What is Community Activation ?
Community Activation is a type of community engagement, building, and management that is based on a community-centered approach. The goal is to empower the community, so it can self-mobilize, self-organize, and determine the best way to reach its own goals.
Most community management is conducted through a top-down approach that emphasizes the community manager as the main decision-maker and enabler for making things happen in a community. In contrast, the Community Activation process focuses on creating organizational structures and an environment of interactions that empower the community to manage, direct, develop, and implement itself. Community managers seek to lead from behind by pushing themselves out of the center, and creating more space for community members to engage and lead.
Why do Community Activation?
Here are some ways that Community Activation benefits an organization or project:
– Increases an organization’s alignment with users’ needs and expectations
– Maintains the long-term relevance of an organization
– Increases an organization’s efficiency (e.g., leveraging volunteer contributions)
– Discovers new applications of an organization’s services
– Increases an organization’s benefit to society
Community Activation
Here is how Community Activation works:
Step 3: Community Mobilization
Community mobilization is the pinnacle of your efforts. This is when your community champions and community members make decisions and take actions without feeling like they need to ask anyone’s permission. They show signs of self-organization and empowerment. The community also gets easier to manage because there are many leaders and do-ers in the community, and things hum like clockwork.
Step 2: Community Building
After you have gathered together a community, Community Building is the next step. Community building consists of creating organizational structures and an environment of interactions that allow people to interact effectively. Some examples of this include: working groups, clusters, and communities of practice.
Step 1. Community Engagement
The development of mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and target external groups. Community engagement is the foundation of any community-based initiative. This step usually consists of gathering and convening people.
