Getting Community Input Without Getting Derailed

This article is a summary of our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 16. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler.

How do you gather meaningful feedback from your community and valuable stakeholders without watering down the results and trying to please everyone, only to end up with a weak, sad version of what was originally imagined?

Many organizations struggle with this balance. Some try to hide projects from their community or stakeholders because they're afraid of the input they're going to get. Others open the floodgates and lose control of the process entirely. Over time, we have come to believe that the right strategy is including more of the right people at the right time.

Be Crystal Clear About Decision-Making Authority

Let’s assume you, a social impact marketer or leader, are about to embark on a big project that matters. A project that will be unavoidable to roll out and something that can't just be done behind the scenes. You're afraid to get community input because you know that this can be somewhat painful.

There's not one way to do this. You might need to right-size this or have different approaches for different types of projects. Sometimes you just have to do stuff and make choices and live with the consequences of those choices. Other times, it's a very big risky thing to do without getting community input, and if you do it without community input, it might come back around to bite you in the butt.

The first idea is that if you do this part right, all the rest of it will probably go a little bit better — be clear to yourself and to your community about how much input and influence they will have in the decision-making process.

To bring in a little bit more detail — How are you going to use their input to make decisions? Let your community know that you will accept their feedback, but you are going to use that information to make this decision, and you will be the one making the decision. 

On the other hand, maybe it's, "We're going to be taking a vote here, and you all are going to decide." In either case, it's important to understand for yourself and for the people you're speaking with how decisions are being made and how their input is influencing those decisions.

This, if done well, can solve so many of the other issues that we see. If people feel like they are sidestepped or their input wasn't heard or wasn't acted on, that could be even worse than just not even asking them. So, if you're going to ask people for feedback, be really clear about what kind of feedback you're looking for and how that feedback will actually be used and how much influence they're going to have. A lot of this comes down to just expectation setting.

Strategic Timing: Beginning, Middle, and End

When do you get input from the community? We've probably made every mistake you could possibly make.  What we’ve learned over the years is that you need input for any big project in multiple parts of the project — at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end.

If you only get input at the beginning, people will feel sidestepped or they're not clear around how — or if — their input was actually enacted. If you only get input at the end, it's probably too late to do anything with that input. If you get input at the beginning and the end, too much has happened between those two pieces of feedback, and it's kind of risky. You might be going back to the drawing board.

It’s important to get feedback from the board or any big decision-making stakeholders. For some organizations, that might be the community of supporters — if you're doing more of a co-creation community led model. We like to get input, data, insights, and hear voices early on. That is gold for us as creatives and designers. It gives us ideas and insight, helps guide our strategy, and gives us stuff to start to work with. It's not to say that we're going to take that community input and just figure out how to copy and paste it into a rebrand or a website project. 

For many, timing has more to do with the ability to reflect back to the people you're collaborating with the results of their input. Anytime feedback is collected, a credible promise should be made to show them how they've made a difference. If you can't credibly commit to that, then you probably shouldn't take the step towards including them in the first place.

Go From Divergent to Convergent Thinking

There's also the idea of convergent and divergent thinking. In creative processes, you start with a divergent process, trying to gather as many ideas as you can, and then you synthesize those and work it back down to a smaller decision point — convergent thinking. Community input can work in both the divergent thinking phase and the convergent thinking phase. 

The kinds of decisions that come after that input are different, and it's important to reflect all of those variables back to the community that's giving you the input in the first place. You don't want convergent feedback in the divergent phase or divergent feedback in the convergent phase. That's where setting expectations with your collaborators is critical to making this work.

How You Ask for Input Shapes What You Get

Another element that is really important when it comes to getting community input or community feedback, is how you ask for that feedback. That might be the format. Is it a survey or is it a focus group or interview? Is it some kind of open session? There's so many ways to get input. 

The first thing that comes to mind is city council meetings where people are up there giving their speeches and you can just see the city council rolling their eyes. Is that a constructive way to get input and feedback? We don't need to debate that right now, but how you ask can almost be more important than who you ask. Obviously both are important as well, but it's about designing the right structures and the right processes for gathering feedback so that people feel comfortable, empowered and can show up to give input that’s as valuable as possible — as a member of the community.

This starts with the decision-maker. You need to have a really clear understanding of the kinds of decisions that you're going to need to make along the way and the kinds of information that they're going to need in order to make the best informed decisions. And so that's an argument right there for really planning out community collaboration points for a big initiative — like a major strategic plan or a rebrand or something.

You need to know ahead of time what the process looks like, where you're going to get that community input, and what kind of information you need at each stage to make good decisions. Sometimes it is going to be the directional kind of feedback where you just need to get the sense that you're on the right track. Other times maybe you need a large enough sample size to make a case to make a decision somewhere, and you need to demonstrate the quantitative power of a particular direction. Either way, you’ve got to know what those things are going into it so that you use the right mechanism for gathering the feedback.

