Charles Duhigg’s new book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection offers practical ways to hold deeper, more meaningful, less conflict-driven conversations.

Given the divisiveness in small towns and rural communities today, these are essential community-building skills.

It’s also relevant for rural small business owners who face a variety of communication challenges with customers, employees, suppliers, community members and more.

Duhigg’s name may be familiar. He also wrote The Power of Habit, another book I found useful.

In Supercommunicators, he covers different types of conversations we have: practical, emotional, and social. Usually, we don’t even think about what kind of conversation we’re having, and that leads to the kinds of problems we’re all used to. Duhigg provides insights on how to recognize and adapt to each type of conversation.

The book’s advice on everyday conversations is particularly useful. This advice is practical and not too hard to remember. Simple graphics make concepts ultra clear. The advice on social and belonging conversations is trickier. When we’re talking about who we are and how we fit or don’t fit in, more care and more guidelines are needed. It starts to feel like a lot, but it’s better than pretending we already know all about it.

The biggest issue I had with the book is the complicated structure within sections. Duhigg often starts a story, then interrupts it with another story, then interrupts that with explanation. It makes it hard to keep track of all the narratives at the same time if you’re not reading large sections in one sitting. Despite this, Duhigg does a good job of getting the practical information across, and the illustrations make the book engaging and informative.

I received an advance copy of the ebook at no cost from the publishers via NetGalley. These are my honest opinions. The book’s publication date was set for Feb 2024.

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Survey of Rural Challenges 2023 by debworks

Top conclusions from the survey

Rural people were twice as likely to say they were optimistic about their communities’ future as negative.

Continuing lack of housing, inactive downtowns and population losses ranked the highest as rural community challenges.

The ongoing lack of workers, support services and usable buildings, stiff competition from online businesses, and marketing ranked the highest as challenges to rural small businesses.

Other preconception-changing results

Defying stereotyped media profiles of poverty, crime and drug abuse as the primary rural challenges, rural people continually ranked these near the bottom as community challenges.

Rural businesses innovate. Far from stuck in their ways and out of date, the most common business assets listed in 2023 were innovative ideas and up-to-date marketing techniques.

Although rural economic development often centers around jobs, it was one of the least-mentioned challenges in this survey. Rural people mentioned available jobs or good jobs as often as mentioning a lack of jobs or low paying jobs. 

For all the reports of a lack of small business lending, rural people said usable buildings are harder to find than loans, a continuing trend from previous surveys.

Rural small business owners showed little or no interest in business plan assistance and pitch competitions, yet these types of assistance continue to be commonly offered to rural businesses.

Rural business people were more likely to mention that they needed help with marketing, starting a business, or receiving economic development incentives on par with those offered to recruit out-of-town firms.

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Rural community optimism

A new question in 2023 asked respondents “Do you think your community will be better off in 10 years?” 

Answers of 1 or 2 were considered negative, and answers of 4 or 5 were considered positive. More than twice as many people gave a positive response (119) than were negative (50) about their communities’ future. Almost as many were positive (119) as were neutral (136).

Nearly all of the survey participants responded to this question, 305 out of 315.

Rural Community Challenges & Assets

Lack of housing, inactive downtowns and population losses continue to rank the highest as rural community challenges. Lack of childcare also ranks in the top 5.

The top five rural community challenges in 2023 were:

1. Shortage of good housing
2. Downtown is dead
3. Not enough volunteers
4. Losing young people
5. Lack of childcare

More about rural community challenges

Through open-ended responses, participants could enter more detailed answers about their challenges. Out of 177 comments, the most common topics mentioned broke down into these rough categories.

• Attitudes: Poor leadership, sticking with outdated methods and infighting were mentioned by 39% of responses.
• Infrastructure: Empty buildings, a lack of housing or usable commercial buildings, broadband, water, wastewater, transportation featured in 26% of responses.
• Economic opportunity: Lack of funding, lack of services and support for small businesses, and a need for a specific business in the community were mentioned in 26% of answers.

Rural Community Assets

On the open-ended questions, people mentioned their community’s assets in 233 responses.

Natural resources, land, outdoor recreation, location and tourism were the most common assets, mentioned in 64% of responses.

Committed people, volunteers, an engaged community, workforce and effective local leaders were mentioned in 48% of the answers.

Events, arts, education and culture came up in 32% of the comments.

Local businesses, a thriving downtown, the variety of local businesses, business development and agriculture featured in 28% of responses.

