Rethinking community: channels, platforms or ecosystems?
This is the second blog in a two part series on the future of communities. You can find the first part here. That article discussed how communities are changing and how traditional charities might not be set up to deal with the challenge of serving communities in the future. In this, we will outline strategic responses that charities are taking.
Many established charities work with fixed, often implicit, definitions of their communities. This can lock them into one way of thinking and behaving. As communities become more fluid, more open, and less 'controllable', charities will need to find new ways of working.
Many organisations - not just mission-driven ones - are responding to the challenge of more fluid and open communities. In working with our clients we see different responses. They are trying to build trust and serve emerging communities in new ways, that we have sorted into a typology of responses that we call Channel, Platform and Ecosystem models.
The choice between these models often depends on a number of factors: how urgent is the case for change, how different are the communities that need to be served (looking at difference in all its forms: including size, shape, behaviour, duration, capability, resources, interests and affinities) , as well as asking questions about power and the level of change the charity is ready to tolerate. Our observation is that in most cases while a Channel model might require the least internal cultural and organistional change, the biggest opportunities for impact are in Platform and Ecosystem approaches.
Channel: a smarter broadcast model
In this approach, charities focus on improving their understanding of where their communities are and become more agile in responding to their needs. The aim of this model is to be smarter about where charities find their audiences. If audiences are more diverse and fragmented, so the thinking goes, charities need more agility and innovation in communications to reach people in a way that suits them.
This approach retains a centralised, top-down mentality, where the charity continues to “do the work” of delivering the mission, making all the big choices about risk and resources. There is limited cultural change, nor shifts in power. There are still risks of bottlenecks and being spread too thin, because ultimately the charity is still taking responsibility for all the important choices. That might be reasonable when communities are similar and behave in similar ways, but becomes less tenable when communities are different from each other in size, character, behaviours etc.
Channel: Would you serve your communities better if you just added more channels?
Platform: empowering communities
The platform approach involves giving communities more access to information, tools, and resources, and handing over power to the community members. This approach encourages openness, decentralisation, and transparency, requiring a significant cultural shift within the organisation.
It means relinquishing some control and empowering communities to take charge of their own interests. The opportunity is to empower everyone who shares their mission, more equitably and at scale. It should lead to greater inclusion, more reach and more community-focussed innovation, but requires a different attitude towards risk and control from charity leaders.
Platform: What would communities build for themselves if you gave them your toys?
Ecosystem: building a healthy system
In the Ecosystem approach, charities actively position and accept their role as just one actor within a broader system. They have particular strengths, skills and relationships, but recognise that others play important roles too. They actively invest in other groups, communities and organisations to create an ecosystem of peers, working together to achieve common goals.
Their vision and mission might stay the same, but the focus is on facilitating the ecosystem rather than specific planned, owned outputs. This is the most appropriate model for accommodating many different types of communities with different needs and behaviours. The opportunity for impact is to shape and grow a healthy ecosystem. However, this trades impact for control in a way that can sometimes be uncomfortable for more risk-averse organisations.
Many charities are trying to work within difficult conditions - falling budgets, increasing demand and limited capacity. In this context, it can be hard to think beyond defending the status quo. Building an ecosystem is way to think about moving beyond the parameters of the current system and think about the future. By investing in new ideas, partnerships and experiments, an ecosystem approach can help invent and sustain a new system.
Ecosystem: What if your job was creating a healthy habitat for others to succeed?
Exploring the models
Each of these models is grounded in a different way of thinking about the challenge of future communities and their needs. All require different attitudes to levels of risk, control and leadership – and each of them demand a different set of skills and competencies. Any of them require the ability to live with ambiguity.
Power and cultural change
Opening up, as required by the Platform and Ecosystem responses, demands empowering communities and giving up control. That can be culturally difficult. Many charities might choose a Channel response to avoid the cultural change required. If communities are becoming complex, self-defined, and volatile, then it will be increasingly difficult to serve them. This is more than a problem of reach. In order to serve them, charities will need to do lots of orgasnisational and cultural work. Channel is more of what you do today, faster. It doesn’t address fundamental change.
This is deliberately disruptive thinking. The more stable the definition of a community, the easier it is to design a response – create a team, build a campaign, offer a service – but that fixed mindset will miss many other definitions and types of community formation, and opportunities for impact. There are real risks in only adopting a Channel based response.
While the Channel approach may be the default response for many charities due to its familiarity, the Platform and Ecosystem approaches offer genuinely innovative ways of operating and opportunities for impact. They most likely offer the best chance to stay relevant, build trust, drive innovation, and to achieve a mission at scale.
This is an emerging conversation for us and these are live questions for many of our clients. We would welcome your feedback on this. If you would like to talk further about these ideas and how Firetail could help you, please get in touch with rachel@firetail.co.uk.