Getting Community Input Without Getting Derailed

"This looks great. Let me just get the board's input."

Those words strike fear into the heart of every social impact leader. You've poured your heart and soul into a project, only to have it potentially derailed at the last minute.

But what if getting community input didn't have to be so terrifying? What if there was a way to gather feedback that actually improved your work instead of watering it down?

In our latest episode of Designing Tomorrow, we tackle the thorny issue of community input head-on. We share hard-won lessons from years of mistakes and successes, revealing:

• The #1 thing you must do before asking for any feedback (get this wrong and you're doomed from the start)

• Why timing is everything - and the counterintuitive approach that works best

• How to design your input process for maximum impact (and minimum headaches)

• What to do when you get "bad" feedback that goes against everything you believe

Whether you're working on a rebrand, website overhaul, or major strategic initiative, this episode is a must-listen. We break down exactly how to get the input you need without derailing your vision or watering down your impact.

Don't let fear of feedback hold you back from creating transformative change. Tune in now and learn how to harness the power of community input to take your work to the next level.

Episode Highlights:

• [01:55] Introduction to the challenge of community feedback during large projects
• [02:56] Discussing how different projects require tailored approaches for gathering input
• [03:36] Setting expectations for feedback + clarifying the decision-making processes
• [05:13] Timing of community feedback in different phases of a project
• [09:10] Designing the right framework for gathering input
• [10:21] Understanding when and how to collect actionable feedback
• [12:00] Synthesizing community input into strategic decisions
• [17:09] Importance of well-planned community collaborations
• [19:05] Handling negative community feedback and maintaining decision-making authority
• [20:11] Including community members who see aspects the leader might miss
• [21:38] Managing vocal minorities within a large community
• [23:06] Addressing the emotional responses of vocal groups without changing course 
• [24:11] Recognizing negativity bias in decision-making processes

Quotes:

• "Be clear to yourself and to your community about how much input and influence they will have in the decision-making process." - Eric Ressler [03:36]
• "Understanding how decisions are being made and how their input is influencing those decisions is key." - Jonathan Hicken [04:15]
• "What I've learned over the years is that you need input for any big project." - Eric Ressler [05:13]
• "For me, timing has more to do with my ability to reflect back to the people I'm collaborating with the results of their input." - Jonathan Hicken [07:25]
• "Getting community input can really slow a project down, and it can be, if not designed well, almost more harm than good." - Eric Ressler [17:56]
• "There will always be some amount of negative feedback. What's the ratio of good to bad feedback you're looking for?" - Eric Ressler [19:05]
• "Have I included my community in a way that gives them a chance to express something that they are seeing, that I cannot see?" - Jonathan Hicken [20:11]
• "We pay more attention to negativity than positivity, and it influences us way more." - Jonathan Hicken [24:11]

Resources:

• The Right Way to Get Community Input on a Rebrand
• Brand Building: An Authentic Approach to Growing a Fierce, Loyal, and Supportive Community
• Navigating a Rebrand: Nine Common Mistakes to Avoid
• How to Build a Community People Will ACTUALLY Join
• Community Building Might Not Feel Like Your Core Work, But It Should Be

Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:01]:

Jonathan, do you want to know what designers have nightmares about? Yes, designers have nightmares about this phrase. “This looks great. Let me just get the board's input.”

Jonathan Hicken [00:14]:

I'm already recoiling.

Eric Ressler [00:15]:

So this episode is going to be about how to get community input on whatever big project you're doing, whether that's a rebrand or a website project or a marketing project or a new program or a strategic plan, any kind of big project where there's probably a good argument to be made to get community input. How do you do that without getting derailed? How do you do that without watering down the results and just trying to kind of please everyone and at the end, you just end up with this kind of watered down, weak, sad version of what you imagined at the beginning. And I've experienced this many times in many different ways in all shapes and sizes over the years with rebrands and website projects and the kind of work that we do at cosmic. And I've seen all these different approaches that our clients take to try to get community input or to try to hide these projects from their community or some stakeholders because they're afraid of the input that they're going to get. And I've really kind of come around to including more of the right people at the right time being the right strategy. And we'll unpack this a lot more in today's episode, but I know you've experienced this in all shapes and sizes as well. So I think this one should be fun.

Jonathan Hicken [01:29]:

Oh baby, let's go.

Eric Ressler [01:54]:

So let's assume you as a social impact marketer or leader are about to embark on some kind of big project, a project that matters, a project that is going to be unavoidable to roll out and something that you can't just kind of do behind the scenes, but you're afraid, right? Because you're afraid to get community input because you know that this can be somewhat painful. Now, I know you've been on both sides of this before. I have a bunch of ideas around how you might do this better, largely learning painfully around how to not do this well. And I'm just curious, has this been something that's come up for you

Jonathan Hicken [02:31]:

Every single day? I think about when and how to gather feedback from the community that we serve constantly. And I've experimented with a lot of different approaches, extremely inclusive and open to much more closed, and I have failed on both sides of that spectrum. So I am delighted that we're going to unpack this together.

