Community Engagement Development for Non-Profit
The client is a small non-profit that serves the St. Louis foster care community. Their focus is supplying critical need foster care families with essential items such as mattresses, bedding, and clothing. Their mission is to enable families to take in last minute foster care placements without the financial stress of having to gather the necessary supplies to house a child.
Situation:
Developing a community engagement strategy can be daunting and seemingly insignificant for small nonprofits. However, especially during the time of Covid-19, consistent communication with beneficiaries and the broader community is essential. Our client understood that better communication would help them reach more individuals and garner more donations, and wanted to improve her overall communication.
Challenge:
Our client had a few challenges that our team was asked to address. The largest challenge was that they wanted to increase their social media presence and consistency in posts in a simple and low cost way, as they are a nonprofit with a small team and limited budget. Through enhancing their social media presence, their larger goal was to increase communication with donation recipients and improve outreach within the broader St. Louis area.
Approach:
The team interpreted the main problem to be the lack of consistency in the client’s social media presence. As the organization had one person primarily managing everything (including all social media pages), a main focus was lessening her workload and creating solutions that would allow her more time to focus on the most important part of her organization: product distribution. Throughout our research, we emphasized Marketing and User Experience to help the client gain a better understanding of how to use social media and connect with her audience of both donors and recipients. To help with time management and general comprehension of social media usage, we recommended using a social media management platform to help plan and schedule posts in advance. For increased branding, we created Canva templates utilizing the organization’s colors and logos that could be used to publicize positive reviews and ask for donations. Finally, we recommended hiring a student social media intern who could help relieve the client’s stress of handling all aspects of the organization while increasing the organization’s online voice.
Impact:
We provided our client with actionable steps to improve consistency and quality of community outreach through social media. Our client now has the tools to create more unified branding on social media platforms and a detailed guide to implementing a volunteer social media intern role. With these resources, our client will be able to better communicate with recipients and donors. Improved communication with current and potential recipients will increase the scope of services to reach more individuals. Improved communication to donors will increase opportunity for financial donations, enabling the increased scope.
Team Breakdown
Team Lead: Rachel Bradley
Strategist: Molly Gottesman
Strategist: Dana Ward
Relevant Background Information
Business Type: Non-Profit
Industry: Foster Care, Child Welfare
Location: St. Louis, MO
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