Signs You’ve Lost Touch with Your Community

This article is a summary of our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 17. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler.

We believe deeply that the best social impact brands are deeply in touch with the needs of their customers, their community, and their participants. They deeply understand the problem that they're solving and are constantly in touch with their community about the best way to solve that problem.

Today, we want to offer some ways to evaluate whether or not you're starting to lose touch with your community and start to identify what it means, or what it looks like, to be in touch with your community.

Four Signs You're Losing Touch with Your Community

Let’s look at four ways that you might start to suspect that you personally, or your organization, has lost touch with your community. And what we mean by “losing touch with your community,” is you no longer deeply understand the dynamic of the problem they have, who they are, how you're solving that problem, and how to continuously improve on solving that problem. 

Your community could be your customers. Could be stakeholders of any kind. Participants in your programs. You name it. We can define this in many ways and that word “community” means different things to different people, but that's what we're going to be digging into right now.

1. You Struggle to Answer “Who Do We Serve?”

The first sign that you might be losing touch with your community is that you stumble through your answer to the question of who you serve and what problem you're solving. When we are working with clients who are coming to do a major rebrand, how natural is it for people in our space to be able to answer that question confidently?

This is a question that we ask clients all the time when they come to us because part of our work early on in bringing a new client on, is deeply understanding the landscape of their social impact ecosystem. 

• Who else is out there? 
• What’s their mission? 
• How are they helping their community? 

We are sometimes surprised that there isn't a clear answer from clients on this. To their defense, though, oftentimes clients are coming to us in a big transition point, so they might be a little lost. They might be in this place where they're not as sure as they once were about who their community is and how they're serving them. 

This idea of who you serve, what's the problem that you solve for them, is obviously one we've talked about in many different ways. It’s still very important. And we think there are times where this question throws up a little bit of a red or orange flag. They don't really understand as much as we hoped that they would about their community and the problem that they solve. This is going to require some work for us to unearth that with them.

For Executive Directors or social impact leaders and CEOs, one way to test this first is to go around your team, your board, or to other people in your organization and ask the same question. See if you are getting the same answer — or at least similarly sounding answers. 

This happens all the time, and one of the things we often do with clients is interviews with different stakeholders, staff, board, community members. We ask a lot of the same questions. It is very interesting and insightful to hear where there is alignment and misalignment in those questions. It can be a big sign that there's some work to do around alignment of mission and vision for this organization.

2. You Don't Know What Your Community Likes or Wants to Change

What your community members like best about your product or service and what they want most to change or improve about your product or service needs to be ultra clear in your mind at all times. And if it's not, that's a sign you're losing touch.

This is really great information for us to have when we're doing the kind of work that we do with our clients. Deeply understand what you offer, the value you offer, or the value you add to the community that you serve. This is a slightly different way of thinking about it than the kind of impact you are making. But we think it's a great way to frame it because it starts to unearth new perspectives and new insights more than: we're helping this group with this problem. 

That's great. That's good foundationally. But: 

• What is it that your audience or your community cares most about? 
• What's going really well for you right now as an organization? 
• Where are you nailing it and where is there room for improvement? 

We think that kind of honest reflection can be really helpful as you're trying to move things forward for your mission.

Some companies that are not in the social impact space that do this well are SAAS tech startups who are constantly asking their customers about features or bugs. They're factoring in those customer's requests into how the product is evolving over time because they're constantly in touch. What are the products, the services or features or components of the product that customers really love and use the most versus the ones that don't exist yet, but they want them and will keep them more engaged with the product over time?

We've experienced this in a negative way where we've used products or services and they have community discussion boards and even the ability for people to vote on particular features. And you see edge cases where the community has been asking for a feature for years — sometimes even coming up on a decade in certain cases — and it's still not done. And you see the same organizations ship new features and people ask, ‘But what about this thing everyone's telling you we want? Why can't you just build that?’ 

We're thinking about a corollary with the social impact space. And we think if we had more community discussion boards in our space for our constituents and our supporters, that would be pretty interesting.

