THE THREE As: ANXIETY, AMBIVALENCE, ASPIRATION →
Attune
Reveal
Convene
Equip
Sustain

Guiding Principles

Sustain

Plan for what comes after the pledge, election, news cycle, or challenge. Focus on cultivating the community of your audience. Empathize with the people who have committed and ask what they may need to keep going.Then enable them.

Go beyond the pledge.

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What does it mean to sustain?

Most campaigns consist of a galvanizing goal or event that generates a lot of energy in a short period of time. It feels good to be driving towards a big push, and to create a lot of buzz and excitement. These are highly productive times in an organization and its community. It is easy to stay inspired, committed, and energized.

Once the pledge or event is over, however, engagement tends to fizzle. We overlook that it’s one thing to make a pledge, but making it stick is another matter entirely. We go back into our complicated lives, and it can be hard to bridge between the intensity of an event and our daily lives. It’s a heavy lift for organizations to continue to push, push, push. Ideally you have generated excellent traction through being attuned, revealing, convening, and equipping people to be self-sustaining and influential.

But the research shows that real and deep change is best achieved by the sustained engagement of the people moving it forward.

It is essential to keep your community working towards the long term on goals that endure past the thrill of a big push.

But, how exactly do we do this?

Plan for the long haul by ensuring you have resources available after you reach your goal. Recruit volunteers to step into leadership and convening roles. Keep people engaged after the event is over. Please, do not overly rely on pledge-based campaigns. They spark commitment and make great metrics, but require longer-term support.

Here are five beginning steps to sustaining people
beyond the pledge:

Give your people follow-up infrastructure that keeps them connecting. Help them receive training after galvanizing events. Design mechanisms to stay engaged. Use convening and relational strategies.
A Mindset Beyond the Pledge

Are you strategizing for the long-haul? This worksheet can be used by individuals or groups to guide you towards sustaining engagement.
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Individual

Group

Activity

Use the tools we have created to go deeper into understanding what sustains your community. Where are they at? What are they needing? Listen. Tune in. Invite co-creation and co-ownership. Find out where you are in the Quadrant of Engagement. Do you focus on short-term activations? Do you focus on building traction long-term?
Future-Casting

Use this worksheet with your team to support their sustained engagement through imagining their futures.
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Paired

Group

Activity

See your work as fostering communities of practice. These are touch points for ongoing supportive interactions as well as regular sources of inspiration. Build in structures to track and celebrate people’s actions and engagement. Train people to run these and know they have a community of practice from which to get input, support, and learning.

As you look to the long term needs of your people, offer them tracks for building capacity and increasing leadership. We will dig deeper into this in our next two Guiding Principles.
 Equip is all about building capacity, and when joined up with Sustain, you have a powerful recipe for deep, lasting, sustaining engagement.

The most powerful way to ensure you sustain engagement over time, is by making your community, people, audiences, funders, supporters into stakeholders and co-owners. Empower people to run with initiatives and ensure they have a robust community of practice.