How to build strong nonprofit community connections
In the nonprofit world, connection is the name of the game. Whether bonding with prospective donors or beneficiaries of your services, you must cultivate and maintain relationships with many important stakeholders to fulfill your mission.
However, your outreach efforts shouldn’t be confined to your immediate community. Engaging with the wider community can inspire new supporters, spread the word about your cause, and strengthen partnerships with other organizations.
In this blog, we’ll review ways to broaden your reach to the larger community around you and build relationships with inspired advocates.
Understand your community
As with marketing and fundraising, inform your outreach tactics by researching and appealing to your audience. Follow these easy steps to flesh out your understanding of your audience:
- Create a persona. Design a detailed profile including comprehensive details about a hypothetical audience member to home in on their emotions and desires. Include demographic information (e.g., name, job, location, age, family) alongside psychographic information (e.g., motivations, pain points, communication preferences, relationship with your nonprofit).
- Conduct interviews. Once you understand the basic characteristics of your audience, gather more information by interviewing people from your target audience segments. For instance, let’s say your nonprofit provides free college preparation classes and resources. To engage the school community, you might interview a donor who’s part of the local high school’s PTA for insights into this audience.
- Look online. Social media provides a helpful window into your audience’s daily lives. You can glean information about their preferences, interests, and concerns—all of which can inform your communication strategy. You can also see how they engage with other charitable organizations and tailor your tactics accordingly.
All of these strategies can provide a firm foundation for your efforts, but nothing beats talking to community members in person. Take every opportunity to speak with people from all of your audience segments; if you know how to interact with them in a genuine and compelling way, your outreach will be far more engaging.
Update your hiring approach
Nonprofits have varying approaches to hiring—some have a team dedicated to recruitment, whereas others handle applications ad hoc. So, it’s only natural that hiring new team members can be daunting for some organizations, but it can pay off in a big way—especially when it comes to community outreach.
Set your team up for community engagement success by adapting your hiring approach in the following ways:
- Open new roles on your team. If your nonprofit has the resources and bandwidth, consider hiring a community relations coordinator. This team member would be responsible for researching, connecting with, and cultivating relationships between your nonprofit and community members.
- Incorporate community engagement into hiring. Ask candidates about any community relations experience or connections they can bring to the table. For instance, some candidates might have a strong network with your target audience from a previous job. Even if they don’t have these resources, ask questions in the interview about their ideas for community engagement.
- Source candidates from diverse backgrounds. Your engagement initiatives should take your community’s diversity into account. Broadening the scope of your hiring efforts helps you pinpoint new opportunities and bring new perspectives to your nonprofit. To limit the impact of implicit bias on your efforts, consider using bias-blocking recruitment technology, which eliminates any identifying information from resumes.
As your nonprofit builds more connections within its community, you’ll be in a better position to market your job opportunities and secure new recruits.
Host and attend community-centric events
You’re likely already familiar with event planning to raise money or learn more about your donors. You can leverage this know-how to host creative events that people across the community will flock to!
Here are some fundraising ideas from Funds2Orgs that work well as community events:
- Farmer’s market
- Cookout
- Open house
- Movie night
- Seasonal carnival
- Concert series
- Sports tournament
While rewarding, hosting events can be expensive and time-consuming. Keep in mind that you don’t have to host community events to conduct outreach effectively. Look for other community events that you can attend in some capacity, whether officially as a nonprofit representative or just as a community member (i.e., a booth at a farmer’s market versus attending as a casual participant).
You can also cut down on the effort and costs associated with event hosting by going in with a partner. For example, let’s say you’re hosting a community golf tournament. You might ask a corporate partner to donate in-kind items, like golf equipment or signage for the different golf holes.
Give back to the community
Your nonprofit exists to help individuals thrive against challenging circumstances, many of which are societal issues. Providing resources to your community is more likely to get them interested in your nonprofit and excited about engaging with you.
While you might be focused on your beneficiaries, leave some opportunities for the wider community to access a smaller degree of your services. For instance, let’s say you’re an art museum that charges $10 for admission. To allow more people to attend and experience the joy of art, have one day a week where admission is free.
These opportunities not only amplify your impact, but also increase goodwill with community members who are otherwise unfamiliar with your work.
You likely won’t reach your entire community overnight, and that’s okay! A great approach to outreach takes time to build and refine. Just be strategic, align your team, fully leverage your resources, and most of all, listen to your community members—their insights will lead you in the right direction and help you establish your legacy!
