Process Creates Change for People: The Case for Strategic Community Engagement
A Community Engagement Plan is Risk Management
Let’s examine a real-world example of why your organization’s community engagement plan is not just a ‘feel-good’ effort. In 2025, GoFundMe Pro, intending to move more non-profits on to their platform, launched 1.4 million nonprofit donation pages. The problem? These pages were unauthorized. The non-profits did not ask for them. In most cases, they did not even know they had them until they heard the PR commotion about the situation.
The result? GoFundMe Pro undermined the efforts of the market they intended to support by competing directly with the organizations’ own fundraising strategies. Unsurprisingly, this generated a lot of negative press and backlash.
The fallout was immediate and costly, resulting in: reduced search visibility for non-profits, donor confusion, and finally, two public apologies and a major system overhaul.
Then, GoFundMe Pro’s first repair communication did not align with their non-profit stakeholders. When their first apology fell flat, they revealed how little they understood their community’s priorities.
Initially, GoFundMe Pro defended the initiative with minor concessions. It took 72 hours to come to a complete reversal, delivering what should have been the immediate response.
Instead of a well-researched platform launch that could have benefitted many organizations, GoFundMe Pro had to rebuild their approach and go into crisis management mode.
GoFundMe Pro’s actions demonstrate why community engagement is not optional. It is basic risk management. Imagine your organization launching its own engagement efforts, only to have them underperform, or worse yet, harm your brand’s reputation.
The incident reveals a common misconception: community engagement is simply a goodwill tactic rather than core business intelligence.
About to launch a new initiative?
Community engagement (and the program development process) is about testing if your solution actually addresses real problems, understanding what your community truly needs, building support before you launch, and creating the necessary infrastructure to carry the initiative forward.
The Most Common Approaches to Community Engagement
When an organization has not yet truly invested in the due diligence process, leaders often go one of two routes.
Scenario 1: sit around a conference room and brainstorm internally, put together an ad hoc program, and run it sporadically as staff has capacity. Results are often inconsistent, and sometimes inauthentic to the audience ‘being engaged.’ They may end up feeling like they were a checkmark on a to-do list instead of a serious partner.
Scenario 2: hire quickly! Organizations often believe lack of community engagement is a capacity issue. The solution becomes to hire a person responsible for community engagement, or engage a consultant. Engaging a consultant is a good approach, but only when the organization embraces the mindset they are building a process with a system. Otherwise, leaders end up with another pretty report that sits on a shelf. When a leader is about to launch an initiative designed to be impact work, it is common to fall for the idea that ‘because we are doing good in the community, everyone will naturally care.’ We really do care about the causes we are passionate about. We believe funding and resources will follow because of our reputation and intention.
In this scenario, leadership has an idea and may have a genuinely compelling vision. But because the new objective is not seen as a profit-driven initiative, it is not given the same due diligence or rigorous analysis as a core product or service launch may. The perspective may derive from a sense that failure will not be as costly since the organization was not going to be dependent on this initiative for revenue. Even though the vision exists, and people may even get excited about it, there may be a subtle underlying belief that the project or program is taking resources from key priorities and the organizational objectives that actually get managed, monitored, and evaluated against. As a result, no real plan is ever developed and leaders wander about trying new tactics instead of building a clear strategy with reasonable goals and metrics.
The 4 Gaps that Must be Closed to be Effective
Community engagement is relationship building, with structure. Because community work is purpose driven it feels charitable. For some, it is not taken as seriously as directly profitable product or service launches. Yet, Profound Hope Industries has worked with clients who are clear on how they connect locally – and they are consistently strong market leaders in their respective regions.
There are four common organizational gaps that lead to underperformance.
Let’s turn the Profound Hope Industries’ HOPE framework upside down for a minute. These are the four most common gaps that create mismatch between goals and outcomes.
- Holistic Misalignment: Community work is not integrated with core business strategy. Either everyone is doing “community” activities that are disconnected from with one another and organizational goals, or only one department is.