Eric Ressler [02:54]:

So I think you bring up immediately, a pretty good point, which is that there's not one way to do this and there's maybe not one way you should do this that you might need to right-size this or have different approaches for different types of projects. Sometimes you got to just do stuff and you got to just make choices and live with the consequences of those choices. And other times that'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.

Jonathan Hicken [03:26]:

I've got some tips. I'm chomping at the bit to start throwing at you immediately, but I'm going to hold off and see where you're coming from and then add a little color to it.

Eric Ressler [03:35]:

My first idea, and this is actually I think if you just did this part right, all the rest of it would 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.

Jonathan Hicken [03:50]:

And to bring that even with a little bit more detail, I would say, how are you going to use the input to make decisions and linking when you give me your feedback about this, I'm going to use that information to make this decision and I will be the one making the decision here. Or on the other case, maybe it's we're going to be taking a vote here and you all are going to decide, but in either case, understanding for yourself and for the people you're speaking with and engaging with how decisions are being made and how their input is influencing those decisions.

Eric Ressler [04:25]:

And I really think that this, if done well, can solve so many of the other issues that we see because what I've seen happen is if people feel like they are sidestepped or they feel like their input wasn't heard or wasn't acted on, that could be even worse than just not even asking them. So if you are 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. And that way if people have a problem with that, you can just say, well, thank you. I guess this isn't going to be a fit and there's a respectful transaction that's happened there because really I think a lot of this comes down to just expectation setting. The other thing that I think is huge here is when do you get input from the community?

[05:12]:

And we've made every mistake you could possibly make here in our work probably. And what I've learned over the years is that you need input for any big project kind of in multiple parts of the project. I like to get input at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. And what I've learned is if you only get input at the beginning but not in the middle of the end, people can or will feel kind of sidestep or they're not clear around how their input was actually enacted or not. If you only get input at the end, it's probably too late to do anything with that input and if you get input at the beginning and the end, there's just a little too much has happened between those two pieces of feedback and again, it's kind of risky. You might be going back to the drawing board.

[05:57]:

So I think about this in the sense of getting feedback from the board or any big decision-making stakeholders, which for some organizations might be the community of supporters if you're doing more of a kind of co-creation community led model, and so we'd like to get input and data and insights and hear voices early on, that is gold for us as creatives and as designers because that gives us ideas, it gives us insight, it helps guide our strategy, it gives us some stuff to start to work with. And it's not to say that we're going to take that community input and just figure out how to copy paste it into a rebrand or a website project. We still need to be strategic with that input and we need to interpret that input and we need that to be a set of data that we use along other data sets to influence our decision making. But we like to have input beginning, middle, end, obviously a high level benchmark. But yeah, curious about timing and when input should happen.

Jonathan Hicken [06:52]:

For me, timing has more to do with my ability to reflect back to the people I'm collaborating with, the results of their input. Anytime I'm going to collect feedback, I want to be able to credibly promise that I'm going to show them how they've made a difference here, and if I can't credibly commit to that ability to reflect their influence, then for me, I'm probably not going to take the step towards including them in the first place. So for me, it's more of just a matter of reaction and this interplay with the audience and our ability to show the impact that they're having as opposed to necessarily beginning, middle end. What I will say is that there's this idea of convergent thinking and divergent thinking, right? And in creative processes, you probably do this all the time, you start with a divergent process, you try to gather as many ideas as you can, and then you synthesize those and you work it back down to a smaller decision point. I have found that community input can work in both the divergent thinking phase and the convergent thinking phase. Just the nature of the input that people are giving is different. The kinds of decisions that come after that input is different and it's important to reflect all of those components and all of those variables back to the community that's giving you the input in the first place.

Eric Ressler [08:14]:

And you don't want convergent feedback in the divergent phase or divergent feedback in the convergent phase.

Jonathan Hicken [08:19]:

That's right. And to your first point, that's where setting expectations with your collaborators is critical to making this work.

Eric Ressler [08:36]:

Another element that I think 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. I think we all, I mean the first thing that comes to mind to me is these 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? I don't know. 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 to me it's about are you designing the right structures and the right processes for gathering feedback so that people feel comfortable, empowered and can show up and be as valuable as possible As a community person giving feedback on your decision,

Jonathan Hicken [09:34]:

I think that starts with the decision maker on the inside, having a really clear understanding of the kinds of decisions that they'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 your community collaboration points for a big initiative, say like a major strategic plan or a rebrand or something, is that you kind of know ahead of time what the process looks like and 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, but you got to know what those things are going into it so that you use the right mechanism for gathering the feedback.

