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Nonprofit Communication in the time of Coronavirus

By Lakshmi Narayanan

Since the beginning of this week, everyone at CallHub has begun working remotely. The idea is to ensure that all of our team stays safe and also be socially responsible in ‘flattening the curve’ by not passing on the virus.

Not all organizations, unfortunately, have this luxury.

For instance, to volunteers and agents for whom everyday work involves having direct interactions with people (via door to door canvassing, organizing events, fundraisers, sales meetings, etc.), remote working can seem impossible.

There is however, a way out.

The answer is not to abandon working completely (for it is now more important than ever to rally together). The answer is to come together and find safe ways to have personal interactions — so that you can still encourage conversations without putting yourself at risk.

That means the majority of nonprofits are willing to forgo a loss in revenue to keep their audience and supporters safe.

(If you are one among them, thank you — for putting the health of your volunteers, supporters, and the public, above your profits. The least we could do for you is offer an alternative.)

The corresponding loss in revenue could be offset (at least slightly) by conducting virtual events.

Even if these online events won’t rake in the same kind of funds your in-person event does, it would still be a good way to deliver on what you promised your audience.

The obvious challenge would be that not all in-person events translate well to an online event. For instance, a bake sale would be hard to replicate virtually.

The interest and engagement generated by in-person contact can fizzle out when your audience are practically joining alone from home.

One way to retain interest is to change the itinerary of your event. Having a quiz or a virtual game can spark the interest.

The second challenge would be to make the virtual event as engaging and personal as an in-person event.

Here are some ideas that can help you there:

Keep in mind that there are no magic solutions for making a virtual event a success — especially because you are catering to an audience who are used to in-person events.

However, the above ideas can help you get started in the right direction.

Your volunteers can still help your cause from the safety of their homes. Instead of direct in-person contact, they can use phone calls and peer to peer texts to talk to their prospects.

In a distributed phone-banking effort, your volunteers can join the campaign from their homes, with just a computer (laptop), internet, and a phone. They do not have to come to a specific location (like your organization’s office), to participate in the campaign.

This is actually not a new concept. Political campaigning (especially for Bernie Sanders — Call for Bernie), saw a lot of young volunteers reaching out to voters millions of miles away. And well, the phone-banking efforts were a huge success (going by the amount of support Bernie gathered).

If you have not used it for your organization, now would be a good time to adopt it!

It would be tough to keep volunteers motivated. