Turning an Audience into a Community
Looking at the tools we use today — social media, chat, email, and more — to think about a more engaged and fruitful digital experience around community.
The Bldg App is an online bulletin to work with your community and turn ideas into public action. Our Medium page explores the core ideas and research behind our work, partnerships, and vision for communal impact.
The term “engagement” has surged to the forefront of public debate in recent years, being upheld as a defining factor of a new project or initiative’s success. Today, a public decision without engagement seems almost despotic and a deep insult to the people it affects. We saw Amazon pushed out of NYC for this very reason and it has become clear for any organization that risking no engagement is risking the feasibility of their work.
And yet, the term is so incredibly vague that even when we try to pursue engagement, there is no real consensus on what that means and the results are hardly convincing. Equally as subjective is the value of that engagement, and what someone can reasonably expect from working closely with a community. What level of engagement should there be? How many or what percentage are needed to engage? Is it a one-way engagement or a dialogue? What do we get out of this engagement? Does this happen once? Twice? And is there a way to ensure our engagement has particular outcomes?
When we consider the various ways engagement could go or what they could produce, our current tools seem sorely and suddenly lacking. Our communities seem sidelined as passive audiences due to there being no impactful way of interacting with them.
The People Behind the Numbers
The current landscape of digital tools has turned engagement into a numbers game. With the status quo of Twitter, Facebook, Slack, MailChimp, and Instagram, organizations are pressured to amass Likes, Follows, Subscriptions, and Upvotes as the only concrete metric of their social impact. Again, this is a very passive relationship with the individuals and communities that are supposed “supporters” of their missions. Social media is notoriously one-directional and the emojis, comments, and even direct messages rarely amount to anything more than surface-level statistics.
A clear case of this is the ratio of social media followings to their level of engagement, such as the number of Likes an organization’s media might receive. Let’s take a prime example of an A-tier institution here in New York, the Museum of Modern Art.
Posted about two weeks ago, this their pinned tweet at the top of their page, and is actually a piece of content and program that could be of real interest to their follower base. It stands currently at just over 200 likes, amounting to a 0.00004% of their 5.3 million global following. In the environment of Twitter, this is an abysmal ratio and the vast follower count might as well be produced from a bot farm.
Does the museum boast a massive following? Yes. Are there millions around the world that understand its inherent value? Yes. Are those supporters engaged in any meaningful way? I’m not so sure.
And while the MoMA has more than enough institutional support to not focus on this limited engagement, the situation becomes much more dire for a small or new organization without that legacy. Compared to what these groups need — donations, manpower, in-kind support, partnerships, etc. — a social media following seems insignificant. We realize very quickly that social media is only partially suited for the engagement needs of different missions and organizations. A great majority of these types of groups don’t have a book to sell or sponsored content to at least monetize attention. Instead, they have a baseline mission to keep their work alive and thriving. How they maintain that is the primary concern.
Following From the Front
But what if that engagement could be more meaningful? What if the party that is engaging and the community that is engaged can both get much more out of the interaction than a quick Upvote? What if that audience could transform into a community of supporters that could provide valuable services, know-how, manpower, and more?
In our development of the Bldg App, we’ve attempted to make a clear distinction between an ‘audience’ and a ‘community’. An audience is what we’ve described until this point, an indistinguishable group there to receive information. A community on the other hand is composed of willing individuals who are mission-aligned and capable of providing even more than you expect of them in a given moment. A community is active and contributing, even when there is no solicitation, because they believe their engagement is necessary to the success of an idea. The real challenge is creating an environment where this definition of engagement is possible and a community can both steward some of the responsibilities and attend to the needs of an organization.
Digital Engagement has to become Real Engagement
As a kicker, the current state of social distancing and remote working are making the latest strategies of in-person engagement almost impossible to continue. There are far fewer community board meetings, townhalls, organizational workshops, etc. These had massive barriers to entry and issues of reach even at the best of times with low turnout and few results, all even more threatened by social distancing. Community activities are slowly beginning to reboot online with webinars and slideshows, but these are failing to uphold the two-way dialogue that is needed in so many initiatives.
Tech companies are stepping up to create digital environments for what was once physical. Internal organization has some strong contenders — Notion, Miro, and Taskade are some of our favorites — and now it’s time to create outward engagement for communities and mutual support.
The silver lining is that the current crisis and need to engage digitally is encouraging a reevaluation of how engagement was done in the past and how we can do better in the future. Sometimes you don’t realize what you have until it’s gone, and those past interactions are really showing their value today.
We’re committed to this and want to hear how you’ve navigated the last several months. What has been your state of engagement? How are you working with your audience? What kind of value are you hoping to create with your community?
Website: bldg.app
Twitter: @bldg_app
Mailing List: Link
Contact: hello@bldgblox.io