Eric Ressler [10:35]:

I think this leads nicely into our next point, which is how do you take this input and make it actionable? So how do you take all this input and filter it down or synthesize it into actions in a way that first of all is actually helpful in the project that you're trying to do and also actually makes the people who've taken their time to give you input feel like it was a worthwhile exercise? So I've seen this work best when there is a small team or committee that is in charge of facilitating this process that then has essentially voting or decision-making power to synthesize this information and make choices based on that information. I'm not honestly a huge fan of, especially when it comes to the kind of work that we're doing, brand building, marketing work, website overhauls of just taking community input and just doing whatever gets the most number of votes, right? If we're putting logo concept A versus logo concept B, or if we're asking people to help give us input around how we might label the navigation on our website, to me this is just data and it's not necessarily going to be something that I take at face value and just say, well, got the most votes. That's what we're going with, I guess. So how do you think about interpreting the results of this community input?

Jonathan Hicken [11:55]:

Yeah, again, I think the logo example is a great test case here for this conversation. So you put two logos in front of your audience and collecting feedback. If you ask which do you 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 when really what you might just be after is like I want to get a gut read on are we 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 your 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.

Eric Ressler [12:52]:

Yeah, I completely agree, and I think this goes back to our point around how do you design the input process to be as effective as possible? And yeah, exactly what question do you even ask? How do you ask that question? That's going to have a huge implication on the kind of answers that you get. Are you providing context for people that you're getting feedback from? 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 instead present to different design directions to just use this example and articulate, here are our goals, here's what we're trying to achieve, here are the outcomes that we're looking for. Of these two concepts, which concept do you feel like resonates with that strategy more that's so 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 design. When should you get community input and when should you not get community input? What's just your gut level reaction to that question?

Jonathan Hicken [14:07]:

There's no one size fits all response to that, but I think we can agree that landing on either end of this spectrum for all of your 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. I think there's actually been a trend in our space to attempting to collect more community input. I think that's generally a good thing. We sometimes do more damage than good when we attempt at these collaborations that are not well thought out. I would think of them as performative collaboration. It's almost the same idea as a virtue signal. We care about collaboration, we care about inclusivity and we want to hear your voice, but actually what you have to say means nothing for our decision making and we're going to do what we want anyway,

Eric Ressler [14:55]:

Not that voice.

Jonathan Hicken [14:56]:

Yeah, right, exactly. And I think that that actually can damage trust with your community if you are seeking input and not being really clear about how that input's being used to make decisions or not.

Eric Ressler [15:09]:

Yeah, I mean, this reminds me of a story of a rebrand project that we did where we talked about this kind of upfront like, Hey, how much community input do we feel like 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 we talk about a lot with clients because there is, again, no one size fits all approach to this, and we collectively landed on what we don't need to do a lot of community input on this project for all these different reasons. We got halfway through the project, we were all internally our team and the client team feeling really good about things, but it became pretty clear pretty quickly that we had collectively missed the mark in a pretty big way with one of our logo concepts in a way that kind of unintentionally would have excluded a portion of their community in a way that would've been frankly almost kind of embarrassing.

[16:03]:

And we quickly kind of course corrected and realized, okay, pause. We need to do a full community input process here. We need to get input both from the end, a bunch of different stakeholders in the community as well as the governance board to be able to do this Well. It really got me thinking about this very question and how do we make sure not to do that again and how do we know when it's time to involve the community and at what level? One of the takeaways I personally had from that 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 I think community input becomes super important.

Jonathan Hicken [16:45]:

I think having your community bought into the brand and what you stand for and what it means for their own personal identities is a superpower for social impact work in this sector. If you can find that, I also don't think 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. I do think actually you probably are looking at doing more damage if you do it incorrectly than the positive upside of doing it correctly in most cases, which is why I think it's very important to have this well thought out and mapped out for any big community collaboration before you begin the project.

Eric Ressler [17:28]:

And I'm just going to a moment of honesty and vulnerability. This used to scare me a lot early on and for really just kind of practical reasons, getting community input, especially when we're not always able to design and facilitate that community input. It can really slow a project down, and it can be, if it's not designed well, almost more harm than good. But what I'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 I am thinking anytime we're bringing a new client on and thinking about a rebrand or any big project that's going to have a meaningful impact on their community is when and how much community input should we be building into our design process for this.