Infrastructure, buildings, housing, broadband and technology were considered an asset in 9% of answers.

Healthcare was listed as an asset in 7% of responses.

Small-town Business Challenges & Assets

The lack of workers and difficulties with marketing continue to challenge rural small businesses. Lack of support from government or agencies ranked second. Lack of usable buildings continues to climb in importance, breaking into the top five. 

The top five challenges ranked by rural small businesses were:

1. Lack of good workers
2. Lack of support from agencies, government or organizations
3. Need a usable building
4. Online competition
5. Marketing isn’t working

More about rural business challenges

Across the open-ended questions, people mentioned rural business challenges in 43 responses.

The most common topics mentioned broke down into the following rough categories.

• Small business assistance: 30% mentioned needing business assistance including a lack of competent service providers, support programs, training and technical assistance.
• Customer service challenges were mentioned by 26%.
• Competition: Big box stores and other competition were mentioned in 17% responses.
• Over 20 other issues were mentioned in the 43 responses, indicating a diversity of challenges facing rural small businesses.

Small-town Business Assets

Across the open-ended questions, people shared more about their business’s assets in 112 responses. More than twice as many of these responses listed assets as listed business challenges.

People were the top small business asset. Caring people, loyalty, relationships and engagement came up in 22% of answers. Although the lack of workforce was the most commonly chosen challenge, nine people specifically mentioned their workforce as an asset.

Trying new ideas and new marketing was common. Almost 20% of answers included new ideas the business had tried successfully. Up-to-date marketing techniques were mentioned as assets in 12% of the answers.

Customer service was mentioned positively in 13% of answers. More people mentioned it as an asset (16) than listed it as a challenge (11).

The community was called an asset to their small business in 9% of answers.

The makeup of rural communities

An open-ended question invited participants to tell more about the makeup of their communities.

Race, ethnicity and cultural backgrounds including White, Black, Hispanic or Latino, Native American or Indigenous, Francophone and general diversity were mentioned in 95% of answers.

Age was included in 69% of responses. Two-thirds of those answers mentioned elderly or aging populations specifically.

Income or education levels were mentioned in 35% of responses.

All other groups were mentioned in few answers. People mentioned openness to different groups, challenges or lack of acceptance, and lack of opportunities for differing people. Less than 6% brought up politics.

Charts and more detail in the report

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About the survey methods

The survey was open from November 11, 2022 to January 31, 2023. A total of 315 responses were collected online from subscribers and visitors to SaveYour.Town and SmallBizSurvival.com, from media coverage and cooperating groups that publicized the survey.

Respondents identified themselves as rural by completing the survey, and 206 identified themselves as business owners by responding to the business question. Participants included 295 from the USA, eleven from Canada and six from Australia.

Based on SaveYour.Town customer data, most respondents likely serve as community leaders and officials, work in community and economic development, own their own businesses, work in a community-oriented business or volunteer informally in their community.

Presented to these conferences

• National Rural Housing Conference, poster session, October 24 – 27 in Washington DC
• West Virginia Brownfields & Main Street Conference, poster session, September 12-14 in Wheeling, WV
• Rural Renewal Symposium, Oklahoma State University, poster session, November 2-3 in rural Oklahoma 
• Teeny Tiny Town Summit, Northwest Oklahoma Alliance, Q&A session, October 10, Woodward, OK

Cited by these publications

• Survey of Rural Challenges, Bank of I.D.E.A.S., Community & Economic Development Matters, Australia
• Survey of Rural Challenges Results Show Optimism and Big Disconnects (and What Economic Developers Can Do About It), IEDC – International Economic Development Council members only feature
• A Small Town Never Forgets!! on Appalachia Meets World podcast
• Rural challenges show repeated concerns and a glimmer of optimism by residents, a new survey indicates, IRJCI – Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky
• Rural Communities Are Upbeat About the Future Despite Persisting Issues, Daily Yonder
• Rural tourism challenges and opportunities – survey results, Tourism Currents
• Inside Our Industry – Survey of Rural Challenges 2023 Results, Agracel, Inc.

