How to Structure a Community Organisation

A practical guide to structuring a community organisation: the four levels every movement needs, how to split groups, and how to keep the structure alive as you grow.

· 6 min read

Most community organisations are not disorganised because their leaders lack discipline. They are disorganised because nobody ever wrote the structure down, so it exists only in the heads of the people who were there at the start. This guide gives you a structure that fits on one page and survives the founders moving on.

Start with four levels

Almost every community organisation can be described with the same four levels. Resist the urge to invent more until you have outgrown these.

ORGANISATION
    │
  GROUPS
    │
  PEOPLE
    │
ACTIVITIES
  • Organisation: the whole movement. Its name, purpose, leadership and public face.
  • Groups: the units that do the work. Chapters, working groups, teams.
  • People: members and leaders, each attached to one or more groups.
  • Activities: campaigns, meetings, events and the documents behind them, owned by a group.

Decide how to split groups

Groups should follow how people actually meet and work. Three splits cover most organisations, and you can combine them.

  1. By place: a chapter per neighbourhood, town or campus. Use this when members mostly work with people near them.
  2. By function: communications, fundraising, events, welfare. Use this when skills matter more than location.
  3. By programme: one group per ongoing initiative. Use this when the work has a clear owner and a lifespan.

A good test: if a new member asks "who do I talk to about X?", the answer should be the name of a group, not a person.

Give every group a leader and a page

A group with no named leader drifts. A group with no written page repeats itself. Each group needs at least one admin who is responsible for its members, and one page that says what the group is for, how to join, and where its work is recorded.

Put people in groups, not in a master list

A single spreadsheet of everyone becomes wrong the week after it is made. Instead, keep membership inside each group. The organisation-wide view is then just the sum of the groups, and it stays accurate because each group maintains its own list.

Attach activities to groups

Every event, campaign and document should belong to a group. That is what makes it findable six months later, and it is how a new leader knows what their group has already done.

Review the structure twice a year

Structures rot when they are never revisited. Twice a year, list your groups and ask three questions: does each one still have a leader, has it done anything in the last six months, and is anyone doing work that no group owns? Merge, close or create groups accordingly.

Gerakia is built around exactly this model. An organisation is a page, groups have members and admins, and activities are pages linked to the group doing the work. If you are starting from scratch, create the organisation page first, then one group per unit, then invite people into the groups they belong to.

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