The word “community” is having a moment in our sector right now. It feels like everywhere you turn, someone is talking about community-building and community-based fundraising.
When you dig in, though, it’s clear that the word is overused and casually applied. I believe our current understanding of community is mistaken. As a sector, we need to redefine what it means and how to create it.
Why?
We don’t have the luxury of talking about small tweaks. If we only talk about small tweaks, we’ll come nowhere close to fixing the challenges of our sector. Only by redefining community will we be able to reverse the contracting giving trends we’ve seen in recent years.
What We Get Wrong about Community
Let’s start with what community is not. We often talk about “our community of supporters,” when we really mean people on our email list. Or “the Denver community,” when we mean people who live in Denver. Or “the ALS” community,” when we mean someone with a diagnosis. But these aren’t communities. They’re lists. They’re potential audiences tagged in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. These lists may only have one characteristic in common, which is the sole reason they ended up segmented in a certain way in your files.
We use community as a noun to mean a group of people with a shared attribute. However, that’s not the true essence of community. A community has group dynamics at work among a set of people. They don’t just have something in common but something going on between them.
Community should be considered a verb—not literally, but in the way that it fosters connected constituents. As Xavier Ramey, the CEO of Justice Informed, so eloquently put it during the keynote address at Classy’s recent Collaborative conference: “Community is a noun. Collaboration in community is a verb.” This active participation is what truly creates engagement and connection, ensuring those involved are deeply committed to the cause.
The Demand for Community
But why is rethinking our current definition of community so important? The fact is that our traditional fundraising methods no longer yield the results they once did.
When we rewind and look at our roots in fundraising, a foundational element was the shared experience of coming together around a compelling cause. This was community.
Local clubs, communities of faith, community centers, and volunteerism were fundamental parts of self-identification and where people showed up. People were accountable and invested in the partnership. Then, the digital age expanded the opportunities for organizations to access whole new groups of potential donors.
Community became anyone you could interact with online. Classy was an early mover here, seeing the power of beautiful, scalable experiences as a way to drive funding in whole new ways.
However, amid this transformation, a new reality has emerged: Digitization is breaking down our communities, and people aren’t showing up anymore.
A report from the American Immigration Council found that 74% of Americans reported nonbelonging in their local community. Meanwhile, nonprofit marketers and fundraisers are asked to compensate for a changed society. You’re asked to forge connection, at scale, then translate it to durable organizational support. It’s an impossible job—even for fundraisers.
Generosity Is Generative
The good news is there are places where people are forming communities around a cause and doing it digitally in this new era of fundraising. This is where I look for inspiration.
Classy and GoFundMe merged just over two years ago, and together since our inception, we’ve helped organizations and individuals raise over $30 billion from our community of over 150 million. An important note: This mobilization is largely absent of big splashy marketing calls to action or formal donor engagement plans. It’s engagement born out of connection.
We also have insights that show that once someone gives, they’re more than twice as likely to give again on our platform—across organizations, causes, and campaign types. This is further validated in a recent study from the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Philanthropy Together that found 89% of participants who were part of their giving circle community made charitable donations beyond their contributions through those groups.
People find giving deeply fulfilling—once they’re activated. The challenge we all have is getting them activated in the first place.
So how do we do that?
The Chief Community Officer
I’m challenging all of us to adopt a new theoretical job title: Chief Community Officer.
A Chief Community Officer’s job is to:
- Find people who believe in a mission
- Introduce them to each other
- Build tools and infrastructure to help them activate to accomplish their mission
Our new job description reframes strategies to align with your supporters’ needs, but not in a way that fosters problematic donor-centric fundraising. Instead, it helps us all recenter on the why behind giving in a way that cultivates community.
Donors don’t give because they identify as donors. They give as an expression of who they are and what they want the world to be like. Your nonprofit is a vehicle for them to make the change they want to see in the world.
Our research found that 56% of Gen Zers want to be a part of a greater solution, and almost 40% see donating as a form of self-expression. A contribution by a next-generation donor is a declaration that they want to be active participants in your cause. What is our response to that hand raise? All too often it’s a thank you and a tax receipt.
I’ll share a personal example on how this has come to life for me. I’m a monthly donor to the Innocence Project. A few months ago, I walked into my mother’s house wearing an Innocence Project sweatshirt, only to have her exclaim that she was also a monthly donor. At that moment, we realized we are both advocates for the same cause, and getting a tax receipt was the furthest thing from our minds.
That’s powerful.
But what do my mom and I do with that happy discovery, and what do nonprofits do with that energy?
Fostering Community
How can we, as nonprofits, help our communities find each other? How do we support them to activate once they connect? And how do we allow them to connect in authentic ways that bring their communities along with them?
I believe that the next chapter of community formation means the loss of organizational control. In this chapter, your donors will champion your brand and bring their communities with them, even if it means throwing out your highly curated, branded playbook.
Does that make you nervous? It’s natural to want to control everything that happens to our organization because we care so deeply about it, but in your new role as the Chief Community Officer, you must usher in the new world of the connected constituent. This isn’t the playbooked fundraiser. This is about letting our supporters run with ideas that resonate with them.
I’ll share one example from Movember, an organization focused on changing the face of men’s health. One of their collegiate supporters wanted to fundraise for their cause by dressing up as a certain part of the male anatomy to make a statement on campus. Movember’s response was, “Go for it.” Not only did this individual raise a ton of money but he inspired fraternity chapters in several other states to support Movember through their own events. In one chapter, they raised over $400,000 in less than 24 hours.
These are the stories that inspire me as Classy and GoFundMe look for ways our technology can help nonprofits become facilitators rather than prescribe rigid frameworks for engagement. We recently launched Impact Links on GoFundMe, which are unique links for individual donors who give on the platform. It allows donors to a GoFundMe campaign to see, grow, and celebrate their community’s impact in real time. All the results are pulled into a unique donor impact dashboard so donors can see the power of their activation. It puts real visibility in the hands of the donor and allows those who wouldn’t fundraise in a traditional peer-to-peer model to understand the impact of their network.
This is just one way we’re thinking about building the technology to help nonprofits become facilitators rather than dictators, helping engaged communities connect with each other and our missions.
This kind of change is uncomfortable. With the collective wisdom, passion, and creativity of this community, we can turn the decline of the small donor into the birth of the connected constituent. We can create a world of Chief Community Officers that change hopelessness into action.