Previous surveys and more

Find the previous surveys back through 2015, and more information at https://smallbizsurvival.com/survey-of-rural-challenges.html

Keywords and classification:

• Survey of Rural Challenges
• Rural surveys and polls
• What rural people need and want
• What a small town needs
• Rural people needs and wants
• Rural challenges
• Small town issues
• Urban-rural divide
• Rural policy
• Diversity in rural communities
• Diverse small towns
• Rural assistance programs

For more info contact

Becky McCray becky@smallbizsurvival.com

Deb Brown deb@saveyour.town

As Carlos Moreno points out, “they” are never coming to save us. Small towns are on our own playing economic self defense. Photo by Becky McCray.

Not everyone who says they’ll help your town is telling you the truth. 

If you want a resilient small town economy and prosperity for the people in your town, I have some self-defense ideas for you. 

Focus more on your own people, less on attraction. 

1. Stop paying people to bring business to your town that will drain resources out. Forget about retail attraction. Skip trying to attract outside entrepreneurs. Never, ever give incentives of any kind to chain businesses. Never even read the corporate site selection RFP list. 
   1. Instead, support your own local entrepreneurs. Cut down the barriers to entry so even a one square foot business idea is valued, encouraged and possible. Create more shared spaces. 
2. Stop fretting about what will bring people to town. Tourism comes after. Recruitment is best seen as being attractive. 
   1. Instead, focus relentlessly on being such a great place for your own people that others can’t help wanting to be part of it. 
   2. Be open to people’s own ideas and dreams. The town you want to live in is the town you could be building together. 
   3. Eschew formality, regulation and red tape. No one is attracted to the moribund. 
3. Stop letting the same ten people dominate your leadership. When you–without even thinking about it–expect people to have plenty of resources in order to participate, you miss out on some of your best people.
   1. Instead, reach out to everyone in town, every single one. Give people small but meaningful ways to participate.
   2. Actively connect to diverse people including Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. You need innovative ideas to survive, and you’ll find more innovative ideas when you bring together people who don’t all share the same backgrounds and all think the same.
   3. Involve people with disabilities and people with less financial resources by giving even smaller but still meaningful ways to participate. Not everyone can do the same things or afford the same things. Everyone has gifts to share.

Focus more on trying ideas in small ways, less on paying others to pick ideas for you. 

1. If you can test an idea with duct tape and cardboard, you don’t need a feasibility report. 
2. Never pay for predictions. A professional guess is still a guess. 
   1. Instead, your own people can and will run experiments once you get out of their way. 
   2. Crowd source the answers you need by testing tons of different ideas.
   3. Tiny failures are almost free, high quality evidence of what doesn’t work. Big failures are evidence you didn’t experiment small enough.

Focus more on local investing, less on creating profits for outside people 

1. Create a local investment team to take these actions: 
   1. Buy up rent houses, so outside real estate investors won’t destroy their value for profit. 
   2. Loan money to local businesses in tiny amounts that big banks can never touch. Loans under $50k are economically infeasible for banks, but arguably the most important for your would be tiny businesses.
   3. Fund community projects with a bias toward tiny individual informal experiments, and away from existing formal organizations. 
2. Move your money to local banks and credit unions. Run a campaign to get more people to join you. 
3. Drive out payday lenders. 

You probably know that I don’t normally cast my opinion in such strong language.

While I was working on videos to help small towns recover, I couldn’t get away from the bad economic decisions we see town officials make over and over.

And I wanted to help you avoid some of those.

What I want most is for your town and your people to prosper. I want you all to build a town together that you are happy to live in. I want you to create something so amazing together that other people want to join you. I want you thrive together.

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And what topics rural people most want help with

Wouldn’t it be great if the people who say they want to help rural people would actually listen to rural people’s own challenges?! That’s why we created this survey!

We use the results to create practical steps that help you shape a better future for your town. Your responses also get shared out to others who work with rural communities through articles and media stories.

Using these survey results, we developed a free video of action steps you can take to shape the future of your town or the towns you serve.

Get the Action Steps Video

Surprise! Stereotypes didn’t hold up

The survey asks rural people what challenges they most want help with and what actions they are taking to address them. The results don’t match the common themes in media coverage and policy conversation around rural communities.

• Are rural people focused on well-publicized crises like opioid addiction or poverty? No, other challenges were selected much more often. Crime and drug abuse ranked in the bottom five of the standard choices. In their own words, fewer than a dozen people each mentioned drug abuse or poverty. Three times as many mentioned negative or angry people as a top challenge they’d like help with. 
• Are most rural communities devastated by lost factories, closing mines or damaging natural disasters? No, “our town has suffered a terrible blow” remains one of the least chosen options on all three rounds of the survey in 2015, 2017 and 2019. 
• Is the lack of small business lending a big challenge in small towns? Needing a business loan did not made it into the list of top 5 challenges chosen. More than twice as many people selected the lack of good employees as a challenge.  

