How can you involve community members in message development and framing?

Co-creation of messaging with communities not only builds trust and buy-in but also helps organisations to truly understand their key stakeholders. Quantitative research such as surveys can provide data points, but in community engagement qualitative engagement on messaging can help create powerful communications that truly resonates with the target audience. It’s important to work in partnership when consulting and truly listen to the stakeholders, rather than just hearing what you think you want to hear. Communities can be incredibly generous with their time and thought when engaged well.

Community engagement is a process of working collaboratively with and through groups of people to address issues affecting their well-being. One of the issues that community workers may want to address is how to communicate effectively with the community members and stakeholders about their goals, activities, and outcomes. Message development and framing are important aspects of communication that can influence how the audience perceives and responds to the information. One way to involve community members in message development and framing is to use participatory methods that allow them to share their perspectives, experiences, and preferences.

One way to involve your community in identifying your target audience is to give them opportunities to work on buyer personas. You can hold a working meeting where members can bring ideas to craft personas, share live resources that members can edit, ask members to review and provide feedback on personas, and then share the finalized personas with your membership. Involving community members in all steps of audience definition and segmentation will help them feel engaged and listened to and will also ensure your personas are as comprehensive as possible.

The approach of "nothing about us without us" must drive the research and planning. Community members should not only be interviewed and consulted but ideally should have a meaningful say in how communications are crafted. Only then can you be assured that the communications reflect their perspectives and will connect with these communities.

Research and analysis are critical components but we also can't forget the very human part of this, which is active listening. Genuinely engage with your community members to learn about them. What do they like? What do they benefit from? What do they appreciate? Why may they choose a competitor over you? What platform are they on most of the time and at which times of day? There are so many questions to answer. Collecting multiple points of view internally is also critical as everyone on your team will have different perspectives to offer, which will help you understand your audience and audience approach.

Co-creation is the name of the game. During my time at Atlassian, nothing happened in our top contributor program without a survey or a live focus group with the very members who would be most impacted. Ambiguity or half-baked ideas will tank the feedback process, so always give them something tangible to react to: a document, a tagline, a roadmap, a graphic, a mock-up. With member DNA infused from the start, they'll feel a sense of shared ownership, and your initiatives will be more organic and more successful.

This can be as simple as just asking. Sometimes, the feedback loop or open door for dialogue isn't obvious. As the person hoping to receive it, we may think it's clear but there is nothing more effective than clearly asking for feedback or pointing out where/how to share feedback. Don't assume people know what you actively need their input on, and invite them to participate.

I am all for collaboration! The more you can involve your community in your brand story, the more they will feel valued and connected. Look for ways to bring them in and let them shine.

Ensuring all your messengers are on the same page is critical for brand consistency. Provide the training upfront to ensure that your brand is consistently represented across channels. Include examples in your training. i.e. "If a community member [says/does] this, we respond by [ ]." Making it crystal clear for everyone will help lay a good foundation. Just make sure to not scare them into sticking to a script. You want your messengers to feel empowered to own the brand messaging. Make it clear that this training is a foundation for success, but in order to grow you must keep changing, expanding, and enhancing. Their points of view are critical in achieving that.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes! That's how you learn. See them as growth opportunities. For example, if you created a small social media campaign and realized poor user engagement, analyze and identify the components that didn't perform. Determine why they didn't. Learn from it, and improve the next campaign. Then do it again and again! Your audience will change alongside you. You will have to repeat the cycle across time, but that's a very exciting component of the evolution of social media marketing.