If nothing else, by going through that exercise and opening up that dialogue, you are staying in touch with your community. Now, how you deal with the decision-making process after that, that's a whole nother discussion, but at least you're paying attention.

3. You’re Nervous About Talking to Your Community

Another sign that you may have lost touch with your community is that you feel nervous to talk to your community members or to your customers, or you feel nervous to read the feedback that they might be writing about you.

We think that is definitely a sign that you've either lost touch or you're concerned that you are misaligned in one way or another. We've all been on the receiving side of difficult feedback and it doesn't feel good. So there's a natural human tendency to just think. ‘We don't want to know what they're going to say about this.’ 

But that is the exact wrong tendency or reaction to have about community feedback when it comes to running a social impact organization. And we think that if you build in a culture and habits around continuous community feedback, even that negative feedback over time will start to sting a little bit less.

4. Your Team Views Your Community as a Burden

The worst and potentially the most damning sign that you've lost touch with your community is that you're starting to hear disparaging comments about your customers or your community within your own team. It's gotten to the point where actually your customers or your community are treated as a burden within your internal culture.

We've heard this come up for certain organizations that serve a broad set of community stakeholders. Perhaps there's this one segment of their community that has a really vocal opposition to a new program — or there's an almost casual eye rolling about a certain segment. But we haven't really heard it come up as the community at large. 

This idea or this scenario where there's a certain sub-segment of the community or a vocal minority of the community that has created some pain or strife for certain stakeholders. That does happen, and we've seen it dealt with in different ways. That to us is a point of interest for us. We're always making a note and we need to dig into that deeper and understand if these stakeholders should be listened to. 

That is something — especially for organizations that have a big broad community, a diverse community — that we have seen and needs to be evaluated and understood by any social impact leader.

Evaluating if Your Organization has Lost Touch

From our vantage point as a creative agency that specializes in the social impact space, one of the things that we often do when bringing a new client on, is think about the initial period of our relationship as knowledge transfer. And we think about it through this metaphor of just wanting to be this giant sponge soaking up as much information as possible — within reason. 

Some clients come to us and they have a lot of data and insights and stories and anecdotes about their community. We really get a good sense of who their community is, what they value, what their motivations are, what their barriers are, and how we might break down their community into discrete audiences. 

That is a difficult scenario to be in as an agency when trying to advise on strategies for design, branding, and communication.

Sometimes clients just need help with that. Because they don't have the culture, they don't have the muscle around getting community input or being clear about who their community is. Maybe their community has changed over time — which often happens. The community is not a fixed thing, it's a fluid thing. So in those scenarios — where we don't have a lot of data to work with around who the community is or what they value — we have to lean on tools like surveys. We know surveys are not always a favorite methodology, but we use them. 

But even more so, interviews, where we have multiple community members joining. This starts to give us a sense of who the community is, who the different stakeholders are. And a lot of this happens just through conversations and probing questions in our own individual research that we might do.

We're delighted that we help guide social impact leaders through that process because we truly believe that staying in touch with your community members and your customers is fundamental to being able to deliver the most excellent version of the impact that your organization promises.

What Doesn’t Count at “Staying in Touch”

What we would not want to have happen is that social impact leaders attempt to get in touch with community members in ways that we think are ineffective. We mentioned one of them already — surveys. 

So let's talk a little bit about what we think being in touch with your customer looks like and what it does not look like. So if you're thinking to yourself that it's really time to get in touch with your community, here are some things that we think getting in touch with your community is not.

Surveys Aren’t Enough

We don't think surveys alone are a good enough way to stay in touch with your community. You may have interesting data points that come through here and there, but we think as a general strategy, you cannot dismiss yourself from staying in touch with your community just because you've sent out a survey.

The distinction here is that when we use surveys, we're using them for a very specific purpose. We're trying to collect historical data and point in time data. The response to the survey can be interesting for us to see what percentage of survey respondents actually take the time to finish filling it out. And of course, a lot of that has to do with how we design the survey. We have a particular way of designing surveys that makes it more likely that we're going to get the kind of responses that we're looking for. 

