How to Foster Community Involvement in Your Organization
If you’re a nonprofit leader, you’ve invested countless hours in your community. Your strategies, your programs, and your whole mission hinges on that community.
How can you get that community to be involved in your good work for them?
We have some ideas here, and don’t be afraid to chime in, in the comments!
Get Your Staff on Board
We’ve written before about fostering a culture of philanthropy in your organization. Doing that is one step to getting your staff to mobilize and bring in ideas that can help your organization with its outreach for important programs.
Remind your staff that they are all representatives of your organization, even when they’re off the clock (yep, it’s that kind of job!) and instill them with pride in your mission and your programs. A community’s coin is reputation, and the more people you have sharing what an awesome organization you have, the better (and bigger) your reputation will be.
Have a Strategy
Community involvement in, and support of, your programs shouldn’t be accidental. When you created the strategic plan for your projects and programs, hopefully you have already outlined a marketing and outreach plan. If you haven’t, then it’s not too late to start.
See the Bigger Picture
When you work hard on a project, it can be hard to remember that not everyone knows it—or cares about it—as well or as much as you do. Remind yourself and your team from time to time that most people will need to be exposed to information about your projects before they’ll gain an interest in them, and it’s up to you to get that information out to the public. Keep lists of key community members and other organizations that might be able to help you get people involved in your projects, and discuss the contacts on these lists with your whole team.
For those of us in small communities—as many of us here in Alaska are—it might seem like we’re in danger of overstating our messages. Nobody wants your cause to lose immediacy because you’ve brought up your pleas for help too many times. If you’re worried that this is the case, ask a mentor or someone outside your organization to speak to you about this and get his or her opinion about how saturated the community is with knowledge about your project.
If you think that the community is knowledgeable about your project, but still is not involved, then that’s also good information. That tells you that you need to analyze how to better illustrate why their involvement would help your programs, and how they will improve your whole community with their assistance.
Find Ways to Engage in Local Events
If your organization isn’t yet partnering with other community groups or with for-profits to take advantage of the extra attention surrounding local community events, then use this summer to brainstorm ways you can make that happen in other seasons. From co-hosting an event, to offering to present your project at the event, to simply helping with outreach for a cause that aligns with your mission, you’ll get more ears and eyes on your good work than if you ignore these events.
Small nonprofits and startup programs may not have the resources available to host their own community events effectively. Don’t forget that most events are planned a year or more in advance, so don’t put off talking to the organizers now about an event you’d like to help with next summer.
If you’re located in an area that has relatively few events, get some feedback from your networks about what kind of event they’d like to start—maybe you can get the ball rolling on a new event, which in turn might help foster a greater sense of community in your area as well as helping your programs!
Is your organization using social media effectively?
Step Up with Social Media
Yes, social media has its drawbacks—there’s too much chatter, it takes valuable time to do it correctly, and you need to observe quickly changing “rules” that aren’t set in stone anyway. However, social media is still a place where you can not only reach out to people in your community who you think might be interested in your causes, it’s somewhere you can be found as well. If the community you’d like to see get involved in your programs is spread across the state rather than located in one town, then social media may be a much more convenient way to connect. Additionally, more and more people are using social media platforms to search for topics they find interesting—don’t you want them to find you?
What other ways do you foster community involvement in your organization? We’d love to hear from you!