Should Nonprofits Act Like Businesses or People?

The new book I co-authored with Allyson Kapin, Social Change Anytime Everywhere, looks at the way nonprofit organizations can use multichannel strategies for advocacy, fundraising, and community building. It’s a practitioner’s guide for planning, implementing, and evaluating strategies that engage constituents across many channels, wherever they may be, and how we as organizations need to structure our work to deliver that experience.

The conclusion of the book is titled “Disrupting the Nonprofit Sector,” and a question that came up in a recent podcast I recorded kept me thinking all week: Why do I think multichannel strategies will actually disrupt the nonprofit sector?

To successfully use multichannel strategies, we need to stop thinking about how we can operate more like businesses, and instead focus on acting more like our constituents. That may sound strange, but let me explain:

Consultants and others often advise nonprofits to focus on business objectives such as streamlining departments, minimizing overhead, and creating a results-focused organization. While those objectives have merit, they are not directly aligned with creating the best constituent experience. Ultimately, if you cannot build a community because engaging with your organization is so difficult, outdated, or cumbersome, you will not have people to support your advocacy, donate to your fundraising efforts, or champion your mission. And to ensure that you do have a strong community of supporters, you need to make supporting your mission fun, valuable, and easy.

What’s more, thinking more like your constituents isn't difficult. Try this: Stop working for just five minutes. Imagine that you are you, enjoying some personal, non-professional time, then go online. What do you do? Which tools do you use? For example, maybe you notice that you check your email and then go to Facebook. From there, you may click on a news article that a friend posted and then tweet it out using the embedded sharing options. In as little as 30 seconds, you just visited four different platforms, engaged with potentially hundreds of people, and didn't stop once to think about what you were doing. That's how your supporters are interacting (or not interacting) with your organization, other nonprofits, their friends, and their family every day.

Multichannel strategies are your keys to creating campaigns, content, and calls to action that meet your supporters where they are and encourage them to support your organization. Social Change Anytime Everywhere is focused on the way constituents interact with each other and organizations, identifying the opportunities for your organization to not just broadcast a call to action, but also create meaningful ways for your activists to take action, your donors to donate, and your community members to share your message on the platforms they prefer.

Listen to this podcast featuring Allyson Kapin and Amy Sample Ward discussing why charities should use more kinds of social media.

Read an excerpt from Social Change Anytime Everywhere.

Read more stories by Amy Sample Ward.