If you’ve been following along with our content for any amount of time, you already know that we are big proponents of deeply involving stakeholders in nonprofit strategy development. We especially won’t shut up about the importance of making sure the people and communities your organization serves (your “beneficiaries”) play a leading role in shaping your organization’s strategic plan and other strategies.
But strategy development is not the only area where your nonprofit should be engaging its beneficiaries. Organizations that aim to be beneficiary-centered also frequently engage the people and communities they serve for purposes such as research, storytelling, advocacy (including testifying before lawmakers), service design, and more.
When beneficiaries get involved with your nonprofit in these ways, they’re sharing their time, expertise and lived experience with your organization. You can (and should) show them you value these contributions by taking a thoughtful, coordinated, and equitable approach to beneficiary engagement. If you can, you should even go as far as compensating your beneficiaries monetarily for their contributions.
If that sounds far from the reality at your organization, you’re not alone. Many nonprofits do not have a coordinated strategy for beneficiary engagement across all their departments and initiatives, and as a result, their efforts can often feel scattershot. Beneficiaries can end up feeling confused, burnt out, or even disrespected by engagement efforts, rather than centered and empowered.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are best practices any organization can follow to improve their beneficiary engagement efforts. In this post, we’ve suggested six of them to help you get started.
Let beneficiaries lead the way by asking them how they want to be engaged
The most important best practice for improving beneficiary engagement is (surprise, surprise): to let your beneficiaries lead the way. Don’t assume that you know how the people and communities you serve want to be tapped for involvement in things like strategy development, advocacy efforts, or research. Especially don’t assume that you know how they want to share their stories and lived experience (which can often be difficult and retraumatizing). Every organization has its own, unique beneficiaries, and among them, there are many diverse perspectives, communication and learning styles, fears, hopes, opportunities and barriers around getting involved with the work of a nonprofit like yours.
There are many ways to understand your beneficiaries’ openness to and preferences for engagement. Surveys, focus groups, listening sessions and interviews can all provide valuable insights. When gathering this input, you’ll be working in the absence of a coordinated beneficiary engagement strategy (because that’s what you’re aiming to create). That said, you can still do things to make this ask for input more thoughtful. For example, you should aim to utilize interviewers and facilitators who have similar lived experience and backgrounds to your nonprofit’s beneficiaries. You should also create multiple different methods for input (written, spoken etc.) as well as opportunities to provide input anonymously.
Take a coordinated approach to beneficiary enagement across your entire organization
Once you understand how your beneficiaries want to be engaged by your nonprofit, it’s time to put a coordinated approach in place across every department and initiative.
Typically, this will begin with auditing and understanding how various departments/employees are currently approaching beneficiary engagement, or how they’ve handled it in the past. What sorts of input do they look for from beneficiaries? How often do they make asks? What formats and tools do they use to collect feedback and ideas? How do they create safe spaces for sharing and protecting beneficiary confidentiality? These are just some of the questions you’ll want to explore.
As you do, you’ll likely notice inconsistencies and inefficiencies. For example, some groups may compensate beneficiaries for their engagement, while others do not. Or, you may have multiple departments/employees asking similar groups of beneficiaries for similar input at the same time (which is a great way to burn your beneficiaries out). You’ll also likely notice practices that are misaligned with how your beneficiaries say they want to be engaged. Classify these practices as “things that aren’t working,” and start to explore policies and strategies you can put in place to discourage them.
On the flip side, you’ll hopefully also discover things that are working well with existing approaches to beneficiary engagement, and that sync up perfectly with how your beneficiaries say they want to be engaged. Explore how you can make those things standard practice across your entire organization.
Finally, you’re likely to find many untapped opportunities to improve your engagement with beneficiaries. For example, perhaps your beneficiaries told you that they want to be involved over a longer time period in sharing their input with your organization, but you only tap them with one-off asks. These untapped opportunities should make it into a coordinated strategy as well.
