(photo credit)

We held a great Online Community Building Training session recently with the staff of an association we work with.

During the session, we began with a simple question: “What are your Community Goals“?

We listed some obvious ones:

- to empower volunteer leaders?
- to involve open volunteers?
- to attract new volunteers?
- to accomplish more?
- to make communicating easier?

!and asked them to take 5 minutes to come up with their own. The resulting answers were incredibly thoughtful (and some were even indicative of a pretty radical shift in how an organization might communicate in the future), and I’d like to share them here with you. See what you think. In no particular order:

- to create better work through more feedback, more open participation, more voices
- to keep better track of overall committee tasks and objectives
- for member recruitment / retention, especially specific segments who need support
- to meet people where they are
- to communicate faster, do work faster, accomplish things faster
- to level the playing field in terms of the generation gap or older more experienced voices versus newbies (= give everyone an equal voice)
- to improve outreach, communications, engagement
- to give people a place to go
- to make the organization feel warm and inviting
- to have a safe space for open, honest communication between staff and members (somewhere people can air feedback openly and get a response, instead of doing it outside the org)
- to get out of the way (as staff) and let work happen
- to spread the wealth, and cut down on volunteer burnout (of the most engaged volunteers)
- to assist members who can’t travel due to budget cuts – get them involved in a myriad other ways that does not require face-to-face presence
- to give new members (especially, but everyone else too) a successful experience of the organization from the get-go.

In the car on the way home I thought of some more. How about:

- to give members ownership in the organization?
- to have a place to show off all the good work going on?
- to have a place to invite new members in to start exploring volunteering activities, getting to know people with similar interests and participating in the work of the organization in small easy ways?

As a group, as they go along, they will want to refine and prioritize their goals – but what a fantastic way to start. What about you? Can you think of others? Have you gone through this kind of simple “big picture†exercise?

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