This is the 4th post in a series focused on rural governance and community development in rural spaces. You can read the previous posts here.
Most rural indicators are a composite measures of population levels and density, distance from metropolitan areas, and economic performance. Not one of those measures how many peer governments, regional bodies, and professional networks a local government can actually reach and access. Yet in research on rural organizational capacity, the connectivity of an organization helps substantially. Communities embedded in dense regional networks hear about funding earlier, encounter policy innovations sooner, and face lower costs when they try to share services. Communities that are isolated shoulder those tasks alone, regardless of how large or small their budget is.
This matters most for what might be called anticipatory capacity: the ability to plan ahead, forecast needs, build capital strategies, and identify risks before they become emergencies. Anticipatory work is disproportionately dependent on outside information, because it requires knowing what is coming, which is exactly the kind of knowledge that travels through networks rather than through budgets.
Unlike the previous posts, that focused where communities are placed on various rural indicatiors (e.g., RUCC, RUCA), this post asks a different question. Not what am I, according to whom? But who can I count on, and where are the holes in my professional support network?
The Ten-Call Inventory
There is a substantial academic literature on organizational network analysis, and how networks can be used to achieve desirable outcomes for local governments (Siciliano et al., 2021). However, much of that work can take hours to read or be expensive to access. What follows is informed by that research, but is deliberately applied and is intended to be practical. It is a diagnostic and reflective mapping exercise, and its value is its feasibility even in organizations with the severe time constraints that many face when working government or nonprofit jobs.
Step 1. Write down a list of your last ten outside calls or points of contact.
Go back through your calendar, sent mail, texts, and call log, and find the last ten times you contacted someone outside your own organization to solve a problem. Not routine transactions, not vendor invoices, not the scheduled COG meeting. Instead, times you needed something you did not have: information, judgment, a template, a favor, a warm introduction to a new connection.
Ten is enough. If you want a more granular picture and have time, you can do twenty.
Step 2. Detail each one.
For each call, record three things:
- Who — peer local government, council of governments, state agency, professional association (NCLM, NCACC, NCCCMA, GFOA), university or extension, consultant, nonprofit or foundation, private firm. How many names would you feel comfortable contacting at this organization?
- Distance — inside your county, elsewhere in your region, elsewhere in the state, out of state
- Basis — did you already have that relationship, or did you have to cold call or find the person for the first time?
Step 3. Read the pattern.
Three patterns show up most often, and each implies something different.
Concentration in one channel. If eight of ten calls went to state agencies, or eight went to a single consultant, you have a single point of failure. Channels close. Agency staff turns over, contracts end, people retire, and the relationship that carried most of your outside knowledge leaves with a person. This is the most common finding and the most fixable.
No peer organizational calls. If none or only a few of your ten calls went to another local government or peer organization, that is worth sitting with. Peer contact is the channel that carries the most transferable knowledge; someone else may have already solved or worked on your problem in a jurisdiction that looks like yours, and they will usually tell you what they did for free. Its absence is often a symptom of geographic isolation, but sometimes it is simply habit.
Do I have enough distance in my professional network? New and innovative ideas tend to come from what sociologist Mark Granovetter called "weak ties." This is the idea that some of our most helpful information tends to come from the people on the periphery of our network or those that we do not frequently interact with. If we are only interacting with the same people and organizations repeatedly, then we are potentially limiting our access to new and useful information. Developing a purposeful plan to create new contacts each year can be very beneficial to your practice of community development.
High proportion of cold contacts. If you had to find most of these people from scratch, you are paying a transaction cost (i.e., the non-monetary costs of networking, for example, time spent searching for contact information, the cognitive costs of deciding on who to contact, and monitoring the status of new relationships) on every problem that better-connected jurisdictions do not pay. This is the difference between having a network and having a search engine.
From Diagnosis to Structure
An inventory that produces a list of gaps and nothing else has not accomplished much. The point is to convert what you find into network arrangements that can strengthen your organizations chances of success.
For a concentrated channel: deliberately build a second one. If everything runs through your COG, add a professional association. If everything runs through one association, add a peer relationship in a comparable jurisdiction outside your region.
For missing peer contacts: identify three jurisdictions that resemble yours — similar size, similar economic base, similar pressures, and that are not your immediate neighbors. Neighbors may be competitors for the same projects and the same state dollars. Comparable non-neighbors are usually more forthcoming, and, if they are similar, their solutions are more likely to transfer.
For high cold-contact cost: the fix is structural rather than personal. Interlocal agreements, shared or rotating specialty positions, mutual aid compacts, and regular cross-county roundtables all do the same thing: they convert a relationship that currently depends on someone remembering a name into a more durable relational arrangement that survives turnover. If you are at the same venues again and again, even if the actors around the table change, your access to ideas, information, and support does not.
That last point is the one worth emphasizing. In small organizations, the network usually lives in one or two people's heads. When a manager with twenty years of relationships retires, the jurisdiction's connective capacity leaves the building with them, and nothing in the budget or the org chart records the loss. Formalizing or transferring to a new employee even a portion of those connections is one of the highest-return, lowest-cost capacity investments a rural local government can make.
Practical takeaway: You can run the inventory once a year, ideally alongside budget preparation, and keep it with your positional profile (i.e., where your community is scored on various rurality indicators). Together, these documents answer the two questions that actually determine what your community can accomplish: what you are eligible for, and who you can reach out to for help.