How to Activate your Community for Impact
The story behind how Airbnb inspired 100,000+ Hosts to open up their homes for good
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Today I’m excited to share the very first guest post I’ve had on this newsletter. I couldn’t think of a better guest and topic to kick it off! Tory Faries spent nearly a decade building community-powered social impact programs at Airbnb from the ground up. During her time there, she designed Airbnb's global volunteer program, built the early framework for the company’s employee resource groups, and helped integrate social impact into the Airbnb Experiences launch.
The highlight of her tenure was leading the team responsible for cultivating a community of 100,000+ Airbnb.org Hosts and donors who offer free and discounted housing to individuals in times of crisis. The culmination of Airbnb.org’s efforts has resulted in 1.5 million nights of free stays for over 250,000 individuals impacted by natural disasters and conflict.
We’ve talked a lot on this newsletter about the impact communities have on their members, and on businesses, but we rarely explore how communities can be activated to impact the rest of the world. I’m so happy Tory offered to share her story.
In this article, she covers:
Why should you invest in activating your community for impact?
What is your community uniquely positioned to impact?
How can you start turning community engagement into community action?
I hope you enjoy it! Over to you, Tory…
We all know our communities can be a force for good. But how do we balance a focus on social impact with our other business and community goals? And how do we motivate our members to contribute to causes outside of our community?
Many companies run into these questions and fail to activate their community to its full potential. They miss out on a massive opportunity not just to help people outside the community, but also to deepen the level of purpose and engagement within.
Through my work at Airbnb, I got to experience the magic that came from empowering community members to offer what they were uniquely positioned to give: the hospitality that Host Cinde extended to a family who lost everything to California’s Camp Fire just weeks before welcoming a new baby. And the many doors Superhost Susan opened to make a refugee family resettling into her hometown feel a sense of belonging after leaving Iraq. We witnessed thousands of similar stories.
I also saw how participating in these programs fundamentally changed the community members involved. Airbnb had provided them with an opportunity to feel part of something much bigger than hosting. It gave them a purpose that deepened their commitment to the community.
I left Airbnb last year to become an independent consultant to help more companies activate their communities to achieve this magic and to spend more time with my two young girls. I recently read The Business of Belonging and was immediately inspired by CMX’s SPACES model. The model defines a community’s value across business objectives: Support, Product, Acquisition, Contribution, Engagement, and Success. After experiencing firsthand how profound of a role a company’s community can have in driving impact, I sensed an opportunity. I contacted David to discuss how we could expand his framework to include how companies can activate their community to further their social impact initiatives. SPACES+ – “Community-Powered Impact” – was born.
In this post, I share how community strategists can activate their communities to play a defining role in driving their organization’s social impact strategy, and why it's worth their investment.
1. Why should you invest in activating your community for impact?
First, in case you’re new to the space... let’s define “corporate social responsibility”.
Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, is an industry and profession that goes by many names but at the end of the day, it’s about how companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and interactions.
Brands like Patagonia and Toms have become the household names of CSR programs, but if you look closely, you’ll find yourself engaging with companies’ impact programs throughout your week– from rounding up and donating the change of your delivery order on Seamless to seeing the free ads Google provides to your local animal shelter when you search for a new pet (adopt, don’t shop!).
“Community-Powered-Impact” is when you activate your community members to contribute something, such as money, time, expertise, or resources, to further your impact objectives.
Why invest in “Community-Powered Impact”?
1. You’ll provide unique value to your members.
Hosts frequently shared that Airbnb’s impact program was part of what drew them to Airbnb over other platforms: they wanted to be part of a hosting community that aligned with their personal values.
And those who hosted people in times of crisis shared how deeply the experiences enriched their lives: how opening their doors to neighbors after a natural disaster gave them purpose in a time of helplessness; how welcoming a family from Afghanistan helped parents live the values they hoped to instill in their children in real-time, together as a family.
Airbnb served as the connective tissue that made these unique experiences to help possible, and Hosts were grateful for it.
