[A] Outdated Systems With Unsafe Data Processes
While having a few conversations with several individuals from small organizations across a few years, I was surprised by a common theme: Almost all of them still rely on traditional Excel to run their community-members' database and day-to-day operations.
This approach required frequent cumbersome manual data manipulation that grows increasingly burdensome and unscalable as the membership base expands. Worst off, many of these all-in-one spreadsheets run on a single laptop or computer, which represents a critical single-point-of-failure for these organizations should there be and hardware malfunctioning, accidental deletion or overwrites.
[B] Unemployable Technical Team With Stretched Staff
Digital platforms are essential tools to help sizable groups manage and operate their communities efficiently. Traditional small-scale societies, associations or non-profit organizations often lack the sizable funds to employ in-house technical talents needed to build and maintain such platforms to securely digitize their operational stack.
The staff are then over-stretched to handling such manual administrations while de-focused on what matters the most—Rebuilding real in-person relationships with their communities.
[C] Social Need To Rekindle In-Person Interactions
Active in-person communities are essentially the social backbone of flourishing and resilient societies. Social media platforms now dominate social interactions, notably among younger and tech-savvy crowds, leading to gradually fragmented communal relations.
Once bustling with weekly or monthly social activities, traditional communities are experiencing a sharp decline in face-to-face-participation.