But if a social impact leader or a community manager is in charge of staying in touch with the community, just sending out a quarterly survey or a monthly survey is not community building.

Conducting Surveys Isn’t Community Building

At the end of the day, when we talk about what community actually is — it comes down to building true relationships and dialogue with both the people that you are serving, and the people who are helping you power your mission. 

We don't think that approaching that in ways that might be considered transactional is a good way to build a relationship over time. So as a creative agency, we might use a survey as one of our tools in our research methodology, but we are not using that tool to try and build community. We are using that tool to try to get a point in time snapshot and some particular data that we're looking for to guide our creative and our strategic work — an important distinction.

What Truly Being in Touch Looks Like

Have Conversations

As a leader of a social impact organization — whether you're on the executive team or the executive leader or on a board — you need to be talking to your community members or customers regularly. 

Whatever format works for you, this doesn't need to be structured. You don’t need to hire consultants to go do focus groups. 

You've got lots of other important work to do, but that regular drumbeat of connection with your community is going to help you ultimately deeply understand their needs and develop those authentic relationships. That's going to give you better insights into what's working and what's not than a survey ever could.

We've seen this work best when organizations build some kind of community stakeholder group that they regularly check in with over the course of a year or two. And we know that's a big ask. You might as well ask them to be on the board — in terms of time commitment, though maybe not in terms of how they show up in other ways. But we think that that kind of deepening relationship approach — where you're continuously checking in — is the right direction with the same individual over time. We've seen that work really well.

Create Journey Maps

Community connection has been used in conjunction with the idea of creating a journey map. That's one way to know you're proactively staying in touch with your customers is having a few people that you're regularly in touch with and regularly getting feedback from. 

Oftentimes it's very casual. It's over coffee. It's over lunch. It's a text message here or there. It doesn't need to be super structured or formal in any way. 

But the other technique used is something called a journey map. In this approach, to deeply understand customer or community needs, you plot out all the different touch points that an individual might have with your organization. You identify where you may earn that person's trust and engagement or lose it. Identify why you're going to deepen the relationship or lose the relationship. 

• What are the barriers?
• What are the problems at each of these steps? 

Just going through that exercise alone helps clarify thinking about who community members are and what they need. And we highly recommend that for any executive leader at a social impact organization. Go through a journey mapping exercise because it’s an empathy-building exercise in and of itself.

Keep it Simple

We want to underline the point that was made earlier. This does not need to be a crazy complicated thing that requires consultants. It doesn’t even require a journey map language that sounds fancy — maybe even intimidating. At the end of the day, having conversations and opening channels of dialogue with your community in different formats is the way to do it. 

Casual conversations over coffee — great. 

Sending short one-on-one emails to folks asking how things are going — terrific. 

Asking what they are thinking about right now — impactful. 

Learning what they are struggling with — insightful. 

Discussing how you might help your followers interact through social channels — valuable. 

As we mentioned earlier, this does not have to be crazy. How do you stay in touch with people you care about in general in your life? You call them. You text them. You meet up with them. Whatever that looks like — that's how you stay in touch with your community.

Build a Culture of Community Connection

It's not just about us as leaders or Executive Directors, or  CEOs that are staying in touch with our community or our customers. We believe in the power of an organizational culture that celebrates that too. And so one way to make sure that your organization is deeply in touch as a leader is to celebrate and incentivize your team. Encourage them to spend time being in touch with your community in the same way as organizational leaders. 

Now, that can be easier said than done — especially in smaller nonprofit organizations or smaller groups where there's just a constant grind. And so organizational leaders need to decide what to deprioritize in order to prioritize time spent with community members. But at the end of the day, you need to celebrate it. You need to talk about it yourself, and in some cases you need to incentivize it. 

And building that culture could take time, but ultimately, it's not just about the leader. It needs to be about the entire team of people contributing to your impact to where a culture emerges surrounding the needs of the community member.