Making Input Actionable

How do you take all this input and filter it down or synthesize it into actions in a way that:

• It’s helpful in the project that you're trying to do
• It makes the people who've taken their time to give you input feel like it was a worthwhile exercise

We’ve seen this work best when there is a small team or committee that is in charge of facilitating this process — one that has voting or decision-making power to synthesize this information and make choices based on that information. 

We’re not fans of — especially when it involves brand building, marketing work, and website overhauls —  just taking community input and just doing whatever gets the most number of votes. If logo concept A versus logo concept B are put out, or if people are asked to help give input around how to label the navigation on a website, this is just data and it's not necessarily going to be something that gets taken at face value. 

Ask the Right Question

If you ask which logo does your community like better — and that's all your audience understands about the contribution that they're making — then the implicit expectation is that you're going to choose the one that got the most votes. But what you might be after is wanting to get a gut read on if you are totally off on one or the other of these. In which case you're asking the wrong question and you're putting it in front of collaborators in the wrong way. 

A better question might be putting both logos in front of people and saying, what do you like about this one and what do you dislike about this one? What do you feel when you see this one versus what do you feel when you see that one? And getting that sort of directional feedback. You're making no promises implicit or explicit about what a vote might mean and you're collecting the right kind of information to make the decision.

Design the input process to be as effective as possible. Think about:

• Exactly what questions do you ask? 
• How do you ask those questions? 
• Are you providing context for people that you're getting feedback from?

That's going to have a huge implication on the kind of answers that you get. Because if you just put two random pictures in front of someone and ask them which one they like better, what is that really giving you at the end of the day? But if you present two different design directions and articulate your goals, what you're trying to achieve, and the outcomes that you're looking for, you can then ask which concept resonates with that strategy. That’s much more impactful as data and input. That's so much easier for the community members to actually weigh in on strategically and not just get into this kind of aesthetic gut level reaction. So much of this comes down to designing your questions.

When You Should and Should Not Get Community Input

There's no one size fits all approach. But we can agree that landing on either end of this spectrum for all of decision making is a fool's errand. You can't be a hundred percent collaborative all the time and you can't be a hundred percent closed door all the time. There's actually been a trend in this space toward attempting to collect more community input. That's generally a good thing. 

Sometimes more damage than good gets done when attempts at these collaborations that are not well thought out happen. These can be thought of as performative collaboration. It's almost the same idea as virtue signaling.  An organization attempts to communicate that they care about collaboration, they care about inclusivity, and they want to hear the community’s voice — but actually what the community has to say means nothing for decision making and they're going to do what they want anyway.

This actually can damage trust with the community — when input is being sought and not being really clear about whether that input's being used to make decisions or not.

An Illustrative Story

On a rebrand project that we did, there was talk about this up front like. We asked, “How much community input do we feel is fruitful for this project? How much input do you already have from your community that we might be able to use to influence this?” 

This is something that gets talked about a lot with clients because there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this. So, collectively we landed on not needing to do a lot of community input on this project for different reasons. Halfway through the project, internally the team and the client team were feeling really good about things. But it became pretty clear pretty quickly that they had been collectively missing the mark in a pretty big way with one of the logo concepts. The realization was that it unintentionally would have excluded a portion of their community in a way that would've been, frankly, kind of embarrassing.

There was quick course correcting and a pause to do a full community input process here. We needed to get input both from a bunch of different stakeholders in the community as well as the governance board, to be able to do this well. It really got us thinking about this very question. How do we make sure not to do that again? How do we know when it's time to involve the community and at what level?

Think About Community Ownership of Your Brand

One of our takeaways is that the more your community feels ownership over your brand, they are part of your brand, they belong, it's part of their identity — the more community input becomes super important.

Having your community bought into the brand, what you stand for, and what it means for their own personal identities is a superpower for social impact work. If you can find that, you're going to garner all of that trust and relationship through a singular community collaboration effort. Certainly that can be a positive piece of the puzzle. But it's certainly not going to be everything. It's very important to have this well thought out and mapped out for any big community collaboration before you begin a project.

Overcoming Initial Fears

To be honest, this used to be scary in the early days of Cosmic. And just for practical reasons. Getting community input — especially when we're not always able to design and facilitate that community input — can really slow a project down. And if it's not designed well, can almost do more harm than good. 

But what we’ve learned over the years is that doing this well can be so critical and so important that it's one of the first questions that we ask anytime we bring on a new client. When we think about a rebrand or any big project that's going to have a meaningful impact on their community, we ask when and how much community input should we be building into our design process.