2. It’s expected.
According to a recent study by Certus Insights, 70% of consumers want to know how the brands they support are addressing social issues. 45% pay close attention to a brand’s social impact efforts when making a purchase.
3. You’ll deepen commitment and connection.
Giving community members the opportunity to work together to achieve a purpose-driven outcome provides a unique sense of shared accomplishment.
When my Airbnb team and I volunteered alongside the Host community each year, I witnessed the business value of this impact: new product ideas were shared with engineers while huddled over garden beds; frequent customer support challenges reached the direct ears of senior leadership while painting school walls. I saw community members come together for meals or coffee after an afternoon of hard work, creating new personal bonds, too.
Working together toward a common good activates a unique connection that isn’t mirrored in traditional events or engagement campaigns.
4. You’ll do more, together.
Even a fully resourced corporate impact program has its limits, and in the current economic environment, companies are making tough choices about how they fund and scale their programs. There’s a finite amount of time and money your company can invest in impact. Your community is uniquely positioned to propel your impact potential far beyond these limits.
Whether it's doubling the hours served or dollars donated to nonprofit partners by inviting your community to give their time and funds or joining your voices together to amplify an advocacy campaign, you’re stronger, together.
Where do community teams fit into driving impact?
Community can be a critical piece of an impact program, but you shouldn't do it alone. In fact, I think it's irresponsible for a community manager to build a formal impact strategy without partnering with someone with expertise in the space.
An effective strategy requires layers of knowledge that often span across some combination of equity, diversity and inclusion, the environment and sustainability, and strategic philanthropy and nonprofit partnership management, to name a few. Needs also vary depending on industry.
That sounds like a lot, right? It is. Community leaders at larger companies can work cross-functionally with team members with expertise in the impact space, just as they would collaborate around Product, Sales, or Support initiatives. At Airbnb, I worked closely with seasoned impact professionals and our Diversity and Inclusion, Policy, Communications, Employee Engagement, and Partnerships teams in the development and execution of our initiatives.
If you lead a community for a smaller company, you can start with lower-touch initiatives that you lead yourself, as referenced in the next section. That could look like a volunteer day or a community donations drive to get early insights into how your community wants to show up and help build a business case for more resources. Then, once you’re ready to build out a more formal strategy, tap an impact consultant or agency to help you build out an ethically designed, outcome-oriented program that will drive longer-term, measurable impact.
In either of these scenarios, your role as a community leader is the fun part: activating the community to play an invaluable role in driving and scaling these outcomes.
2. What is your community uniquely positioned to impact? Introducing PACT
Airbnb didn’t activate tens of thousands of Hosts for good overnight, but rather, over a decade. Their community-powered impact journey began with simply inviting local Hosts to join employees during their annual global week of service, an event that was happening anyway. But in time, Airbnb centered its strategy around what its Host community is uniquely positioned to offer: space and hospitality to people in times of crisis.
Not all companies have a clear path right out of the gate for how to activate their communities, and there’s a multitude of layers that differentiate how a community can drive impact.
I created the PACT model to help companies think through this process via Product, Advocacy, Contributions, or Time:
Product: Activate your community to share or donate your product or service. For decades, airlines have been leveraging this model by empowering travelers to donate their frequent flier miles to organizations like Make-A-Wish. Retailer Madewell recently launched a program where loyal customers can drop off pre-worn jeans at a local store to be repurposed into housing insulation, and they reward their customers’ good deeds with a $20 store credit.
Advocacy: Activate your community’s collective voice to draw attention to the issue areas your company impact strategy is championing. Call on them to sign petitions, circulate social media campaigns, and show up for change. Bobbie baby formula, a former client of mine, activated their community of parents to call their representatives to urge them to pass legislation to combat the Black maternal mortality crisis and rallied parents to march at the Capitol to demand legislative reform after 2022’s infant formula crisis.
