Discover Your Hidden Engagement Pyramid – Barbara Christensen, Percolator Consulting
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An engagement framework ensures you’re spending the right amount of time on the right people. Building it usually involves lots of strategy work to define your Theory of Change, audiences, and levels, plus finding the best technology track it all. Haven't yet embarked on this epic journey to being more effective organizers and fundraisers? You'd be amazed what you've already accomplished without ever having uttered the words "engagement pyramid". Let's uncover the maps you already have, clear away the mists of technical uncertainty, and help you lead the way to your hidden engagement pyramid. BARBARA CHRISTENSEN, SENIOR PROJECT MANAGER at Percolator Consulting Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gardengnome/ Barbara has spent 20 years on the digital side of a nonprofit—CRM wrangling; digital organizing, fundraising, and communications; and IT and user support (and often all of those jobs at once). Her favorite campaign win was turning out hundreds of happy commenters to dull wildlife commission meetings for months. At Percolator, she empowers clients to sync their technology to their mission and is practically giddy about engagement. She believes profoundly in goals over gadgets, loves smashing bugs of the technical persuasion, and will talk to you about bats and/or chickens for far too long if you let her.
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Discover Your Hidden Engagement Pyramid – Barbara Christensen, Percolator Consulting
- 2. Hello!I am Barbara Christensen I’m an engagement technology geek at Percolator Consulting. Barbara@percolatorconsulting.com
- 3. Defining engagement Finding a framework Your mission: Engage
- 5. Engagement Process of building and managing relationships with the people who help you achieve your mission 📸: Techbridge
- 6. An effective engagement org ▣ Combines data, tech, and organizing ▣ Knows the most valuable relationships ▣ Offers value to supporters ▣ Treats people as more than lists ▣ Has org-wide shared understanding
- 8. Metrics that matter Are we spending the right amount of time on the right people?
- 14. 3. Engage!
- 15. Strategy process Audiences Theory of Change Pyramid The map: Getting to mission accomplished The people: Roles for them, Value to them The framework: How they engage How they move up
- 17. 📸 FoodCorps📸 WA Trails Association 📸 Young Farmers
- 18. Starting your strategy ▣ Document what you do now ▣ Identify your silos ▣ Define what’s working & not Current, accurate, accessible data 📸 America SCORES, Bay Area
- 19. Setup your first experiment ▣ Send a legacy program invite ▣ Pull high level volunteers for feedback ▣ Invite regular digital advocates to a free event 📸 Sacred Heart Community Svcs
- 20. bit.ly/net2pyramid Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end. Data –Mister Spock
Editor's Notes
- STORY-- growing volunteer numbers, great online, aging member base and declining retention, data was disconnected, didn’t really tie back to what we were trying to accomplish. digital strategy consultant grabbed an envelope-- “engagement framework”. At the time, it felt a bit like we were starting some epic journey into an uncharted universe. Boldly go…
- There isn’t a nonprofit out there that isn’t at its core about people. Even if your mission is focused on preserving land or designing salmon-friendly waterways, it’s people that accomplish your mission.
- Engagement is the process of building and managing the relationships between your organization and those people who help you achieve your mission. It’s more than a final destination, of course, there is no X marks the spot. It’s a process-- a continuous journey of strategy, experimentation, evaluation.
- beyond single vertical focus on donations or list sizes to a holistic view of your supporters and how they help you create the world you envision. combines data, technology, and good old-fashioned organizing to lead people into deeper and more impactful roles within the organization. right ask to the right people at the right time. knowing which relationships are the most valuable and spending the time and effort needed to grow and maintain them. It means offering value that’s appropriate and commensurate to the roles you’re asking people to take on. The thing that speaks to me most about engagement is how it breaks down silos- you seek to understand AND involve your supporters across all you do.
- So, engagement is, I think, the best way to organize how pretty much any nonprofits work…but let’s be clear: This shouldn't be about building another system, collecting data just to make nice graphs, (though I love nice graphs!) You should do engagement for a reason: Spending the right amount of time on right people to meet your mission.
- A well-designed engagement framework becomes a powerful indicator of your overall organizational health and success. Your framework should help you understand each supporter fully AND understand which of your engagement efforts are the most effective This is where an integrated CRM really shines. For example, for Dogwood, we integrated salesforce, organizing platform nation builder & callfire’s phonebanking tools, and an email platform. Because they had a full 360 of their supporters actions in Salesforce, with just 800 volunteers they engaged tens of thousands of supporters with live phone calls an inperson organizing in the last federal elections.