- Organizational Readiness: Internal culture has not yet been designed to prioritize authentic external engagement. Employees do not understand why community matters because leadership has not made it clear. Or, employees are given expectations around community engagement without tools for execution. There is a change management process to undergo.
- Partnership Approach: Relationships are transactional. The organization does not yet have a clear structure the ways engagement creates mutual value, or have not yet identified the problem it is uniquely situated to solve.
- Economic or Environmental Context: Organizations fail to account for external forces such as the policy landscape, funding ecosystem, or broader market forces that shape what’s possible.
Why Common Approaches Do Not Work
Scenario 1: Ad hoc programming and random event attendance do not typically work well because this approach lacks definition and information. Information is missing if the organization has not gone to do some basic market research around their philanthropic goals. Goodwill should not equate to half-hearted effort. When plans start with unvalidated ideas, they can often be shaped by biases, perceptions, or media narratives rather than reality. The organization misses the opportunity to do meaningful work that connects their business goals to a greater context. Because the contextual data is missing, goals and objectives end up being improperly defined from the beginning and reward the wrong efforts.
Scenario 2: Adding a new role does not solve a structure that is not designed to reward purpose driven work. (Purpose at work has real value. It can improve employee engagement and productivity, brand engagement, and visibility and reputation). A qualified person still works within the context of the organization, and a poorly integrated program faces unnecessary design barriers.
Instead, the new hire:
- Gets stuck executing disconnected tactics, or find themselves needing to plan larger and bigger events, always having to raise the bar.
- Becomes the ‘community person.’ If they leave, relationships go with them, and the organization is starting over from square one.
- Is seen as operating on feel-good work, not serious business investments, and is treated as such.
- Lacks authority to implement across divisions, while work gets silo’ed, and does not connect to business growth to the degree it could.
Even a consultant has limited capacity to help an organization achieve growth if the focus is not squarely on organizational design, process development, and change management. As a result, the organization never builds the level of presence and positive goodwill it could.
What to do Instead
Before you take steps to hire or design your next program, define your reasons for implementing, redesigning, or building a new subsidiary for community impact.
Are you doing this because:
- There was a leadership transition and the new leader has a new goal?
- The business brand reputation is being threatened?
- The organization wants to grow in a new region or market?
- A regulatory requirement to engage or give back is in place?
- It feels like “the right thing to do?”
- Competition is doing it?
- You want to solve a meaningful problem for a community?
None of these are right or wrong answers. Any single response or combination show up as common drivers for reimagining community engagement. Understanding the motivation will help build clarity around what the organization hopes to achieve. Include statements around what you believe the community benefit and the business benefit will be if you are successful.
Once the organization has clearly defined the reasons for community engagement, take time to evaluate additional areas where the planning process is critical. Include the following 5 topics in your conversation:
- Strategic Focus
- Existing Community Knowledge & Relationships
- Measurement & Evaluation Processes
- Current Capacity & Supporting Culture
- Long Term Planning & Future Vision
Although community knowledge is not referenced first, this one should drive the strategy. The organization must begin with a definition of a problem or focus (the strategy) so it can go out and learn whether its own approach will resonate. The strategy must be validated to create success. If it is not, every other metric and process will create feedback loops in the wrong direction. Change your starting assumptions and go back to the boardroom and try a new iteration. This is how the organization gets it right and operates effectively and efficiently.
Without this foundation of real, validated input and structural integrity, organizations repeat the same pattern. New initiatives or program launches do not land, the staff assigned to the work burn out, and invested resources don’t yield results. With the right foundation and structure, community engagement stops feeling like an overwhelming burden and starts functioning like any other strategic business operation. It should operate with clear goals, measurable outcomes, sustainable processes, and in the context of real relationships. The work becomes more effective. The relationships are authentic, and people work together to solve problems. Then, when leadership or staff turns over, markets shift, or the economy is rocky, your community presence does not disappear—because it was about a system and not a person or program.
Learn more about how the H.O.P.E. Framework helps organizations build strategic community engagement infrastructure.
