nia avanna’s Post

Community engagement mistakes I’d love to wave goodbye to in 2025 👋 As we approach the new year, now is the perfect time to reflect on how your business engages with the local community. Genuine engagement starts with listening, understanding, and working together — not ticking boxes or chasing recognition. Let’s leave these behind in 2025: 🤔 Guessing what the community wants: Spoiler alert: assuming isn’t knowing. Before your next initiative, ask the community what they need. A quick survey, a chat, or attending local events can make all the difference. Listening first ensures your good intentions land as great ideas, not missed opportunities. 💸 Assuming donations are enough: Donating to local causes is fantastic, but it’s not enough on its own. Sure, making a contribution might tick the “good deed” box, but it should be just the start. If your business’s operations frustrate or harm the community, donations won’t smooth things over. Listen to local concerns, follow up on contributions, and ensure your efforts reflect actual needs. 🔄 Confusing community engagement with CSR, ESG, and social value: Community engagement is essential to CSR, ESG, and social value strategies, but it’s also a star player in its own right. Treating engagement as its own priority ensures your efforts are relevant, effective, and genuinely valued. Without meaningful engagement, those broader strategies risk falling flat as they won’t reflect what the community actually wants or needs. 🌟 The ‘all about you’ approach: We get it — your business does great things. But if your efforts feel more like self-promotion than genuine support, it’s time to rethink. Celebrate the charities, volunteers, and groups doing the heavy lifting — they’re the real stars. Sharing their successes shows you’re in it for the right reasons. 📢 Promotion with no punchline: If you’re sharing your efforts, don’t leave us hanging! Tell us why it matters. What’s the story behind your initiative? What difference did it make? A heartfelt explanation with clear outcomes goes further than a staged team photo. ✅ Prioritising appearances over impact: Trendy campaigns might grab attention, but are they actually helping? Sometimes the less glamourous efforts — like supporting food banks, running workshops, or partnering with schools — deliver the most benefit. Community engagement isn’t about quick wins or superficial gestures, it’s about building genuine relationships and being a force for good in the communities you operate in. Let’s make 2025 the year we focus on listening, learning, and working together, leaving behind the surface-level efforts for something far more rewarding. What do you think businesses should do differently to engage with the community in 2025? Let’s me know in the comments! 👇