- The idea of engagement frameworks arises from years of organizing, marketing, sales, fundraising, because nonprofits do all those things, too. The end goal is not more widgets sold, of course, but more acres preserved, more sick kids cured, more equality, more meals distributed.
- There are lots of models for an engagement framework. Percolator’s favorite is a pyramid. good conceptual model for organization-wide engagement Simple, qualitative levels Each level defines how you get there, what you do while you are in there I’ll include resources at the end defining each of these levels, but let’s look at the basic qualities for a moment…
- Up the pyramid the ways your supporters engage with you require more of their time, their attention, and their money Their work also has more impact and value to your organization. When we say Value to your org, it’s not just donations. We also mean: “What would it cost to accomplish this same task with paid staff”– volunteer licking envelopes once a quarter for a newsletter mailing volunteer organizing your capital campaign to build a new hospital wing The width= the number of supporters. For most folks this means a much wider bottom than top, but your org may be different!
- The types of interactions you have with supporters also changes as you move up the pyramid At the bottom: It’s less personal, broadcast-based, based on single transactions like a donation or an action, and you don’t ask them to dive too deeply into understanding you, nor you to understanding them Higher up they take on more complex roles, you manage them more one-on-one, and they contribute more to how you do your work.
- There’s a lot of potential for complexity, but Pyramids don’t have to be complicated to be effective. Great example of how not to get bogged down in determining a fiddly score Great thing about a streamlined pyramid– it’s much easier to ID the tests to try, measuring action is concrete, and adoption is easier for all your staff. You should strive for simplicity, especially when starting out!
- I don’t know about you, but when I started to ponder an engagement pyramid for my org, with that envelope drawing in hand, I got the general concept, but where to start, that was lost on me. It was like trying to navigate into the delta quadrant without navigation
- But luckily at the time I had the help of some awesome consultants (some of whom later became my bosses…note to all you engagement superstars out there– career path!). This is a quick overview of how we go about building an engagement pyramid. Theory of Change- your destination is a world where your mission is accomplished and you can close your doors. Then you walk backward from there defining the conditions that will get you there. From there you define Audiences– the people you want to reach who help you meet those conditions in the theory of change. You define who they are, what they want from your org, also what value you offer to them Create you pyramid: define what they do, how they move up
- We used a process like this with the education advocacy group GO Public Schools in Oakland CA. They are engagement superstars– they love trying new tactics to not only move people up the pyramid, but also keep people happy in their current level. They use our Salesforce app StepUp to track their org-wide engagement, I’ll include a link to a case study in my resources page at the end!
- OK, so let’s say you don’t already have a powerful pyramid mapped out like GO Public Schools. You haven’t created a theory of change. That’s ok. Let’s think about what you *DO* have: You probably have a pretty large pool of people who know who you are but you don’t know who they are…yet. Press hits, social media followers you don’t have an email for. You probably have a decent sized list of people who have given you their contact info– email subscribers, people who pledged to conserve water in their in your watershed campaign, folks who signed up at your booth at the local health fair You have volunteers or action takers, and some of them get more and more involved-- You probably have a few superstars- board, first nations spokesperson who testifies on your behalf, volunteer who designed your case management...they eventually become staff Sound familiar? You already have all the roles and people that belong in a pyramid. You just need to document it, get shared understanding among staff, and use it.
- Document your systems- what happens when someone donates, volunteers for the first time, signs up to your email list. Be a secret shopper to your own org. And survey your staff– is everyone using your systems? Understand your silos- functional and data – whose spreadsheets aren’t making it into your CRM, do you ask volunteers to donate, are you asking your program staff to report back the value of donations to fundraising staff Define: What’s working now? What’s not? If you have systems that aren’t working well, for instance, using an external form instead of a facbook lead gen ad, what’s your plan to tweak them? But remember– But the engagement pyramid only works when the data behind it is current, accurate, and accessible. BUDGET FOR TECH
- I love also that moving people up to the next level becomes inspiration to experiment with new tactics and campaigns. Like adding postal codes to your email sign up forms in order to target a volunteer ask to the right riding Legacy program invite to people who haven’t donated a lot but are hightly involved and over 65 Invite volunteers with high engagement level to weigh in on strategic plan or other authority-oriented tasks Use wealth capacity data to target high capacity, high engagement level, low donor supporters to give at a higher rate find those demonstrating that they are ready (actions) or worth spending time on (wealth capacity, constituency, collectively)