Most community organizers spend more time as data entry clerks than as leaders. It is the hidden tax of the industry that nobody talks about. You spend your day copy-pasting email addresses from a registration list into a spreadsheet and then into another email tool. By the time you actually get to talk to your community you are too tired to say anything meaningful. This is exactly how burnout starts and it is killing the passion in our industry.
The technical friction of running a community is at an all-time high. When you have to manage five different apps just to host one event things are going to break. People fall through the cracks and relationships that should have lasted for years end up disappearing after a single weekend. We are essentially building houses on sand and wondering why they don't stay standing.
We need to fix the chores that eat our time.
When we fix these friction points we give ourselves room to breathe. The goal is to get to a place where the tools work for us instead of us working for the tools. We should be building connections not just managing lists.
If your tools are making you tired they are the wrong tools.
