Lessons from an Outreach Campaign

A nonprofit organization produced an outreach campaign around the concept of alleviating hunger in their community. Taking a three-pronged approach of collecting food, soliciting donations, and galvanizing people to long-term volunteering, the organization partnered with other community groups to implement the campaign. Ambitious and well-intentioned as it was, the campaign did not achieve their desired outcome. Here’s what they learned.

Lessons

1. Focus on one goal. Raising money, collecting food and inspiring volunteerism turned out to be too many goals for one initiative and spread them too thin. They said that next time, they would assess what is realistic and focus and channel their efforts toward that one  goal.

2. Allow enough time. With only 6 weeks to coordinate the effort, they were already short of time in coordinating all parties, lining up the right assistance and developing the marketing. Allow 6 to 12 months to work out the strategy, plan the details, galvanize support.

3. Have strong leadership. In this case, they had the laudable goal of stitching together a coalition of community groups. However in practice, there were too many chefs in the kitchen and disputes broke out about who was in charge. Strong, diplomatic leadership is needed as well as clearly articulated roles for each party that match their expertise and meet their interests.

4. Plan properly. Lack of proper planning resulted in major problems, such as not getting the requisite permission in time to distribute more than 100,000 flyers in schools – a huge wasted opportunity – as well as a website that was incapable of collecting volunteers names. Proper planning can help you to map the roles, responsibilities and logistics, as well as contingency plans, needed for a successful campaign.

5. Manage your consultants. The coordinator who was hired to recruit volunteers did a good job in his initial outreach, but failed to set up a campaign office to field calls. As a result, innumerable volunteers were lost and the effectiveness of the overall campaign was compromised. There are several possible lessons from this:

A. Vet your consultants thoroughly to ensure that they have the necessary expertise and capabilities to deliver on what they say they can.

B. Fully understand the scope of services that you are engaging them in and document it in writing.

C. Assign one person to take responsibility and provide proper oversight, including feedback, support, resources and monitoring to ensure the project is on track.

6. Identify your weakness and get help. The organization recognized that they lacked the expertise or connections to get media exposure for their campaign. Looking internally they found someone with a contact to a former TV reporter who was very connected to the media. They got him to volunteer his services, which proved invalable in getting media coverage.

7. Build the structures needed to ensure continuity. For this campaign, one of the goals was to inspire people in the community to become regular volunteers. Poor planning and oversight resulted in a website that did not capture volunteers names or list the ongoing volunteering opportunities with the community groups. Had this been a priority, the campaign could leveraged this asset to build on the hundreds of hours of work put into the campaign.

8. Learn from your mistakes and build on your relationships. Unfortunately, the relationships with the community partners were left in a more strained status than at the start. Bringing together other organizations to work on a campaign serving the public interest is a good foundation from which to grow. And while success is the goal, some mistakes are inevitable. Viewed as learning experiences, these could be seen as opportunities for all parties to gain knowledge about what does work and to deepen their relationships for future collaborations.

Postscript

In the end, the organization publicly claimed the campaign as a success, stating that it was billed as a one time event that engaged more than 5,000 individuals in volunteering, raised 20,000 pounds of food (and justifying that it did raise the $100,000, but from community foundations that had made previous pledges, instead of the public as intended).

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