A different kind of influencer…
By Anna Northey
It takes more than a nonprofit to make real, meaningful social change happen. It takes much more…
Of course, you are thinking. There are donors and volunteers and employees and government departments and partner organisations and advocacy groups and more. But today I want to focus on one particular part of this big eco-system. And that is the community in which we hope to affect positive change. But drilling down even further, I want to focus on the influencers within these communities who really make it all tick.
These days we have influencers everywhere, from the 70,000-odd self-labelled influencers who dot your LinkedIn feed (see an entertaining synopsis of this kind in The Wall Street Journal) to the trendy-types who get paid to market products to their huge network of Instagram followers. But it’s the influencers within physical communities who really impress.
CEO and co-founder of Kopernik, Toshi Nakamura, recently highlighted an interesting insight about such people who can leverage their status and influence gained through a career in social services to affect change in attitude and behaviour amongst their peers. And they have the selflessness and drive to take it upon themselves to actually get the program work that community development organisations hope to move forward really pumping. Quite frankly, if they weren’t there, not much of what a nonprofit or NGO tries to do would work.
Take a guy I met recently called Pak Eko, for example. He is a regular guy with a family, a home, a job, a dog. He’s an immediately likable, genuine guy. He has a love for jumping on his bike and touring the Sumbanese countryside around him, meeting people, chatting. So, he’s been to the remote communities around him that are off-grid with no access to electricity at all. He knows the struggle the people endure because of this. But Pak Eko is also a guy who has built good connections with local NGOs, government members and village leaders in the region. And he spends much of his own time leveraging these relationships to encourage change and suggest solutions, like the introduction of solar power, to those who can make change happen. It takes time to convince people of the long-term value of solutions like this. But he does it because he believes these solutions will improve people’s lives. If Pak Eko didn’t jump on his bike and reach these communities to help, maybe no one would, well anytime soon.
Or, another example, Pak John from West Timor. He is a respected member of his community who runs a local NGO. He acts with earnestness and good-nature about his plans and aspirations for a better future for those around him. And with local village leaders he has kicked off a grand plan to implement the use of clean water filters en masse for the better health of the entire district. By making an example of one village of 300-odd homes, with a water filter in every home, he hopes to demonstrate the health benefits to neighbouring villages, so that they might follow suit. When people see him using the filter, they trust it. One sip from Pak John can do the job of what any given employee of a nonprofit or NGO stepping in from outside could try to convince people of for years.
Everywhere nonprofits are, there you will also find countless numbers of such brilliant ideas, different approaches, selfless acts and unique stories of influential people. Each taking our initial model and ongoing support structures to build something new and more robust out of it, specifically suited to their needs. And it is great. Because the reality is, we cannot possibly come up with a model to deliver goods and/or services that help to bring people out of the cycle of poverty that will work everywhere. There is no one size fits all and no perfect solution. And it simply cannot work without trust and understanding from within the community.
When we talk about influencers in marketing, it’s not just somebody with scores of followers who are the really powerful ones. Anyone can have a huge list of followers using the right tools and techniques. But the real influence is within the people who have connections with the right groups of people, that have the same values that we do, and in the famous words of one of my favourite influencers Simon Sinek, ‘who believe what we believe’. These influencers built their networks of followers over time by voicing their opinion loud and clear, acting and delivering on ideals and ideas, and building their own credibility. And it’s these people who can say what we’d like to be able to say to the people we want to talk to, but using a louder, stronger voice.
Just like what this kind of influencer means to a brand, to which many of us these days hang off every word, our influencers within the communities in which we work are gold. They are the ones who can truly get things moving because they believe with their heart and soul that there is a better way for the people in their community. They can deliver the knowledge and information behind that belief to their networks in a way that is relevant and meaningful. And when they trust an idea, a product, a person, so does their community. When they say it works, people believe them… they intrinsically trust them. And we, as nonprofits or NGOs or social enterprises, absolutely need these people to get anything off the ground.
This is an abridged version of an article originally published in WhyDev on 23rd August 2016.
