Signs You’ve Lost Touch with Your Community

Are you losing touch with your community? It might be time to reconnect.

As social impact leaders, we pour our hearts and souls into our work. But sometimes, in the rush to create change, we can drift away from the very people we're trying to serve.

In our latest episode of Designing Tomorrow, we tackle this critical issue head-on. We explore the subtle signs that you might be losing connection with your community and offer practical strategies to rebuild those vital relationships.

We dive deep into:

• The telltale signs that you're out of sync with your audience
• Why staying connected is crucial for your organization's success
• Simple yet powerful ways to reconnect, starting today
• How to create a culture that celebrates community engagement

Whether you're leading a nonprofit, social enterprise, or mission-driven company, this episode is essential listening. We break down exactly how to stay in tune with your community without compromising your vision or watering down your impact.

Don't let disconnection derail your mission. Tune in now and learn how to harness the power of authentic community relationships to take your work to the next level.

Episode Highlights:

• [00:09] Staying connected with your community
• [01:43] The first sign of losing touch: stumbling when explaining who you serve and what problem you're solving
• [04:25] The second sign: not knowing what your community likes or wants to improve about your product or service
• [07:28] The third sign: feeling nervous about engaging with or hearing feedback from your community
• [08:13] The fourth sign: hearing disparaging remarks about your community from your team
• [10:12] Using community input to guide their design and strategy process
• [14:16] Community defined as building true relationships through authentic dialogue, beyond transactional methods
• [15:01] Importance of conversations with customers and not relying solely on structured methods
• [16:20] Create community groups for continuous feedback and deeper relationships
• [17:04] Use of journey mapping as a way to understand and connect with customers
• [18:03] Informal check-ins, like emails or coffee chats, to maintain community engagement
• [21:06] Measure organizational success based on how the community defines its own success
• [23:32] Organizational benefits of reducing churn and developing deeper relationships
• [24:00] Use community feedback can help to shape organizational value and impact

Quotes:

• "The best social impact brands are deeply in touch with the needs of their community, understanding the problem they’re solving." - Jonathan Hicken [00:09]
• "Another sign you’ve lost touch: not knowing what your customers like best about your product or service." - Jonathan Hicken [04:25]
• "Even negative feedback stings less when you've built a culture around receiving it." - Eric Ressler [08:02]
• "Some clients come to us with rich insights about their community, while others are nearly starting from scratch." - Eric Ressler [10:35]
• "When we talk about what community really means, it's about building true relationships and dialogue with the people you serve." - Eric Ressler [14:16]
• "As a leader, you need to be talking to your customers regularly to develop those authentic relationships." - Jonathan Hicken [15:01]
• "It’s about building a culture that celebrates staying in touch with your customers, not just you as a leader, but your entire team." -Jonathan Hicken [19:29]
• "Listening and being responsive to community feedback is critical to doing your work well. It’s simple but not easy." - Eric Ressler [24:26]

Resources:

• Journey Mapping 101
• Community Building Might Not Feel Like Your Core Work, But It Should Be
• Brand Building: An Authentic Approach to Growing a Fierce, Loyal, and Supportive Community
• Embrace the Power of Surveys to Inform Big Decisions
• The Right Way to Get Community Input on a Rebrand

Transcript:

Jonathan Hicken [00:00]:

Eric Designing Tomorrow's season two with you has really sparked a lot of thinking around what makes a great social impact brand and how it separates or distinguishes itself from the pack. And one thing I believe deeply is that the best social impact brands are deeply in touch with the needs of their customers or their community or their participants deeply understand the problem that they're solving and are constantly in touch with their community about the best way to solve that problem. So today I want to offer our listeners some ways to evaluate whether or not maybe 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. How does that sound? That

Eric Ressler [00:48]:

Sounds super

Jonathan Hicken [00:49]:

Interesting. Let's do

Jonathan Hicken [01:14]:

There are four and probably more ways that you might start to suspect that you personally or your organization has lost touch with your community. And when I say losing touch with your community, what I mean by that is you are no longer deeply understanding this dynamic of what problem they have, who they are and how you're solving that problem and how to continuously improve on solving that problem. And 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 listeners, but that's what we're going to be digging into right now. The first sign that I think 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 you 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?

