Top Four Challenges Facing Non-Profits Today

The nonprofit industry is an incredibly rewarding community to be a part of, but it’s not without its challenges. In fact, many NPO’s face the same roadblocks as their peers - budgetary constraints, staffing struggles, and messaging mixups are all a part of daily life.

SIR has accumulated an extensive portfolio of NPO clients throughout the years and has noticed a pattern of communications quandaries that continue to reemerge. Throughout the course of this case study, we’ll touch on campaigns from Feed More, MEDARVA Healthcare, Goodwill, and LeadingAge to explore the top four non-profit communications problems that our clients have brought to us for help.

1. Increasing and Tracking Stakeholder Engagement

Feed More is a non-profit that collects, prepares, and distributes food to neighbors in need across 29 counties and five cities in Central Virginia. They came to SIR to gain a deeper understanding of their supporters and how the organization should best position itself with these key stakeholders.

Through a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative research effort, we identified supporter segments and profiled each segment using insights on attitudes, perceptions and misperceptions, behaviors, and giving preferences. We also found that volunteering is often the first step to building and deepening Feed More’s long-term relationship with supporters, and so we recommended shifting the language and focus used in its communications to include those who give of their time, talents, and energy, not just donors. 

We also discovered that the organization’s engagement capabilities were being hampered by an inability to adequately assess and track its supporters. To combat this hurdle, we transformed its engagement efforts through enhanced technology platforms and developed a strategic plan that allowed it to set smarter goals, effectively measure its progress, and better align with its mission.

2. Spreading the Word to Key Audiences

One in four school children has vision and hearing impairment significant enough to affect learning. To grow its free pre-K vision and hearing screening program, MEDARVA Healthcare engaged SIR to enhance community awareness of the program’s scale, scope, and effectiveness. 

First, we synthesized data covering the breadth of the service area, the number of children screened by area, and referral rates across the Richmond region. Armed with these insights, we developed promotional materials showing the outcomes and impact on the community. 

Today, MEDARVA is using these materials to gain funding commitments and partnerships from local businesses to drive referrals and increase screenings.

At the start of our partnership, MEDARVA had screened approximately 1,000 children in the greater Richmond metropolitan area. In the roughly three years following our work with the organization, that number had climbed to nearly 12,000, thanks in part to better promotion and increased awareness of the service and its benefits to the community.

3. Messaging Consistent with the NPO’s Mission

When Goodwill of Central and Coastal Virginia wanted to increase public awareness of its core mission and turned to SIR, we quickly recognized an operational opportunity — a chance to not only say what it does more effectively but also do what it does better. 

Through our 360-degree assessment, including in-depth qualitative research among donors, staff, board members, business partners, employees, and other stakeholders, we found that Goodwill needed more than a marketing refresh. We found that it could significantly increase its impact by transforming the company’s day-to-day business operations to better align with its mission and values — helping people help themselves through the power of work.   

We recommended reorganizing the staffing structure, investing in new mission-oriented partnerships and facilities, and developing better metrics for measuring results and impact — changes now underway in its 34 stores and main office. Similarly, we helped set forth a new four-pronged vision for workforce development centered on recruiting, preparing, matching, and supporting its employees to improve their skills and increase the organization’s capacity to fulfill its mission.

In laying out Goodwill’s new direction in an op-ed published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in March 2019, Charles Layman, president, and John Dougherty, vice president, described the project as a “strategic transformation [and] a bold new direction that focuses on long-term impact.”

4. Meeting the Needs of Your Stakeholders

LeadingAge Virginia is the trade association for senior living providers with the collective goal to expand the world of possibilities for aging. Near the end of their three-year strategic plan, they approached SIR to conduct research in order to better understand how they could serve both their members and older adults in the Commonwealth, as well as lead a workgroup of members to develop new products and services.

Through one-on-one interviews and workshops, we helped develop concepts, which were then tested via online virtual community qualitative research. One winning concept proved to be a job-matching service for workers 55 and older and senior living operators. The other was a clearing-house to help develop, foster and deliver new product and service concepts to meet the needs of older adults in Virginia.