“How can we increase participation in our community?” If you’re managing or building a community, I’m sure you’ve asked this question at some point. There is a lot to unpack here. To start, you can try breaking it down into these two fundamental questions: What types of community participation do you have? Which types of community participation are you aiming for?
A Guide to Participation Types in Communities
I created this guide to help you identify the types of participation that exist in your community. It is organized from more passive types of participation (at the bottom) to more self-mobilized types of participation (at the top).
To achieve Community Activation, your overall strategy should be centered around the top three types of participation: Functional Participation, Interactive Participation, and Self-Mobilization.
What types of community participation do you have?
It’s likely that more than one type of participation exists in your community.
There is an appropriate place for even the most passive type of participation. The newsletters and email blasts you send out to your community, for example, are a form of Passive Participation. There is no need for these types of communication to be two-way. Indeed, many of the recipients (audience) probably prefer to keep their participation at this level. Likewise, Information Giving is what often happens when you conduct surveys of your community. For example, when you collect feedback after an event.
Participation For Incentives is where things start to get tricky. It’s also where a lot of communities often get stuck. While incentives are the easiest way to motivate communities, it’s not very sustainable. Most incentives can’t last forever, so it takes quite a bit of overhead to keep the community going by relying on them. Instead use Participation for Incentives for short-term endeavors with a clear goal—for example, offering a free course that introduces new people into your community.
Functional Participation gets you a lot closer to sustainability. However, leadership (i.e., decision-making) is still stimulated externally from the community (by you). This type of participation is sort of like hand holding, where the community manager still needs to do quite a bit of the back end work in order to motivate the community to take charge. It’s also often a means to an end, such as when you’ve got a project with a clear goal that would benefit from a community-based approach.
Interactive Participation is where you want to be for community activation. It means that you’ve made the right amount of space to empower people, and created systems of autonomy for your community.
With Interactive Participation, people feel comfortable making decisions that affect the community overall, and don’t feel like they need your permission to do so. However, members still work within the structures of the community, and get benefit out of doing so.
Achieving the gold standard of Self-Mobilization means that you are working yourself out of a job, since parts of your community won’t need you anymore. In this case, you can walk away as a minted game-changer having successfully made an impact on the world. It’s likely that your community will still need you, however, since you can still help fledge other new initiatives as they flourish.
Which types of community participation are you aiming for?
It’s best to aim toward an upward movement (self-mobilization), but context means everything.
Some communities are fairly well prepared to work towards self-mobilization, and they just need additional organizing and assistance (from the community builder and manager) to hit the ground running. Other communities have a lot more obstacles that they need to navigate—for example, communities that have been historically under-resourced and oppressed.
To have a chance at succeeding with Interactive Participation and Self-Mobilization, you’ll need a spend time thoughtfully and strategically developing a sturdy foundation for the community. The values, goals, and principles of the community should be well articulated and messaged. A community-based governance model for decision-making will also set the stage for empowering your community to be part of the solution.
As you implement new approaches and activities in your community, consider the types of participation that you are supporting, and how they fit within the goals of the community. If you are aiming for Community Activation, then look toward the self-mobilizing end of the guide as your goal.
References:
Cornwall, A. (2008). Unpacking ‘Participation’: models, meanings and practices. Community development Journal, 43(3), 269-283.
Pretty, J. (1995) Participatory learning for sustainable agriculture, World Development, 23 (8), 1247–1263