Eric Ressler [02:22]:

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 their mission is, how they're helping their community? Yeah. I am 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, right? 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. I think this idea of who's your community, what's the problem that you solve for them, obviously one we've talked about in many different ways throughout the course of this season, still very important. And I think there are times where I ask this question and the answer I get back does throw up a little bit of a red or orange flag that's just like, oh, they don't really understand as much as I hope that they would about their community and the problem that they solve. This is going to require some work for us to unearth that for them or with them,

Jonathan Hicken [03:26]:

And for executive directors or social impact leaders and CEOs. One way to test this first is to ask yourself, but also go around your team or to your board or to other people in your organization and ask the same question and see if you are getting the same answer or at least similarly sounding answers. And if you're getting a big spectrum of responses, there's probably a disconnect with your community happening.

Eric Ressler [03:52]:

So 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, oh, there's some work to do around alignment of mission and vision for this organization.

Jonathan Hicken [04:25]:

Another sign that you may have lost touch with your community is that you, as the executive director or CEO or leader in a social impact organization, you don't have a clear sense about what your customers like best about your product or service and what they want most to change or improve about your product or service. That needs to be ultra clear in your mind at all times. And if it's not, I think that's a sign you're losing touch.

Eric Ressler [04:51]:

Yeah, I mean, I think this is really great information for us to have when we're doing the kind of work that we do with our clients and just kind of deeply understanding what is your offer, what is your value offer or your value add to the community that you serve, which is a slightly different way of thinking about it than what kind of impact are you making? But I think it's a great way to frame it because it starts to unearth new perspectives and new insights then just like, oh, well, 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? I think that kind of honest reflection can be really helpful as you're trying to move things forward for your mission.

Jonathan Hicken [05:37]:

Some companies that are not in the social impact space that do this well I find frankly are SAS tech-based startups who are constantly asking their customers about features or bugs, and they're factoring in then 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 I really love and I use the most versus the ones that don't exist yet, but I want them and will keep me more engaged with the product over time?

Eric Ressler [06:11]:

Yeah, this is something that I've experienced in a negative way where we've used products or services and you see these community discussion boards and sometimes even the ability for people to upvote or vote on particular features. And you see these 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 organizations shipping these new features and you're like, but what about this thing everyone's telling you we want this. Why can't you just build that? I'm not going to name names here. It's so tempting to, but I'm thinking about that kind of corollary with the social impact space. And I think if we had more even community discussion boards like that in our space for our constituents and our supporters, that would be pretty interesting.

Jonathan Hicken [06:59]:

If nothing else you are. 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. Another sign that you may have lost touch with your community is that you feel nervous to talk to your community or to your customers, or you feel nervous to read the feedback that they might be writing about you or for you.

Eric Ressler [07:28]:

Yeah, that would not be good. I 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. I mean, I think, look, we've all been on the receiving side of difficult or honorary feedback and it doesn't feel good. So I think there's a natural human tendency to just like, oh, I 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 I 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.

Jonathan Hicken [08:13]:

I think 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 when it's gotten to the point where actually your customers or your community are treated as a burden within your internal culture. I think that is a really bad sign when you are working with clients after they've made the decision to commit to working with you, do you ever find that happening and do you need to correct that?

Eric Ressler [08:47]:

I've heard this come up for certain organizations that serve a broad set of community stakeholders where again, there's this kind of like, oh boy, there's this one segment of our community that has a really vocal opposition to this new program, or there's this kind of almost casual eye rolling about a certain segment. I haven't really heard it come up as the community at large, oh no, we have to deal with our community that we help. That's not something that really comes up too much. I would say that 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 we're working with, that does happen, and I've seen it dealt with in different ways. That to us is kind of a, I don't want to say a red flag, but it's a point of interest for us to, I'm always making a note and we need to dig into that deeper and understand, should we be listening to these people? Is there some kind of insightful data here that we should be incorporating into our creative strategy or not? And so that is something that, especially for organizations that have a big broad community, a diverse community, I frankly have seen. Yes.

