What do we actually mean by community engagement?

This was written with a shul community in mind, but you can tweak the examples to make sense for your own community. The article is here to give you the methodology.

What engagement actually is

An engaged member is someone willing to give you their time, their money, or both, because you are doing something they believe in. You are giving them a way to live up to their own values.

That definition is about the member, not the institution. It doesn't ask how many events you ran or how many seats were filled. It asks whether people are acting on what they care about, through you. More events and more filled seats follow from an engaged community.

Different people, different resources

People don't arrive with the same resources, dispositions or backgrounds, so they won't engage in the same way. Some attendees will never pay for membership, yet will happily give their time to keep a service running. Others sit quietly at the back, never volunteer for anything, and bankroll most of the community.

Neither is "less engaged" in any useful sense. Each is giving what they have. The trouble starts when a community counts only one kind of giving and judges everyone by it.

To see the picture properly, you need to start somewhere. Here is a deliberately simple way to do it.

A simple way to score engagement

Eight measures, each worth up to 1 point, so everyone scores somewhere between 0 and 8.

The last measure is the hardest to judge from outside. If you sit on the board, you probably already know who these people are, but a self-assessment is fairer and more consistent. Ask members to rate, from 1 to 5, how true this is of them:

I consistently offer and drive forward creative ideas that help the community move forward.

Convert the answer to a score with (answer − 1) ÷ 4, so a 1 scores 0 and a 5 scores 1.

This is not a science, and you should adjust the variables to suit your community. The two rules that matter: every measure must be numeric, and as objective as possible. "Lazy" and "not community-minded" are judgements, not measures, and they won't work here. More on why in a later article.

Five members, five scores

Here are five fictitious members. You will probably recognise someone.

• Daniel, the reluctant dad. Comes because he thinks it is good for his children. Pays his membership but gives nothing beyond it, attends a service about every other week, mainly because of the children's service. Takes the children to three events a year and goes to one himself. Never goes to the AGM, gives no time and offers no ideas. Rates how well the community's values match his own at 2 out of 5.
• Miriam, the joiner-in. Signs up for every event and enjoys them all. Comes to services most weeks and gives to the occasional appeal, a few times a year. Has no children at home. Has never been to an AGM, never helps with anything and rates herself 1 out of 5 on ideas and 4 out of 5 on how well the community's values match her own.
• Rachel, head of the chesed committee. Pays, gives monthly by standing order, attends weekly, goes to most events with her children, never misses the AGM, gives several hours a week and rates herself 4 out of 5 on ideas and 5 out of 5 on how well the community's values match her own.
• Leah, who often volunteers to run the children's service. Gives a few times a year, is at shul more than once a week, gives about an hour a week, takes her children to three events and attends three herself. Has never been to an AGM and rates herself 2 out of 5 on ideas and 4 out of 5 on how well the community's values match her own.
• Ari, the shul hopper. Prays somewhere different most weeks. Turns up here a few times a year, usually for a kiddush or a simchah, and once to an event. Made one donation last year. Not a member, and rates how well the community's values match his own at 1 out of 5.

Rachel scores highest and Ari lowest, which is no surprise. But a score on its own tells you very little about what to do next.

Maximum engagement potential

Almost nobody will score 8, and nobody should be expected to. Everyone has a limit, set by their circumstances and by how well your community's values resonate with their own. Call it their maximum engagement potential, or MEP.

• Someone who cannot afford membership is not going to pay it.
• Someone without children will not take any to events.
• Someone whose values differ from the community's is unlikely to attend many events, however warmly they are welcomed.

To estimate someone's MEP, work in two steps. In short: MEP = P × F, where P is their potential and F is their value fit.

1. Circumstances. Go through the eight measures and ask what the highest realistic score would be for this person, given their situation. Add those up. This is their potential, P.
2. Value fit. Ask them to rate, from 1 to 5, how true this is: "The values this community stands for match my own." Divide the answer by 5 to get their value fit, F, between 0.2 and 1, and multiply P by it. The result is their MEP.

Circumstances cap particular measures: no children means no children's events. Value fit is different, because it scales everything at once. Someone who doesn't resonate with your values has a lower limit across the board.

Notice what never goes into an MEP: a verdict on someone's character. A member who gives little to your community is not necessarily lazy or non-community-minded. They may simply not be this community-minded, because what you stand for is not quite what they care about, and they may be giving generously somewhere else. That is a mismatch of value fit, a fact about the relationship rather than a fault in the person, so it can fairly lower their MEP. "Lazy" is a judgement. "Doesn't share our values" is a description.

If you find yourself explaining a low score by calling someone lazy, you are making the community look healthier than it is. Where you can, ask the member rather than guess.

Where to work: the gap

Subtract each person's score from their MEP and you have their gap. The biggest gaps show where the community is failing the people it could be serving best.

Rank the members by raw score and Ari looks like the problem. Rank them by gap and it is Miriam and Leah, who feel at home here and are not yet being asked for more. Those are the conversations worth having.

Daniel and Ari have small gaps for a different reason: low value fit. Daniel is giving roughly what his value fit predicts, and pushing him harder won't change that. But value fit isn't necessarily fixed. If his rating rose from 2 to 4, his MEP would double from 2.4 to 4.8, and he would have a gap of about 2.5, the largest in the table.

The formula in full

• MEP = P × F
• Gap = MEP − S
• Engagement = total of S ÷ total of P

Here is what each term means. "Total of" means added up across every member.

• S, score: the points a member actually earns across the eight measures, from 0 to 8. It records what they do.
• P, potential: the most a member could realistically score, given their circumstances alone: money, children, time, health and so on. Add up the highest realistic points on each measure, as if they felt entirely at home.
• F, value fit: how well the community's values match the member's own. They rate it from 1 to 5 and you divide by 5, so F runs from 0.2 to 1.
• MEP, maximum engagement potential: potential adjusted for value fit. It is what you can realistically expect from this member in your community.
• Gap: MEP minus score. How far a member is below what you can realistically expect, and so where your effort is best spent.
• Engagement: the total of everyone's scores divided by the total of everyone's potential. Value fit is left out of the denominator on purpose. Otherwise a community could raise its figure just by attracting members with low expectations.

So what is community engagement?

Add up everyone's scores, add up everyone's potential, and divide one by the other. That figure is what we mean by community engagement.

To see how it behaves, imagine a community of 100 people made up entirely of our five types: 25 Miriams, 30 Leahs, 5 Rachels, 30 Daniels and 10 Aris. A real community is far more complex than this. People don't sort neatly into five types, their circumstances and their value fit change over time, and the measures affect one another. These are archetypes, chosen so the arithmetic is easy to follow, not a model of your shul.

Engagement is 327.75 out of 623.75, about 53%: together, members are doing a little over half of what their circumstances would allow. Add 100 more Daniels and it falls to about 45%, because each of them uses only 38% of his potential. Add 100 more Miriams and it barely moves, to about 55%, because each uses 57% of her potential, just above the community average. That is the point: 100 more keen Miriams would barely change how the community feels, and the figure agrees. It measures how fully you use the people you already have, not how many people you have.

It is not how many volunteers you have, how many events you run or how many members are on the books. A community can have all three and still be failing the people with the biggest gaps. Engagement is whether your members are giving what they could give, and finding in your community a way to live up to their values.

In the next article we look at why people volunteer, and why that matters for closing the gaps.