Archive for the ‘Public engagement’ Category
Posted by Jon Howard on April 20, 2011 in Fundraising, Nonprofit Highlights, Public engagement
Captain Ahab set out from New Bedford, Massachusetts, with just one idea: putting his harpoon in the ultimate big fish, Moby Dick. His all or nothing approach didn’t work out so well for anyone but the whale.
The Coalition for Buzzards Bay got much better results by spreading nets in many different waters when they set out on their own New Bedford-based quest: to grow membership by more than 50 percent over two years. The Coalition started in 2009 with 5,200 members. A generous donor offered them $500,000 if they could add 3,000 new members before December 31, 2010.
“He wasn’t kidding,” said Mark Rasmussen, the Coalition’s Executive Director of his anonymous donor. “He made it clear: if we missed the target, we wouldn’t get the money.” Last week, my colleague Anne Garnett and I sat down with Mark just a few blocks away from the Seaman’s Bethel and other opening scenes of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to find out how the Coalition met the challenge, won the prize and set a new direction for its future. Here are some lessons:
- Share the drama. “It’s wonderful – and frankly a bit scary – to have a challenge like this,” said Mark in his 2009 announcement. The compelling $500,000 challenge and the possibility of failure helped excite and engage the Coalition family and the general public.
- All hands on deck. Volunteers moved mountainst to get targeted mailings out the door, saving thousands of dollars. Board members stepped up, ransacking their Rolodexes and buying gift memberships. That commitment brought other friends and members in on the project.
- Know what you are counting. The goal was member numbers, not member dollars. The Coalition already had clear criteria for counting individual members (family memberships count as two members) so everyone, including the challenge donor, knew the score.
- Make it easy. Any donor of $10 or more ($30 for families) who opts to be a member is a member. That low price point made it easy to say “yes.”
- Try everything. Mark handed us a pie chart with 12 slices breaking out where the members came from. Their traditional Bay swim and newer Bay bike ride accounted for 42 percent of the new members. The rest were spread over 11 separate member recruitment projects.
- Recruit the friends of your friends. As noted, the Coalition got the biggest boost just by offering a member option to riders, swimmers and their sponsors. Mark has been pleasantly surprised to find event sponsors responding well to direct renewal requests this year.
- Go grassroots. Who loves the Bay? Boaters and shellfishers for sure. Volunteers moved mountains to merge and purge records from 18 coastal communities. Personalized mailings to these two groups of public permit-holders snagged 13 percent of the total new member catch.
- Let people help. The owner of Not Your Average Joe’s restaurant created an entire promotional effort on his own, including hats, table cards and personal appeals from servers as well as mini-matching gifts of $5, to encourage diners to add membership dues to their dinner check. That brought in an astounding 550 members in just five weeks.
The Not Your Average Joe’s campaign added to a late surge that put the campaign way over the top in the later months of 2010. The Coalition wound up adding about 3,600 new members by the deadline, blowing the doors off their goal. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 21, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Communicating, Effectiveness, Public engagement
What makes for a genuine process of engaging the public in policy-making?
After a summer of shout fests around health care reform, I’d like to suggest that the typical “public hearing” or even “town hall” process simply encourages this way of behaving.
Most of the problems that we face are pretty complex. In our current adversarial way of policy making, there will always be winners and losers rather than win/wins.
I’ve experienced countless public hearings where, as a member of the public, I have been frustrated and angry at the lack of adequate time to share complex views. Standing at a microphone with just 1-3 minutes to make a comment and with no ability to have a thoughtful conversation with the other side — I can’t imagine what else could be designed to make audience members feel frustrated and angry.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The 7 Characteristics of Meaningful Public Engagement
What is necessary to ensure that the public is meaningfully consulted in policy making?
In our primer Meaningful Participation, an activist’s guide to collaborative policy making which you can download for free here, we set out 7 principles that need to be included in any process.
For citizen consultation to be meaningful, it must be:
1. Broad-based. That is, the process must truly include the full range of interests and positions that are represented. As the Quakers like to say, “everyone owns a piece of the truth.”
