Community Compass sets a new direction for leaders

Dr Huntley said the study, unlike her previous work, provided greater understanding of how people interacted with the sector.

“Yes, it's about attitudes. But it is also about the level of engagement, the actual behaviour,” Dr Huntley said.

“What all of this segmentation really does present is quite a complex and nuanced picture about the diversity of public relationships with the community sector, both in terms of behaviour and in terms of attitudes.”

She said her researchers “really sweated” in choosing the right kinds of names for each groups, with the terms indicating both the level of engagement and the prevailing attitude.

The study held “heartening insights” but also highlighted “red flags” for sector leaders, including confusion about what actually constituted a community organisation, with many thinking local councils and schools were part of the community sector.

Dr Huntley said the challenge for the sector was to be able to work with different attitudes and levels of engagement in different ways.

Organisations needed to interrogate the study to extract actions and strategies, she said, and questions would include: “What are the values? What are the concerns? What are the barriers? How do we think about these audiences? And where is the potential to engage, potential to give, potential to care? How do we hold their attention?”

She said the alternative to inaction was a splintering of the community through a loss of social cohesion, and a slow decline in support for the sector.

The threat was that “We lose our sense of ourselves as a strong, fair, connected, collaborative society, a little bit every day, and suddenly all at once.”

The countering action was to maintain and build that community “a little bit every time” and with a “laser-like focus on who we talk to, how do we talk to them and what do we need to understand about them?”

At its heart, the Community Compass was a tool to help organisations to “reinvigorate our value to all of those audiences as much as we possibly can,” she said.

One of the ways the sector could do this, she said, was to work with the different segments to attempt to ensure the “Indifferent Uninvolved” did not grow, and that the “Enthusiastic Engaged” segment attracted younger and younger people.

Ageing was a critical part of the changing equation, Dr Huntley said, and she suggested community organisations would be well served by highlighting their relevance to the younger age bracket.

“A very small percentage increase can mean a lot … and I know with the kinds of people doing the kind of work listening today we can get there.”

Settlement Services Australia (SSI) CEO Violet Roumeliotis – whose organisation provides services including refugee resettlement – said in a LinkedIn post soon after the Community Compass launch that the study offered “a crucial snapshot of attitudes towards our sector and it’s a picture that demands our attention.”

SSI had already begun shifting its approach as a result of increasing social polarisation, she said.

Among the “Indifferent Uninvolved” grouping, “the motivators of morality and shared humanity don’t resonate with them”, and as a result, “it's easy for our sweeping, idealistic statements to lose their appeal,” Ms Roumeliotis said

“Our value as a sector needs to be proved based on the impact delivered, not promises made.”

More information

Study reveals what Australians really think of the community sector

Comment: “Whatever your attitude towards community groups, one day you’re going to need them”

Finding a new north: reflections on the Community Compass report