Jonathan Hicken [10:12]:

So these are four ways that from my vantage point as an executive director, these are ways that I am paying attention to whether or not I or my organization have lost touch with our community and the people that we serve. I'm fascinated to hear how you evaluate whether or not an organization has lost touch or is losing touch from your vantage point as an agency

Eric Ressler [10:34]:

Owner. I mean, one of the things that we often do when bringing a new client on, in our discovery work and our onboarding work is we think about that period of our relationship as knowledge transfer. And I think about it even more through this metaphor of we just want to be this giant sponge soaking up as much information as possible within reason. And some clients come to us and they have a lot of data and insights and stories and anecdotes about their community to the point that we really get a good sense of who their community is, what they value, what their motivations are, what their barriers are, how we might break down their community into discrete audiences. And other times we feel kind of like we're starting almost from scratch there. And that is a difficult scenario to be in as an agency trying to advise on strategies for design and branding and communication.

[11:29]:

And I think sometimes clients just need help with that, right? 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 or because 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, then we have to start to lean on tools like surveys. I know surveys are not always your favorite methodology, but we use them. But even more so like interviews, I don't want to use the word focus group, but meetings 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.

Jonathan Hicken [12:21]:

Well, I'm delighted that you're helping guide social impact leaders through that process because I think I truly believe that staying in touch with your community and your customers is fundamental to being able to deliver the most excellent version of the impact that your organization promises. What I'm concerned about or what I would not want to have happen is that people walk away from this conversation and start to attempt to get in touch with customers in ways that I think are ineffective. You mentioned one of them already surveys, so let's talk a little bit about what I think being in touch with your customer looks like and what it does not look like. So if you're thinking to yourself, gosh, it's really time I get in touch with my community, I'm going to get to it. Here are some things that I think getting in touch with your community is not

Eric Ressler [13:07]:

Okay.

Jonathan Hicken [13:08]:

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

Eric Ressler [13:29]:

I actually agree with you, and I think 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, around even the response to the survey can be interesting for us to see what percentage of survey respondents actually take the time to finish filling out the survey. And of course, a lot of that has to do with how we design the survey and 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 I agree that if I were the leader at a social impact organization or a community manager, whatever the position might be, that's in charge of staying in touch with the community, just sending out a quarterly survey or a monthly survey that is not community building.

[14:15]:

And I think at the end of the day when we talk about what actually is even community when we use that word, I really think this comes down to building true relationships and dialogue with the people that you are serving and the people who are helping you power your mission. And I don't think that approaching that in ways that might be considered transactional in a survey might be kind of considered a transactional way, 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, which I think is an important distinction.

Jonathan Hicken [15:00]:

I think that's brilliant. So let's go there. What does it look like to be in touch with your community in a meaningful, deeper way? And I think the first is having conversations. I mean, really, truly 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 customers regularly. And I mean, whatever format works for you, this doesn't need to be structured. This don't need to hire consultants to go do focus groups. No disrespect, you can just go out and talk to people and ask them these simplest questions, and it doesn't need to take a massive amount of your day. You've got lots of other important work to do, but that regular drumbeat of connection with your customer is going to help you ultimately deeply understand their needs and develop those authentic relationships that's going to give you an insight to what's working and what's not that no survey ever could

Eric Ressler [15:56]:

Agree. And I would say the way I've seen this work best is when organizations build some kind of community stakeholder group that they regularly check in with over the course of a year or even two years. And I know that's a big ask, right? That's essentially might as well ask them to be on the board, right? At some level in terms of time commitment, maybe not in terms of how they show up in other ways, but I think that that kind of deepening relationship approach where you're not just asking them kind of one-off and then you get that data and then you just kind of move on, but continuously checking in. And that way you can start to see how your efforts are moving in the right direction or the wrong direction with the same individual over time. So I've seen that work really well. Have you ever used that?

Jonathan Hicken [16:42]:

I've used that and I've used that in conjunction with this idea of creating a journey map. So that's one way that I know I'm proactively staying in touch with my customers is having a few people that I'm regularly in touch with and regularly getting feedback from. And 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 I use is something called a journey map where to most deeply understand my customer's needs or my community's needs, I plot out all the different touch points that an individual might have with my organization, and I identify where I may earn that person's trust and engagement or lose it and lose their trust and engagement. And I identify why I'm going to deepen the relationship or lose the relationship. What are the barriers? What are the problems at each of these steps? And just going through that exercise alone is helping me clarify my own thinking about who my customers are and what they need. And I highly recommend that for any executive leader at a social impact organization to go through a journey mapping exercise, we can link to some resources in the show notes because that is an empathy building exercise in and of itself.

