Sustainable communities
Communities have always fascinated me. They’ve been key to my education and of great support on my entrepreneurship path. Yet none of them ever really lasted, even though at their peak they were positively impacting a lot of people.
In my current residency as and entrepreneur and researcher at Hogeschool Arnhem en Nijmegen I, together with a team of entrepreneurship and communications researchers, have an opportunity to dig into this problem that’s been floating around me for so long. What causes community collapse?
Imploding communities
I’ve witnessed a couple of implosions:
The community identity is hijacked making core members feel excluded (eg. corporate and consulting interests moving into creative communities)
A poor design and execution on community events leaving members empty handed
When the community’s initiator leaves and with that the community’s impetus
Particularly the last one is nasty. Community leaders often have to take most of the initiative to keep communities alive. When this goes too much at their own expense, they tend to leave.
Experienced community people like David Spinks warn about this dynamic with aspiring community managers. You have to really like doing it, and be a bit crazy, because you’re going to be “it” all the time.
Community satisfaction
Satisfaction seems to be a key word for building sustainable communities. Both members, as well as the initiator(s) need to be satisfied about how the community works and what it delivers.
But what delivers satisfaction? What variables do you need to take into account? So far, I’m considering the following components, which I’ll be exploring further in my research.
Sense of Community
A satisfied community fosters purpose and belonging. A scientific paper by McMillan and Chavis from 1986 unpacks this illusive sense of community. The authors provide 3 factors that contribute to satisfaction:
Belonging - Do members experience inclusion? Of being a part of an environment where they feel at home?
Influence - Does the community matter to the world? Do members feel that they matter to the group? And that they have a meaningful contribution to it?
Shared experience - Is there common ground between the people that are part of the group?
Aside from describing the flag that attracts people to group in a community, this definition at the same time provides a smart way for marking the boundary of a community, between that which is part of the community and what is not.
Quality of interaction
Communities need great interaction amongst members to provide them with value. This is about people who are present, stories that are shared and connections that are made.
If members can’t meet on (enough) events and/or if the formats fail to facilitate desired interaction, then community dynamics fizzle, even for communities with a strong sense of purpose.
Relating to community satisfaction, the question is here: Do events facilitate connection and do members get what they came for?
Responsibility
This touches on the organisation and rules of the community. For community members, the relation between responsibility and community satisfaction is a balance between the investment they make in community dynamics vs the value that they get. If members’ required contribution is burdensome, then the rewards will need to be solid and high enough to warrant the effort.
One part of responsibility is in upkeep of the community. It’s about questions like who can lead the next event? Who can help out to mobilise new members? Who has time to find sponsors? If it’s always the same people standing up, they will not at some point. If upkeep is shared over different people, then that creates a healthier dynamic by spreading the burden.
Another part of responsibility relates to initiative. This is more about taking leadership over a new development for the community, as opposed to contributing to its upkeep.
I was moved to add this factor by another paper I read by Bosse et al. (2023) about the relation between stakeholder management and entrepreneurship. In this paper, the authors describe the role of an entrepreneur as someone who takes initiative and a leading responsibility in community management. Because they think there is an opportunity to seize from doing so. This fits to my view that communities’ health depends on such entrepreneurial initiative. People who are willing to spend time and effort to lead the building or building out of the community’s foundation.
Satisfaction and community sustainability
If members are satisfied with a buzzing community, then it means that the community has a clear flag around which people congregate, there are fruitful interactions amongst each other and the responsibilities of helping to organise the community and taking initiative are shared amongst a wide group of members.
My next step will be in making such a framework operational to test this idea of satisfaction on different communities. The main hypothesis is that communities with a higher satisfaction rating are more sustainable and those with lower rating face threats to their existence. I’m also keen to see whether there are differences in responses between people in the core group of a community and those that are outside of it.
The framework will hopefully give some guidance and tools for interventions that communities can take to strengthen themselves.
If you’re interested in this topic, and would like early access to our findings and tools, or perhaps to participate in this research with your community or by commenting/adding to the research questions, then I hope to hear from you!