Contributions: Activating your community to give funds is one of the most common ways companies engage, and when done right, can be an effective way to double your organization's impact. Clearly communicate your company’s skin in the game through a match or corporate contribution, and work together toward a time-bound, right-sized goal (whether that’s raising $1k or $10M). You’re likely to hear a classic example of this type of campaign on your daily commute when your local public radio station is doing a fund drive (“If callers help us reach our goal of raising $1,000 in the next hour, a local partner will match your effort, dollar for dollar!”).
Time & skills: Activating your community’s time can be as simple as inviting them to roll up their sleeves and volunteer alongside your employees for a service project. To tap further into the skills your community has to offer, ask if they have a unique skill they can offer your nonprofit partners. LinkedIn leverages its technology to make it easy for community members to indicate their willingness to join nonprofit boards.
To decide which area of PACT to focus on, consider your available resources, impact objectives, and where your community can provide the most value.
If resources are limited, it may be as simple as inviting your community to join employees in giving their time for a service project. Or, you may start with an initiative that combines elements of PACT with a right-sized goal, such as Bobbie’s maternal health campaign, which included activating their community to both drive contributions to 4Kira4Moms, and advocate for change by contacting their local representatives.
If your company does not have existing impact programs underway, your first step could be as simple as giving community members the opportunity to add a donation at check-out when purchasing tickets for an upcoming event or conference to a local nonprofit aligned with the subject matter. It’s ok to start small.
3. How can you start turning community engagement into community action?
Once you’ve figured out what area(s) of PACT to focus on, how do you get people to actually participate? The good news is you’re likely already equipped with many of the tools you’ll need: access to social media and marketing campaigns to get the word out to your community, community forums for feedback, and existing community leaders and recognition programs to evangelize the program and incentivize participation.
And yet, even with all these tools at our disposal at Airbnb, our road to a successful community-driven program took years, not months. Be prepared to test, iterate, and adapt. Set a bold long-term vision for your community-driven impact program, not an aggressive timeline.
1. At the risk of sounding cliche, its OK to start with something that doesn’t scale
Before we invested in building major product solutions to enable Hosts to offer their homes for good, we did a lot of hands-on research and manual operations (think managing thousands of individual Airbnb coupon codes across a dozen nonprofit partners!).
While labor intensive, this allowed us to get crucial insights on how to build a product that met our community member’s needs, and it allowed our early community team to build deep personal relationships with our first values-driven Hosts, who played an essential role in our program development.
2. Expect (and welcome) pivots as you learn
Even with these foundational learnings, we still reworked key components of our product and program over the years, in part thanks to community feedback.
When we originally launched our program, Hosts only had the option to opt-in to offer their home entirely for free. While we had an early community of Hosts deeply committed to the program, this high barrier to participation limited Hosts who were eager to help but unable to give at this level—insight our community shared across feedback channels. We also received feedback that some of the Hosts who were positioned to Host for free were frustrated they weren’t being activated because they weren't located near communities in need of support.
We took this feedback and integrated two additional ways Hosts could participate: by offering their home at a discount, and by opting in to donate a percentage of their earnings of regular, paid stays to financially support Airbnb.org stays. Opting into any of these actions earned a Host the status of an Airbnb.org supporter, with a special badge of recognition.
It took work to implement such significant changes, but our efforts paid off. We saw our community and impact grow by tens of thousands of members, dollars, and stays in a short period of time.
3. Set clear boundaries and expectations
For all the feedback that we were able to act on, we also had to make tough choices in order to run a successful program. Our impact program couldn’t be everything every community member hoped it would be. We regularly heard from passionate Hosts asking us to expand our programming to support additional beneficiaries such as veterans and people experiencing homelessness or local nonprofits.
They weren’t wrong: there’s a long list of issue areas and organizations that free, temporary housing could support– and community members sometimes felt let down that we weren’t able to support what was important to them. But as a small team, we narrowed our attention over time to a single focus area–supporting communities in crisis– in order to responsibly execute our program.
This decision enabled us to build deep expertise and tailor our product, program, partnerships, and how we activated our Host community around a specific need.