When we say “take a coordinated approach,” what we really mean is that you should spell out a set of strategies, guidelines and standard practices for beneficiary engagement in a written document that can be used by every department and function of your organization. Then, you should put real time and effort into educating staff and board members on the approach, and ensuring everyone is adhering to the same practices and guidelines within the context of their work. As you roll the coordinated approach out, you may also want to create tools like a shared outreach calendar so that everyone is aware of when beneficiary outreach is taking place.
The next few points highlight some practices that are worth considering including in your coordinated approach/strategy.
Get as close as you can to a “representative sample”
When creating opportunities for beneficiary engagement, it’s important to get as close as you can to a “representative sample” of the people and communities your organization serves. For example, if 60% of your program participants identify as Black, 30% identify as white and 10% identify as Latino, the groups that you’re asking for input from should have a similar make up. Similar considerations should also be made for other identity-based characteristics, and psychographic ones, as well. Of course, this is much easier said than done, and outside of large-scale surveys, truly representative samples can’t usually be achieved. But aiming to create listening session groups, interview lists and survey distribution lists that roughly align with your beneficiaries’ (many, intersectional) identities and lived experiences is still a worthwhile practice.
Use trauma-informed practices any time you ask beneficiaries to share their experiences
As we nodded to earlier, sharing input, experiences and stories is by nature difficult for many beneficiaries. This is especially true if your nonprofit works with individuals who have experienced trauma. As you spell out your coordinated approach to beneficiary engagement, make sure to pay special attention to incorporating trauma-informed facilitation and interview practices. If you’re not sure where to start, Nonprofit Learning Lab has several trauma-informed facilitation training sessions coming up.
Consider a community advisory board
One of the biggest challenges that comes up when developing a coordinated approach to beneficiary engagement (especially for larger organizations) is the sheer quantity of asks for input, stories and feedback. If you’re finding that your organization is asking beneficiaries to engage more than a few times a year, and if those asks are coming out of multiple departments and initiatives, one solution might be to develop a stakeholder board, more commonly called a community advisory board. Like a governing board, a community advisory board meets quarterly (or even more frequently) to tackle big, strategic initiatives. Unlike most governing boards, however, a community advisory board is made up entirely of people who participate in your organization’s programs, who live in the communities the organization serves and/or who have lived experience with the challenges your nonprofit addresses.
I wrote about this approach for Nonprofit Quarterly awhile ago, and highlighted how organizations like KERA in North Texas, Shields for Families in Los Angeles, Boys & Girls Clubs of King County and Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago are executing on it successfully. As I mentioned in that article, a stakeholder board is not an answer to a diversity problem on an organization’s main board, but it can be a useful way to structure and systematize beneficiary engagement. To make a community advisory board work, you must create ample opportunities for the group to interface with your governing board. You should also build pipelines for folks to transition from your community advisory board to your governing board, regardless of their ability to fundraise or contribute financially.
Consider compensation
By this point, hopefully it goes without saying that we’re proponents of compensating beneficiaries for the time and effort they put into engaging with your nonprofit. It’s an important practice for any organization that cares about advancing equity (which, as we always say, should be every organization!) While still not the norm across the sector, more nonprofits have begun to prioritize paying their stakeholders for their time, including Goodwill, United Way and Feeding America. Even smaller organizations can work beneficiary compensation into their budgets with careful planning.
As you think about how to handle beneficiary compensation, it’s best to keep your approach flexible. Align compensation amounts with each specific ask, and consider the circumstances of the people you’re asking to engage. That said, a good rule of thumb can be to look at what the “fair market rate” for a similar type of engagement would be in a more business-oriented setting. For example, participants in traditional market research are typically paid $40-$150/hour, so you might consider similar figures for a listening session or focus group participant. Or, if you’re asking a beneficiary to provide input on the design of a new program, consider what you’d pay a consultant for similar services.
Keep learning
Effective beneficiary engagement is a journey, not a destination. As you roll out a coordinated approach across your organization, be open to continuous learning and evolution. Continue collecting inputs from inside your organization and from your beneficiaries about what’s working and what’s not. Then, continue iterating.
