Does Civic Engagement Belong in the Organizational Chart?
Civic Engagement Has No Organizational Home
Lately, I have begun to pay attention to an interesting pattern I see when connecting with organizations about their community engagement efforts. Across conversations, I am hearing that community engagement does not really have an organizational home. Even though reporting roles and job titles will naturally be structured differently based upon a specific organization’s need, what is happening here is something different. I see this happening across a wide range of industries, organizational structures, and sizes.
Community engagement does not have a formal place on the organizational chart. There are some common places where it lives – with marketing, philanthropy, government affairs, or corporate social responsibility showing up repeatedly. I have spoken with many people with the specific Community Engagement Manager or Community Engagement Specialist title. But across those roles, I have seen the function report to an Executive Champion, the VP of Human Resources, to whoever is overseeing DEI or ESG, or department leaders that on the surface do not have a logical connection to community engagement. In some organizations, department leaders take on elements of an initiative, without fully owning every aspect of an outreach or community strategy. Even in organizations that have a dedicated team, the team is frequently small compared to employee headcount or the broader balance sheet. Multi-billion-dollar organizations sometimes have teams of 2-5 dedicated employees, who rely on the internal volunteerism of other functional roles. I have even seen place-based efforts supervised by people in non-local roles.
Fragmentation Costs the Organization in Real Value
This fragmentation results from confusion, inconsistency, and missed strategic value. Organizations know community or civic participation is important, without understanding what it should do or be. As a result, the function often competes for legitimacy among many other priorities. Yet, somehow, the organizations that show up for their communities are the ones with the strongest reputations and consistent positive growth. Numerous studies demonstrate the positive impact community engagement has on an organization through increased profitability, reduced employee turnover, and other benefits. I recall vividly a conversation with a leader in a tiny, locally based credit union. This one was acquiring new members organically and beyond expectation. In the wider industry, credit unions of similar size and situation were shrinking. When I asked what was happening, the answer was simple. Every Thursday for a few hours, staff closed the doors at a scheduled time and literally walked the local urban streets talking to people they ran into and passing out information about their services. It was community engagement (and marketing) at its grassroots core.
Community engagement typically gets evaluated against standards that simply aren’t right for what it is. If I were to theorize, this might have coincided with the rise in access to technology and digital marketing. Especially in the early days of social media marketing, the numbers were straightforward. Invest X number of dollars, get an X return on clicks and conversions. Digital marketing was a sort of vending machine for growth if you reverse engineered your numbers intelligently. And for community-based non-profits, the shift happened gradually over decades as cultural forces encouraged community-based organizations to prioritize management theory over local embeddedness. Forces like technology, funding competition, regulation, and venture philanthropy shifted the dominant model for non-profits toward governance and organizational management over presence and mutual aid. That’s not to say many for-profits and non-profits aren’t doing fantastic community work. Organizations doing great work exist – but community engagement has acquired some underlying, unnamed assumptions that it should function like every other business unit with clear goals, objectives, and metrics. What it really is, when done authentically, is the heart, conscience, and service motivation of the organization.
Why Community Engagement Gets Measured Like Marketing
In this article, I outlined the differences between marketing and community engagement, acknowledging they often overlap. However, community engagement cannot really be measured against the same standards for marketing. It is based in the organic elements of community building. It means being present with people, including physically, giving to others, sometimes without expectation of return, seeing people and places for their strengths holistically and not solely through the frame of benefactor or critic. And the return might be non-linear. Another community development leader, whose work is often highlighted as industry best practice, described his successes as the result of repeated showing up and referenced the many moments where it felt like objectives failed or went nowhere. When community engagement gets measured by marketing metrics, it gets reduced down to a goodwill line item. For companies, it might actually be a goodwill line item, but it cannot provide value in a linear timeline. Relationships themselves are non-linear. When the value of community engagement isn’t clear, or intention is lacking, any work being done gets cut when budgets tighten or someone re-evaluates the value of the operational line-item. That’s not to say there isn’t good reason to diffuse efforts across departments, lean on employees to volunteer in their communities, or develop efforts that live beyond a single job title. In fact, those shifts can be some of the habits of best-practice organizations if purpose becomes embodied in culture. When done well, a lean community engagement department can be a sign of its operating health instead of underinvestment. However, infusing purpose-based practices across an organization’s culture is different than underinvesting in a community engagement department or cutting headcount to reduce inefficiencies.
The Deferred Cost of Underinvesting in Civic Engagement
The most glaring example of this I saw recently: a widely recognized company scrapped their community engagement advisory boards and efforts when bought out by private equity. The signal was clear; exploratory community programs don’t have value in a structure where ROI is priority. The decision was Management 101 – cut the inefficient, slow growing programs and focus on the things generating revenue and scale.
The unfortunate truth for this company? Community engagement has tremendous value, but the return isn’t a straight line, and sometimes isn’t measurable. Sometimes, the results that turn into PR opportunities and headline successes are truly serendipitous. Building networks and local relationships as an organization – whether for-profit or non-profit – is critical. Everyone knows individually why networks and relationships matter to our personal and professional lives, yet too often we don’t apply this same logic to balance sheet disciplines. We operate as though we believe the truism that your network matters works for individuals, but doesn’t work for a collection of individuals working together under a defined legal structure. I have seen genuine community engagement open doors – whether it is to seats in rooms where decisions are made, contracts being awarded because of long-standing trust and repeated reliability, or new initiatives being launched successfully because the value of real perspective was included early on.
When community engagement behaves as a function that sits wherever seems most logical and convenient, rather than an intentional strategic investment, it’s at the expense of institutional depth, cohesiveness, and the commitment that creates serendipitous opportunity. It is the value the organization never gains because their community engagement lacked community voice, problem/situation awareness, strategy and dedicated resources that contribute to unrealized potential. There are deferred costs to inaction. Brand perception is shaped by community interaction – and not just actions related to a product or service. Reputation is tied to civic leadership and influence, and can’t be bought in the moment when there is a crisis situation. Partnerships between government, anchor community-based organizations, companies, residents, and even joint ventures with peers or competitors may be lost when community engagement is a check-the-box exercise. An organization’s community engagement emphasis may even determine whether talented employees choose to accept a role with your organization or move on. There is a lot at stake in putting community engagement in the right seat in the organizational chart. For many organizations, the seats on the organization chart are occupied by fewer people than the work demands. For others, it’s a matter of adopting it as mission instead of a function.
Which one is your organization’s challenge?
If you need help with this – Profound Hope Industries has built the H.O.P.E. Framework to help your organization design a civic engagement program that is sustainable and connected. The system doesn’t place its emphasis on an area of subject matter expertise (such as affordable housing, human rights, financial inclusion, etc) – those are your domain. Profound Hope Industries’ work addresses the structural gaps that bottleneck the best-intended projects.