[18:20]:

So let's talk about one other, I think kind of top of mind question our listeners probably have, which is, what do you do if you get bad community input? And what I mean by bad is 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 would hoped you were getting. Either that it pointed you in a different direction or it's just generally the reception has been negative to your plan or any work that's done to this point. How have you managed navigating that negative feedback and the balance between there will always be some amount of negative feedback. What's the ratio of good to bad feedback that you're looking for when you're getting community input?

Jonathan Hicken [19:15]:

Gosh, it really, I mean, honestly, I've made decisions on both ends of the spectrum and for better or for worse, where there have been times where I've made the decision to just plow ahead with what I believe, even though the feedback I'm getting may counter that there are other times where I start to evaluate my own thinking and say like, gosh, I was way off on this and my community is giving me a signal that I've made a mistake somewhere. Now I think a lot of that comes down to this question of have I included my community in a way that gives them a chance to express something that they are seeing that I cannot see?

[19:57]:

I think that's a really important sort of strategic screen to making these decisions around who to include on decision making. And for me, a lot of times it comes down to I can't see everything by the nature of my job, there's a limited amount of information I can collect with my 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 I want to include those people in the community collaboration effort because they're seeing something I can't see. And that's ultimately going to be the thing I'm going to be listening to when I confront this conundrum of I'm hearing some feedback that is countered to what I was expecting here, and do those people see something that I can't see or am I seeing the same thing that they're seeing and we just disagree?

Eric Ressler [20:57]:

That's really at the end of the day, that's the purpose of community input. You're going to get a new set of perspectives and experiences then you would otherwise, and that can be helpful. I guess one thing that 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? How do you navigate that?

Jonathan Hicken [21:45]:

Yeah, I'm actually dealing with this situation at this exact moment. There's a big project that I'm working on through my organization, and there's a subset of people who feel very passionately about this, the direction we take on this project. It's a small group of people who have very strong and very valid reasons for believing what they believe. And that caused me a lot of stress and consternation because what I eventually learned for myself is this project, the direction we're taking is ultimately not for them.

[22:19]:

And so having a clear understanding of who my audience is, the impact we're having and who we're serving, and what our unique approach to the problem is, help me clarify for myself, you know what the path forward is not to serve this group, but what I do need to do is I need to pay attention to the underlying reasons that they are so vocal and so emotional about this, and is there a way for me to address that emotion and address that big feeling as a part of my overall ultimate decision that will help them feel seen and acknowledged? And I do think we've found that, but it took me that moment of realizing I'm not doing this for them.

Eric Ressler [23:01]:

So in hindsight, would you include them again if you had it to do over, even though it wasn't for them? Just because that opinion is still a valid opinion?

Jonathan Hicken [23:11]:

I would because ultimately they raised something that ultimately honors a legacy and honors the history of this project, and I think that ultimately is a really important thing to do that I wasn't tracking at the beginning.

Eric Ressler [23:29]:

So even though they're not going to get their way so to speak, it's still been a valuable exercise for you in navigating the overall challenges and opportunities with this project.

Jonathan Hicken [23:38]:

Absolutely.

Eric Ressler [23:39]:

So I think one more thing to say on this, and then I want to give you some time to just add anything that you feel like you'd still would like to cover. I think we need to be aware of this kind of negativity bias. And what I mean by that is that as human beings we pay more attention to and 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 us and influence us way more just by nature of our psychology than the 80% support. So I think that's just something for our listeners to be aware of. Again, not to say you should ignore people, but you should just be aware of are my emotions clouding my judgment because of this negativity bias?

Jonathan Hicken [24:27]:

Yeah. I think ultimately what that comes down to is a sense of for the leader or the person running the project, your own ability 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. And ask yourself, is there a way for me to address those negative emotions, even though that's not going to be the thing that ultimately sways my decision?

Eric Ressler [24:57]:

Right. So any other big tips or takeaways from today you want to make sure listeners hear?

Jonathan Hicken [25:02]:

I think being thoughtful and not being impulsive about collecting community input is the single most important thing that a listener can try to factor into their own work. I think getting into those reactionary, impulsive community collaborations can do a lot of harm, and when thought out and 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.

Eric Ressler [25:31]:

And I think the last thing that maybe we should leave listeners with is, at least in my experience, I've seen this work pretty much on every point along this spectrum. I've seen organizations that are co-creating everything that are extremely democratic in their work, and that can work really well if that culture works for that organization and certain types of organizations that's going to work better for than others. I've also seen 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 you're going to kind of just have to find your way. But I do think it's a worthwhile thing to explore how and when and why do I include my community in my decision making? And if we're going to do that, how do we do that more skillfully and make sure it's not derailing our projects?

Jonathan Hicken [26:15]:

I can't wait to hear listeners' questions and comments about this conversation today.

Eric Ressler [26:19]:

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me, Jonathan. 

Jonathan Hicken:

Thank you, Eric.