What To Do With Bad Community Input

Let's define what we mean by “bad”. Let's assume you've done all of your work to get good quality community input. You've designed the input process effectively. You've been clear about expectations with the people who are giving you input. You have a team to facilitate this and to interpret the results and to make decisions, but the feedback that you're getting from your community is counter to what you hoped to get. Either it pointed you in a different direction or generally the reception has been negative to your plan or any work that's been done to this point. 

How do you navigate that negative feedback and the balance between an expected amount of negative feedback? 

What's the ratio of good to bad feedback that you're looking for when you're getting community input?

A lot of it comes down to the question of if you have included your community in a way that gives them a chance to express something that they see that we cannot. That's a really important strategic screen for making decisions around who to include in decision-making. 

A lot of times it comes down to not being able to see everything. By the nature of the job of a social impact leader, there's a limited amount of information that can be collected with your own eyes. Who is seeing the dynamic or the thing most closely? Who can influence what's happening — a behavior or some sort of dynamic? Who can influence that most powerfully? And wanting to include those people in the community collaboration effort because they're seeing something that you can’t see. 

That's ultimately going to be the thing that gets listened to when confronting this conundrum of hearing some feedback that is counter to what was expected. Do those people see something that can't be seen or are we seeing the same thing that they're seeing and we just disagree?

At the end of the day, that's the purpose of community input. 

Dealing with Vocal Minorities

One thing we should mention is that sometimes you will get a vocal passionate minority that really disagrees. But they're small versus a large population that either agrees or is neutral. And so how do you know when it's time to just say, “You know what, we don't care about those people — which sounds really brutal. Or, we do care about those people, but we're going to continue on this path anyway because most people are on board with this. Is this just a gut thing? Is there some kind of threshold?

What we’ve learned is to accept that the direction being taken is ultimately not for them. Having a clear understanding of who the audience is, the impact being had, who is being served, and what the unique approach to the problem is, helps clarify what the path forward is. It’s not to serve this group. What needs to be done is paying attention to the underlying reasons that they are so vocal and so emotional about this. Figure out if there is a way to address that emotion and address that big feeling as a part of the overall ultimate decision that will help them feel seen and acknowledged.

Ultimately, this group may raise something that honors a legacy and honors the history of this project, and that is a really important thing to do. That wasn't being tracked at the beginning. So even though they're not going to get their way, it's still been a valuable exercise in navigating the overall challenges and opportunities.

Avoiding Negativity Bias

Social impact leaders need to be aware of negativity bias. What that means is that as human beings we pay more attention to, give more credit to, and are more affected by negativity than positivity. So even in situations where there is 80% support, maybe even vocal support, but 20% negative feedback, that 20% negative feedback is going to affect and influence way more — just by nature of our psychology than the 80% support. That’s not to say you should ignore people, but you should be aware of emotions clouding judgment because of this negativity bias.

Ultimately what it comes down to is the ability of the leader of the project to recognize where your power is in this project and feel confident and assertive in that power — in your authority to make decisions — but also humble enough to listen to the underlying reasons that you might be hearing these negative emotions to begin with. 

Additional Takeaways

Be Thoughtful, Not Impulsive

Being thoughtful and not being impulsive about collecting community input is the single most important thing that a social impact leader can try to factor into their work. Getting into those reactionary, impulsive community collaborations can do a lot of harm. But when thought out, planned out, and mapped out ahead of time can absolutely give you a unique advantage in the project that you're embarking on. So just take the time to plan these out.

Find Your Approach

We have worked with organizations that are co-creating everything. They are extremely democratic in their work. And that can work really well if that culture works for that organization. For certain types of organizations, that's going to work better for them than others. 

There have also been examples of really solid, strong, determined, thoughtful leaders who don't get a lot of community input around how they make decisions. They maybe do it more intuitively and that can work well. 

So, as a leader, you're going to have to find your way. But it is a worthwhile thing to explore how and when and why you include your community in your decision making. And if we're going to do that, how do we do that more skillfully and make sure it's not derailing your projects.

Your Community Can Be Your Greatest Strategic Asset

Before you launch your next rebrand, website overhaul, program expansion, or strategic plan, ask yourself one question: 

Social impact leaders who are changing the world are the ones who know how to multiply their intelligence by tapping into their community's collective wisdom. It’s not about choosing between top-down leadership and democratic collaboration — it's about strategically leveraging the thoughtfulness and passion of your community. When you design input processes that honor both your vision and your community's insights, you transform potential roadblocks into rocket fuel. 

Your community members want to do more than just be heard — they want to help you succeed in creating the change they believe in. By being clear about expectations, timing your requests strategically, and synthesizing feedback into actionable decisions, you're not just avoiding project derailment — you're building the kind of authentic community brand ownership that turns supporters into champions and creates unstoppable momentum for your mission.