Eric Ressler [18:02]:

I want to just kind of underline the point that you made earlier that this does not need to be a crazy complicated thing that requires consultants, that requires, even with a journey map language that sounds kind of like fancy, maybe even intimidating. I really think 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. So is that, yeah, casual conversations over coffee, great. Is it sending short one-on-one emails to folks and saying, Hey, how are things going? What are you thinking about right now? What are you struggling with? How might we help you interacting through social channels with your followers and taking the time to read and respond to comments and opening a dialogue there? 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.

Jonathan Hicken [18:57]:

And it's not just about us as leaders or executive directors, CEOs, you name it, that are staying in touch with our community or our customers. I 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, spending their time doing the same thing and being in touch with the customers or your community in the same way that you're holding yourself to now, that can be easier said than done, and especially in smaller nonprofit organizations or smaller groups where there's just a constant grind. And so you as an organizational leader need to decide what to deprioritize in order to prioritize time spent with customers. 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 you as 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 customer.

Eric Ressler [20:00]:

What this makes me think of as you're describing that, is this mental picture that comes into my brain that the blurrier the line is between your organization and the broader community, the better. If there is a hard divide there or a canyon between your organization doing the work behind the scenes for the community, and they are this other group, to me that feels like a bad sign. You're not in touch with them, you're losing touch with them. And even beyond that, there's no coherence between this natural organic discussion and relationship that should be built. Does that mental model work for you?

Jonathan Hicken [20:36]:

Absolutely. It makes me think of a concept in philanthropy where you don't want to position yourself to a donor as the in-between, 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. And so absolutely, this is something that I think about frequently in my work. So another thing that I 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. So that is where I think you're really unlocking true value is when you understand a customer saying, I'm using this product or this service because it delivers me X, whether that's a tangible outcome or an emotional outcome or whatever. If you can start to measure your own organization's success by how your community defines success for themselves, I think you've reached the mountaintop of being in touch with your community. Do you see this as a way that social impact organizations are measuring success for themselves today?

Eric Ressler [22:10]:

Sometimes. Yeah. And I think 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, we've talked about in a couple episodes already, is helping to define audience segments for our customers. And the way that I think about that is really looking at this community as a big pie and what are the slices that make up that pie? And for each of those slices, one of the exercises that we go through is trying to deeply understand 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? And then what are some of the obstacles that might be getting in the way of your organization collaborating with that slice of the pie? So it's not exactly the way that you described it, but I think it's really coming from the same place.

Jonathan Hicken [22:59]:

Ultimately, I think any social impact organization who stays in touch with their customer or stays in touch with their community is setting themselves up for really important business outcomes. That's the “so what” behind this discussion today is why does it matter that we're staying in touch with our community? And ultimately, I think the biggest reason is that it is about deepening relationships and reducing churn of those relationships, whether that's a philanthropic churn or a participation churn or a buyer churn, the more we're in touch with our customers, I think the most profound impact is keeping people engaged with our organizations for a longer period of time. I'd also say that of course, it's helping develop deeper, more meaningful relationships. It could be increasing revenues, and I really do think ultimately it's going to help you build a better product or service. Are there any other benefits that I'm not mentioning to constantly staying in touch with your community?

Eric Ressler [23:58]:

I mean, I think in the business world, there's this concept in this terminology around market feedback. You have these ideas, you're building a product or a service or you're selling something. And the true test of your success beyond just whether or not you're making money, is the market feedback. 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 I think could be translated and should be translated to some degree 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 let's just say your value. So let's call it maybe 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?

[24:47]:

And I think that listening and being responsive to that feedback is absolutely critical to doing your work well. And sometimes we get so focused with our blinders around like, well, this is our mission, this is our vision. We're on the track to do that. We're focusing on that, that we lose sight of, well, how's everyone feeling about how that's going and the people especially that we care about. And I think it can be easy to lose sight of that. It's one of those things that's simple but not easy to lose sight of. And so I like a lot of these ideas that you've brought to the table around some signals that maybe 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 kind of move your mission forward.

Jonathan Hicken [25:28]:

So if you're just sending out surveys, you're just throwing some testimonials from customers up in an email campaign here or there 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 a very simple way. And so I hope that our listeners get to it right away. I think that's going to be it for today, Eric. 

Eric Ressler [25:55]:

Awesome. Thank you, Jon.