A scientist who doesn’t publish dies in obscurity. Scientists know publishing results is simply part of the job and give it the time it deserves.
Community organizers (those in your local neighborhood) can spend as much time proving they had an impact as doing the work.
They know success is only one half of their job. The other half is proving their success.
It doesn’t matter if you do a good job this month if your funding is cut next month.
Failure to gain internal support kills a community as effectively as managing one badly.
The best community practitioners know this and spend 40% to 50% of their time (and budget) gaining and sustaining this support. They build sustaining support into their strategies and weekly plan of action.
Imagine the difference if you:
- Proactively schedule meetings with those who both support and don’t support the community each week to better understand their needs and align the community towards their goals.
- Systematically collect emotive community stories each week which you can drop into every conversation about the community.
- Take responsibility for measuring the community’s impact to world-class standards (not dubious call deflection or correlation metrics, but actual studies which demonstrate the statistically significant impacts of the community).
Much of the reason communities struggle to gain support is community managers don’t treat the process seriously enough. They don’t give it the time and budget it deserves.
No job description is going to read ‘you must persuade us not to kill the community each month’, but squint and read between the lines a little and it’s there.
