Why Everyone Can’t Be in Your Nonprofit’s Community

If everyone is in your community, doors wide open, you just have a crowd with no shared idea, diluted passion and a cacophony of voices. The most vibrant communities make clear what they are about and ask community members to subscribe to those ideas. Not everyone is invited or even allowed in. 

In the book, “The Business of Belonging,” author David Spinks wrote, “Communities are groups of people with a common interest, a common belief, a common set of values … which means there will be people who share that commonality, and people who don’t.”

He continued, “Don’t feel guilty when excluding people, because it’s the exclusion that makes members feel safe, knowing that the people in the room are those they can trust, and whose values they align with.” 

An example involves the Virginia Council of CEOs, a group Katrina was part of and led at one point. To enter the group, you had to produce $1 million in revenue and have at least 10 employees. Everyone in the group had at least that baseline, and so we likely had some challenges in common. 

It was important to have a good understanding of who was in the room and their problems, but it was also important to know who wasn’t there. There was no one there who would not understand when Katrina said something like: 

• “I had to fire someone today, and I feel like hell.” 
• “Payroll was tough this time.” 
• “Sometimes I just want to run away.”  

There was no danger anything would be said that others wouldn’t have the experience to understand and empathize with. That made Katrina feel safe and understood. 

Psychologists say that trust is the opposite of fear. In a fear-less situation your trust is high. You are confident. You feel good. You are comfortable. You want more of that experience. When you’re in a group of individuals you identify with, you think, “People like us do things like this.” (Thanks Seth Godin!) There are a lot of people who don’t do “things like this.” If they are in your group, you can’t build group trust. You can’t make assumptions about their beliefs and attitudes, and you don’t feel comfortable. The social norms are unclear, uncomfortable. Your engagement declines. 

If there are people in your community who don’t share your values, you don’t feel safe. You don’t stay.

Excluding people feels bad when you work in social good. Exclusion doesn’t feel like who we are. But this is not about social good, this is about the operating system of the typical human. Evolutionary psychology makes this true; we are evolved to trust our in-group to stay safe and survive. If we can’t feel that trust, gained through shared ideas, we are uncomfortable and feel unsafe, a vestigial survival response.

If this still feels weird, you only have to look at bad actors (terrorists, gangsters, drug gangs, etc.) to see the power of it. They only include people deeply committed to their ideas; they strictly exclude — sometimes by killing them — those they want to exclude. In these cases, when you’re in, you’re in — sometimes for life. It’s an extreme example, but directionally illuminating. 

We’ve written many times on in-group/out-group phenomenon. One of the things about identifying strongly with the in-group (the included) is that you will ridicule and degrade the out-group (the excluded). This is what social media companies have found is most effective to keep you plugged in, by emphasizing your in-group, and fostering your natural tendency to degrade the out-group. Turns out this generates a lot of emotional energy — the thing that keeps you on the site. Without the “exclusion and out-group degrading” part, this wouldn’t work. 

How do we in social good make use of this human pattern of behavior?

• Decide who is in your community and how you will include them. 
• Decide who is not in your community and how you will exclude them, without being a huge jerk. 
• Decide how the community will behave; what are the rules of the road? 
• Nurture the community with time, tools and budget. Acquisition is easier with a clear-cut community with standards, also, retention even easier. 
• Reap the rewards of community members’ satisfaction: trust, revenue and buy-in to all community activities. 

The preceding blog was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.