few politicians and corporate leaders who control and shape the economic system. But power is there to be taken and held when we recognize that everyone holds a piece of its infrastructure.

Ritti Singh, in an article for Convergence this week (Surround Sound Communications: How to Build a Narrative Machine), writes about creating "surround sound" communications campaigns that transform communications from broadcast messages into conversations (and audio and video) that appear in multiple places at once.

The result is that you hear about an issue or candidate in a nonprofit email, on a neighborhood WhatsApp group, in Facebook posts, on a Reddit thread, in stickers or graffiti along the street, and in a podcast. This "surround sound" effect isn't achieved through millions in advertising. It's the result of relationship building, relational capital, and understanding how and where people communicate.

Narratives move through networks shaped by language, culture, shared interests, and geography—spaces centralized communications can’t fully see or reach. Treating these as separate from organizing leaves that terrain uncontested.
– Ritti Singh

Singh's article is told through the lens of years spent working on New York City tenant rights campaigns and, more recently, the Zohran Mamdani's rent freeze proposal that became a centerpiece of his mayoral campaign.

A four-part framework is offered as the infrastructure for this communicate to everyone everywhere all the time approach:

Map, seed, echo, and invite.

In other words, this is more about organizing though communications and digital play key roles:

  • Very deliberately identify and map out all the people and places that deliver info to the audience. Chances are these places aren't the newspaper of record, or your website's news page or blog.
  • Get messaging into every place you identified in the form that fits that channel.
  • Tap a network of amplifiers who can comment, share, put it in their own words. Set a flywheel into motion.
  • Make organizing and participation desirable in all these places. Make it easy for people to be part of something.

Content becomes a mode of connection. Content strategy is not just fonts and design and lengths. It's also informed and shaped by organizing strategy, civic structures, relationships and the value of trust.

Save a spot at Newsletter Nerd Club on Wednesday, June 3.

Talk through your big newsletter questions. So if you've wondered about tools to use, how to find audiences, how to coordinate newsletters with the rest of your calendar, how to fundraise or think of revenue, how to grow your list, where to find answers, how to test, and more. This is your space.

Save a Spot

Relational Capital, Content and Newsletters

The most common questions in newsletters, at least among nonprofits I talk to, have to do with growth. How do I build a list? And how do I get people to donate and/or pay for a subscription or membership?

The questions are obvious. If you can't cover costs then why bother? How do you justify the work? And you can't get money out of a small list that isn't growing. (Right???)

Revenue establishes a goal. It offers a metric to test against. Goal-free newsletters limp along. Some organizations view newsletters as a cost of doing business. Updating people on the work, events, and stories seems required. A required newsletter can operate without goals and metrics. These can become little better (or worse) than having no newsletter.

Goals are good. But is revenue or growth the metric you need? What else can you measure?

Let's look at newsletters, and content more generally, as infrastructure needed to construct trust, networks, mobilization, and narrative shift. The ability to deliver and hold conversations, inform, and inspire both action and trust are essential to civic action and social change.

What if a newsletter (or any content product) could be conceived and built to capitalize on the relational capital of the content producers, organizers, and program people behind them create?

What if goals and objectives were measured in the relational infrastructure built by the content for the organization or movement?

I'd argue that neither growth nor revenue are sufficient reasons for or metrics for newsletter or content strategy. Important? Probably. But they can also send the wrong signals and result in misdirected resources. How often have you seen organizations invest in list growth while falling short on impact?

Instead of growth or list size (or clicks) we need metrics of relational capital and relational infrastructure. This could look like measuring the number of newsletter subscribers who join or volunteer to participate in echo/amplification roles. It could mean identifying the subscribers who share their news sources and messaging preferences with you. It could mean measuring the number of people who actively respond to questions asked in newsletters, texts, chat groups.

In other words, key metrics shift to organizing-led functions of communications instead of relying only on simple engagement or small donor optimization data. Perhaps this is too big a shift to internal programs and teams. Regardless, it IS possible to develop more relationship driven metrics for newsletters and other communications products.

Find out more and join Newsletter Nerd Club on June 3.

Bright Ideas

🏃‍♂️Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax writes writes Emma Roth in The Verge. Fees are higher. The network effects don't live up to the hype (or the numbers). And, worse, especially for nonprofits and news organizations trying to build direct connections with people, Substack is built around followers, not subscribers. [via Ben Werdmuller]

🤖 Your organization is likely seeing AI-related shifts in search visits and on-site behavior from those visits. 4Site, a nonprofit tech strategy consulting firm, released their Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) & Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Playbook.

🕶️ New_ Public released After the Feed: Trust, connection, and the next era of social technology. The 82 slide presentation makes the case that AI is the meteor that will finally send social media network dinosaurs into extinction. There's a lot to debate and question in here regardless of whether or not you root for, as I may, a potential demise of Meta and other social media companies. But short of a post-electricity dystopian future, our social networks and informational lives will be influenced by technology. It's imperative that more civic, community, and nonprofit organizations engage in defining that future.

👨 Here are two pieces of research into the world of young men in America. I appreciate how it doesn't flatten the stories and turn people into data. Regardless of gender, geography, class...it's difficult to engage the disconnected person in a conversation about a positive future/vision for national democracy and politics.

📬 How direct mail undid the civic imagination of everyday donors [Jason Lewis / The Giving Review]

🛍️ America is giving dying mall vibes by Karen Attiah is an ode to the crumbling capitalistic third space of American life: the mall. More importantly, Attiah frames our lament for the mall as community in starker terms. Nostalgia-based narratives ("Make America Great Again" being the king of these) are exclusionary retreats. I beg advocacy groups, movements, and politicians to create and share a vision of the future that isn't centered on a (usually fallacious) past.

🗿 Tiny News Collective has been facilitating and studying the small news org startup process for several years. In The path to resilience: Why we are studying the soul of small news businesses, Elaine Díaz Rodríguez describes their current work (guided by the smart Ashley Woods Branch) to quantify the hard to measure experiences and qualities that make up the asset mix of success. Growth and revenue aren't among them. Instead, they're finding technical capital, social capital, and narrative capital (what I'll call skill, trust, and story) as the base fuel for success.

🤑 If your team (or the experts on the Internet) are pitching AI inevitability through more efficiency, productivity, and cost savings you're probably not going to be happy in 18 month. Read why in We Keep Measuring AI ROI Wrong and the Error Is Getting Expensive. [David Rice / People Managing People]

🏙️ Why “neighborism” is having a moment explores the how and why of more people relying on in real life connection instead of isolation (and digital social networks). It may just be me but perhaps there's a rising exhaustion and sense of grief (yes, grief) surrounding tech-mediated social interaction. Layer a greasy mix of AI, data centers, disinfo, and tech-fueled surveillance capitalism onto the cake and it's no wonder people would rather get to know their neighbors than ChadGuy263 on Reddit. [Sara Radin / Vox]

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Hey. Ted here. I run Bright+3 where we give changemakers the ideas, inspiration, and tools to create content that builds stronger communities.

I also write this newsletter, Future Community, and run the Future Community Jobs list.

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Ted Fickes
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