We could show up in ways we wouldn't have been able to if we were stretched across a broad range of cause areas and beneficiaries. Communicating clear, public-facing guidelines on how our program worked, who we supported, and why empowered us to say no in a fair and unbiased way to our community. They didn’t always like the answer, but they could see it wasn’t personal.
4. If you want your community to step up, your company has to step up first
Airbnb’s leadership did its part from day one. Asking your community to give their time, money, or voice to your cause will have a negative impact if they don’t see your company stepping up alongside them, leading the way.
As Airbnb grew, our community’s expectations grew alongside it. A common piece of feedback in the Airbnb Community Center and social media threads was why should Hosts be expected to shoulder the financial burden of contributing to our program when Airbnb was approaching a multibillion-dollar valuation?
We were able to maintain credibility and have our community continue to stand up to support beneficiaries on Airbnb.org by scaling Airbnb’s own skin in the game. When Airbnb was in its early days, and funds were limited, the company still committed to paying for buses for volunteer events and granting small coupons to donate to charity auctions that Hosts championed. As Airbnb grew, these commitments scaled alongside it – as evidenced by the company’s $10 million matching campaign in response to the conflict in Ukraine.
5. Celebrate your community with storytelling
Think back to the beginning of this post. Do you remember how many Hosts joined the Airbnb.org community, or how many people received housing? Probably not. Do you remember how it felt to learn about the Host that helped a family who lost their home to the California Camp Fire? Much more likely.
Stories are incredibly powerful in moving members to engage in impact initiatives. Centering impact stories on the community members who made them possible also feels far less self-aggrandizing than focusing on your company’s efforts.
If you show—don’t tell—the power that purpose-driven engagement has on your community members to inspire others to follow, your community will feel like they’re directly part of your impact (instead of watching it play out from the sidelines).
Elevate the personal stories of your champions, such as what motivated them to help. Pair that with the impact participating has had on their own lives to inspire others. Sharing the story of Els, a Host in Rome who opened her home to a refugee, helped fellow Airbnb Hosts validate their potential feelings (nervous, excited), teach Hosts what to expect in participating, and share the lasting effect it had on Els in her own words.
6. Collect data on how the impact program affects community engagement and business metrics
In addition to tracking the impact your program is having on the organizations you’re supporting and the beneficiaries they serve, track the halo effect your program is having on your own community.
I regret not integrating questions around how the existence of Airbnb.org impacted community members' decision to join Airbnb and their desire to continue Hosting into ongoing surveys until later into my tenure.
Collect data early and often. Does participating make your community feel more connected to your organization? Is being able to participate in social impact activities a reason they joined your community, or why they plan to stay? How does community sentiment evolve alongside your program? Use data to get the internal buy-in to expand your program, and use your community’s feedback to learn how you can improve year-over-year to make it something everyone can be proud of.
7. Don’t let great get in the way of good
Getting started in building a new impact program or expanding an existing program can feel daunting. You should have gathered by now that there’s no one right way to do it: leading community-powered impact is an art, not science, and you may stumble along the way. Approach the work with curiosity, listen to your intuition, tap into your deep knowledge of your community, get help when you need it, and take the first step.
You’ll be surprised how fast you can learn and the value of what you and your community can build together. You’ve got this!
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I hope this guide helps you get your Community-Powered-Impact program off the ground. Just imagine a world where all of our communities are contributing to impact programs. What a dream!
If you have any questions, leave a comment below or reach out to me directly here.
Tory Faries is an independent social impact consultant who’s passionate about helping companies activate their communities to deepen and scale impact. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon. To learn more about her consulting services and to get in touch, visit here.
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That’s all for today!
Thanks again to Tory for sharing all of her wisdom and working so hard on this article over the last couple months. And thanks to all of you for reading and sharing your comments every week!
Did any part of this article stand out to you? Do you have experience with activating your community for impact? Drop a comment and let us know!
Until next week…
Thanks for building community!
-David
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Such a great post, bookmarking to come back and read in detail
An interesting post. Thank you so much for sharing this one!