2. Open. Anyone who is interested should be aware of and understand how they can contribute and participate. They should feel welcomed. Meeting places should be accessible and well located. Meeting formats should be accessible and understandable.
3. Truthful. It is absolutely essential to ensuring the good faith of the participants that everyone acts in good faith. Accurate information needs to be contributed and analyzed. Important data, even if contradictory to your own views, should be included.
4. Responsive. For people to contribute civilly and in good faith, they need to know that their opinions are in fact being listened to and that they might have the ability to actually help create a better outcome.
5. Deliberative. Whatever the process is, it needs to provide enough time for everyone involved to be able to develop a shared understanding of the problem, to create a common vision of what could be, to be creative about options and to have time to thoughtfully reflect on possible solutions. One shot public hearings with citizen comment aren’t set up for this. People expect to have to demonstrate and shout to get their voices heard. There are better ways to talk to each other.
6. Fair. All participants need to know that they are equally valued and have equal access and input. Not just the highly paid lobbyists, but ordinary citizens.
And finally, the process needs to be
7. Competent. That is, it should result in the best decision being made because hard data was examined, real examples of solutions in action were examined, evidence-based practices were considered.
Whether you are a policy maker or a citizen advocate, you are going to need to work really hard to ensure that the process of developing major policies includes all of these elements. But it is truly worth it.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on February 11, 2009 in Big ideas, Good reads, Public engagement
The William and Fora Hewlett Foundation has teamed up with McKinsey and Company to start a conversation about building a “stronger nonprofit marketplace.” The proposal is outlined in their report “The Nonprofit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap.” They would like to get your feedback.
The problem that many funders and donor advisors want to solve is how to steer philanthropic dollars to the “strongest and most effective nonprofits.” They’d like to see some intermediary that could measure nonprofits based on their social impact. They are concerned, and rightly so, that the reduction of nonprofit effectiveness to percent of revenues spent on programming used by sites like Charity Navigator do a disservice to both nonprofits and to donors.
In principal, I’d welcome attempts to shift philanthropic dollars out of the ivory towers and into the streets. We need to expose more individuals of wealth to the full range of nonprofits that need their help but will never afford giant development departments (or even medium sized ones, for that matter). I’m also pretty sure than many more organizations would get “stronger” pretty quickly if funders invested in building a serious fund development capacity in those organizations.
As you know, I am absolutely dedicated to steering nonprofits to a razor sharp focus on intensifying their societal impact. But I also know that on virtually any big issue, it is pretty unrealistic to expect that a single nonprofit will change the world by itself. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on January 19, 2009 in Great quotes, Public engagement
Across the US, people are honoring the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday by performing community service. President-elect Obama has asked all Americans to serve on King Day and make an ongoing commitment throughout the year.
While I champion the call to service, I’ve been concerned for many years that the definition of volunteering and service has been too narrowly drawn and that what we should be encouraging is civic participation, in all of its many forms.
Here are a few examples of civic participation that don’t always get counted when the discussion turns to “community service.”
We’ve had a lot of snow here in RI over the last few weeks. My wonderful neighbor Doug, who owns a snow Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on January 5, 2009 in Communicating, Great quotes, Profiles of passion and courage, Public engagement
Senator Claiborne Pell and Gayle Gifford 1981
It’s not often that I get weepy over the death of a politician. But I couldn’t help tearing up when I heard New Year’s Day that former Senator Claiborne Pell had died. While he served Rhode Island for six terms in the Senate, he truly was a Senator for all of us, a man who believed in public service as a noble calling, and had faith in the power of civility and diplomacy. He worked tirelessly for international peace, human rights, education, the arts and scholarship, the environment and historic preservation.
He was quirky, the way we like our politicians in RI. Known for his frayed cuffs and collars, his summer seersucker suits, he was a patrician beloved by the working class, interested both in science and UFOs and ESP. He defined his Senate job as “translate ideas into action and help people.” Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on November 13, 2008 in Big ideas, Public engagement, Strategic Thinking
Paul Schmitz of Public Allies offers a great overview of what nonprofits can learn from the Obama campaign in his article in NonProfit Quarterly. Paul cites five key attributes nonprofits can emulate: A powerful brand. A clear, measurable strategy.? Disciplined management. Face-to-face and online organizing. Youth leadership.