Rural Community Challenges

Top five concerns at the community-wide level this year are very similar to the results from 2017 and 2015.

1. Losing young people
2. Downtown is dead
3. Not enough good housing
4. Need new residents
5. No one shops in town

“Losing young people” and “Downtown is dead” have dominated the top 2 spots in 2015, 2017 and 2019. “Not enough good housing” is a new entry that wasn’t included as a choice in the 2017 or 2015 surveys. “No one shops in town” also appears in the top 5 in all three rounds of the survey.

Here is a graph of all the choices offered on the 2019 survey ranked in order of how often people chose them. (Click to see it larger)

Small-town Business Owner Challenges

Almost ½ of those surveyed identified themselves as current or prospective small business owners. Here are the top five challenges they chose.

1. Can’t find good employees
2. Marketing isn’t working
3. People buy from online competitors
4. Tried opening later hours without success
5. Need a business idea

A new choice, “Can’t find good employees” was chosen by over 50% of respondents making it the number one challenge. It replaced a previous choice, “Need help but cannot hire,” in the top 5.

“Marketing isn’t working” has been consistently in the second spot, and “Opening later hours without success” remains in the top 5 on all three surveys. Online competition moved up to 3rd this year from 6th in 2017 and 2015. Needing a business idea returned to the top 5 after dropping to 9th in 2017.

Here is a graph of all the choices offered on the 2019 survey ranked in order of how often people chose them. (Click to see it larger)

What’s working

A new question in 2019 asked people what they or their community are trying to address their challenges. The four choices ranked in this order.

1. Traditional economic development groups
2. Informal idea copying
3. Formal programs
4. Other things

Traditional economic development was the clear top choice with over 75%, and informal copying of ideas was chosen in over 50% of the responses.

In their own words

When offered the opportunity to share more in their own words about challenges, what is working, or anything else, 389 people shared more. Their responses can be grouped into these general categories with both positive and negative themed responses.

1. Government, leadership or officials
2. Business and economy issues
3. Community teamwork, volunteers and engagement
4. Non-government programs such as Main Street, Chamber of Commerce and many others
5. Workforce, employees or jobs

Here are some of the individual responses.

• Team work is what is working and working best. What isn’t working is thinking that the money pool is the [economic development group] or Chamber [of Commerce]
• There is a group of us that are willing to try new things and looking for ideas. There are some in town who are stuck in the old way of doing things. We are starting small and I think the big will come. With each idea, it seems like more ideas are starting to happen.
• The empty building tour worked well. We will be planning another one for the Fall. Getting everyone working together is not working well.
• After losing some major employers, some people have opened businesses, also some spin-offs related to remaining businesses. Landing the “big one”, outside employer, has not been successful.
• A group of progressive minded “young” (30 to 55) leaders have joined together to celebrate what is right about our community and to make some fun things happen.

Each community is different, and different people from within a single community can see the challenges and opportunities differently.

Diversity in rural people and communities

How diverse were survey respondents? An open-ended question invited people to say if there were ways they considered themselves diverse, and 278 people chose to answer. Some answered with their own personal diversity, but most answered about their community at large.

More rated their communities as diverse than not

Over fifty percent more people said their communities were diverse than the number of people who said their communities were not diverse. Over 70 people said their community was diverse now or increasingly diverse. Another 43 responded with average or not sure; and 42 said no, not diverse or not applicable.

The top 5 most common descriptive answers were grouped into these rough categories.

1. Color, race, ethnicity or cultural origin
2. Age
3. Education, skills or technology use
4. Businesses, professions or commerce
5. Cultures, ideas and ways of thinking

The grouping of cultures and ways of thinking includes common perspective divides such as new vs. longtime residents, farm vs. town, city/urban vs. rural/small town, and full time vs. part time residents.

Gender spectrum and LGBTQIA diversity featured in over 50 of the responses. Diversity in income or class, disability, family makeup, religion, political views and military service were also mentioned.

What next? Action steps you can take

Using these survey results, Becky McCray and Deb Brown developed a special video of action steps you can take to shape the future of your town or the towns you serve. There is no charge.

Get the Action Steps Video

Press and Media Information

You’ll find more information on the methodology, talking points for media and links to prior surveys at our Survey page.

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