Skip to content
Understand your supporters holistically.

Our Engagement Work

We help organizations define and quantify constituent engagement.

 

 

Like our iterative approach to work, our thinking on engagement and effective use of technology systems is always evolving. This page is a reflection of that messy reality. It’s incomplete. We will make revisions. We also believe in the work we are doing and in the value of sharing our philosophy and framework, whether you choose to work with us or not.

Our intent is to provide a resource that will grow over time and provide additional structure and context as we share our thoughts (both here and via our newsletter) on how to do this work effectively.

 

What do we mean by engagement?

Engagement is any way your constituents interact with the organization: reading emails from your mailing list, volunteering, donating, or participating in a program. Each of those interactions has value and can be viewed holistically rather than independently. Instead of segmenting your constituents by how they interacted in one way (ie. how much they donated), a comprehensive approach to engagement looks at all of these interactions.

 

How to think about engagement

  1. Is this for your organization? We find that measuring engagement holistically is most valuable to organizations who are ready to take the information from the system and use that in their strategy to further engage constituents. Organizations will need to have a stable CRM in place and a high level of governance around that CRM: something we also help with.

  2. Define your goals. What constituents do you currently have? What are all the ways they can engage with your organization? How would you like to see them engage further? Maybe it's getting a donor to increase their donation, or maybe it's getting a monthly donor to lead volunteer events. Who hasn't engaged yet and how can we offer them an opportunity to do so?
     
    1. Don’t conflate data collection with a business outcome

    2. Data silos are bad… right?

Measuring engagement

  1. An Engagement Pyramid is a tool that helps to assign value to each way in which someone can engage with the organization in multiple dimensions.

  2. Lead Source is one of the most commonly used (and misused) mechanisms for understanding a constituent journey and the efficacy of marketing efforts.
     
    1. Part 1

    2. Part 2

Achieving success

  1. Strategy. The process and technology has to be driven by the strategy. This requires digging deep into the mission of your organization and understanding why it’s important to increase engagement. Having your data in one place is not a good enough reason to justify investing in technology—a clear map of precisely why and how your systems will power the outcomes you seek is critical.

  2. Governance and Ownership. Increasing engagement and using technology to do so has to be a strategic priority of the organization. If it's not, there will be downstream issues when trying to make critical decisions about technology and people in technology.
     
    1. Salesforce’s New “Nonprofit Cloud” is a Wake-Up Call. But It’s Not About the Product.

  3. Maintenance. The maintenance of any technology system is not to be understated. It will be ongoing and will require someone in the driver’s seat with good governance and strategy behind it all. There's no way around this investment, but when done well the efficiency and efficacy of the work you do will more than offset the cost.
     
    1. Efficient versus elegant problem solving

What's next?

You Don’t Need Us to Get Started... but we love to chat about this stuff, even if you aren’t sure whether working with Pedal Lucid is what you need. Please feel free to get in touch!