In my view, the most unexpected of these factors is the success (and recognition) of old- and new-fashioned community organizing. And this, I think, is where nonprofits badly need to pay attention. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 15, 2008 in Public engagement, Strategic Thinking
By the time I blew the whistle to begin Week Two, our group of well-dressed men and women had at least learned one lesson. At my shrill blast, they leapt up from their seats and raced to the welfare office. Within 30 seconds, that line was out the door. Those who hadn’t run either settled in for a long wait or turned away to try their luck elsewhere.
I enjoyed a privileged perch as co-facilitator of Rhode Island’s ?first Poverty Simulation, an exercise created by Missouri Community Action and now being used all over the United States to help the more fortunate understand what the phrase “not making ends meet” really means. During our Rhode Island simulation, held on Sept. 23, 50-odd participants played specific roles as adult or child members of 23 low- and moderate-income households. The incomes and situations are based on reality – these families are mostly the working poor, not the most destitute. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on September 26, 2008 in Fundraising, Nonprofit Highlights, Public engagement, Research
I spent an hour yesterday in a lively phone conversation with the drafters of “Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted from Purpose” a report on the challenges and opportunities in improving grant application and reporting. The call was hosted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals which is one of the partner organizations participating in Project Streamline, a collaborative initiative of the Grants Managers Network.
Though I’ve already referenced this effort in an earlier posting, I wanted to remind you to go the the website of Project Streamline, download a copy of the report and its recommendations, and add your feedback to the discussion.
Some of the things we talked about on our conference call:
The need to rightsize the application process to the amount of the grant.
The need to focus proposal writing on the right stuff, (program and results), and not take up time with excessive paperwork.
The need for better online application processes (ones where you can save your document, copy and paste, print out versions to check, etc).
The need for open source final reports so that our colleagues can learn from our experiences (rather than reports locked in a file cabinet that no one pays attention to).
The report is a good read. It may confirm all of your frustrations. If a fair amount of your revenues come through private foundation grants, it’s well worth your involvement, especially if you have recommended solutions to the problems addressed.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of grants and contracts which nonprofits receive come through the government … which isn’t a beneficiary of this study. But the project sponsors were urged to share the report with government grantmakers anyway as they may benefit from its recommendations.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on September 22, 2008 in Better Boards, Big ideas, Communicating, Fundraising, Good reads, Great quotes, Public engagement, Strategic Thinking
Last week I facilitated a planning meeting for organizations and individuals working on issues of economic independence for individuals with disabilities. Across the US, programs like theirs are facing enormous funding cuts as state governments face extreme budget shortfalls. These service providers, like those in education, health care, and throughout our system, were extremely concerned about how they would continue to support the people they serve.
Then the conversation shifted. A feeling of hopelessness gave way to a realization that everyone in the room had to come together to completely reinvent the system. They could do this by looking at the resources they did have and finding better, more effective, and interdependent ways of working.
Given hard times, this excerpt from Peter Block’s new book, Community, The structure of belonging, seemed particularly timely.
“Community transformation calls for citizenship that shifts the context from a place of fear and fault, law and oversight, corporation and system, and preoccupation with leadership to one of gifts, generosity, and abundance; social fabric and chosen accountability; and associational life and the engagement of citizens. These shifts occur as citizens face each other in conversations of ownership and accountability.”
What is it that we wish to hold ourselves, not just our leaders accountable for? What is the world we want to live in? What responsibility do we have for creating that world?
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on August 25, 2008 in Great quotes, Public engagement
“I realized that public affairs were also my affairs. I became active in politics because I saw the possibility, if we all sat back and did nothing, of a world in which there would no longer be any stages for actors to act on.”
With the party conventions opening today with the Democrats in Denver, I couldn’t resist this quote attributed to Helen Gahagan Douglas.
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