The blurrier the line is between your organization and the broader community, the better. If there is a hard divide between your organization doing the work behind the scenes for the community — and they are this other group — that feels like a bad sign. You're not in touch with them, you're losing touch with them. 

There’s a concept in philanthropy where you don't want to position yourself to a donor as being between the donor and the impact. You want to position yourself as a partner that brings something unique to the table, that — when combined with the donor's generosity or philanthropy — can create that impact. And it's only when you team up can that impact occur. This is something that we think about frequently in our work.

Define Success in Your Community's Terms

Another thing that we think is a really important exercise for being in touch with your community or customers is to start to define your own success in terms of how your community defines success for themselves. 

We think you're really unlocking true value when you understand someone tells you that they're using this product or this service because it delivers them X — whether that's a tangible outcome or an emotional outcome or whatever. 

Sometimes, social impact organizations are measuring success for themselves this way. And it's something we do in a different kind of way, help our clients see from that vantage point. One of the things we do is help define audience segments. And the way that we think about that is really looking at this community as a big pie and determining what makes up those slices. 

And for each of those slices, one of the exercises that we go through is trying to deeply understand that in several ways: 

• What are the motivations for that slice of the pie?
•  What are their personal motivations for being involved? 
• What are their personal values and how do those values align with your organizational values? 
• What are some of the obstacles that might be getting in the way of an organization collaborating with that slice of the pie?

The Benefits of Staying in Touch

Ultimately, we think any social impact organization that stays in touch with their customer or stays in touch with their community is setting themselves up for really important outcomes. That's the "so what" behind this discussion and why it matters that we're staying in touch with our community.

We think the biggest reason is that it deepens relationships and reduces churn of those relationships. Whether that's a philanthropic churn, or a participation churn, or a buyer churn, how much we're in touch with community members has a profound impact on keeping people engaged with an organization for a longer period of time. 

We'd also say that of course, it's helping develop deeper, more meaningful relationships. It could be increasing revenues, and ultimately it's going to help you build a better product or service.

In the business world, there's this concept around market feedback. You have these ideas, you're building a product or a service or you're selling something. 

How does the market actually respond to how you are positioning yourself and how you're building a product and how that product is received? And that's something that we think should be translated to the social impact space. The difference is that you're not always selling a product. If you're a social enterprise, you might be, and if you're a nonprofit, you might be too. 

But for most nonprofits, let's just say it’s your value. So let's call it your value feedback. How does the market actually respond to the value that you are attempting to create through your impact and through other approaches as well?

Listening and being responsive to that feedback is absolutely critical to doing your work well. And sometimes social impact leaders get so focused that we have blinders around this is our mission. This is our vision. We're on track to do that. 

But sometimes, we're focusing so much on our mission and vision, that we lose sight of how everyone’s feeling about how that's going — especially the people that we care about. It can be easy to lose sight of that. Pay attention to signals that you're losing touch with your community and how you might do better at staying in touch. Because it will ultimately improve your impact and your ability to move your mission forward.

Taking Action Today

So if you're just sending out surveys, or you're just throwing some testimonials from customers up in an email campaign here, or they are on the walls in your office, you're probably not doing the right work to stay in touch. But the good news is getting in touch with your community can start today in very simple ways.

Your Greatest Superpower is Already Within Reach

Staying in touch with your community isn't a "nice-to-have" — it's an essential part of driving impact. You have the opportunity to drive your mission forward by doing something radically simple: listening deeply and responding authentically to your community.

No consultant, survey, or complex strategy can replace the insights you'll gain from sitting across from someone whose life your work touches and simply asking, "How are things really going?" These conversations aren't just data collection — they're the lifeblood of authentic impact. When you prioritize staying connected to your community, you're tapping into a renewable source of innovation and motivation that will fuel your mission for years to come.

Every conversation you have, every genuine question you ask, and every moment you spend truly listening creates ripples that extend far beyond what you can see. The power to create deeper, more meaningful change is in your hands — and it starts simple — with a single conversation.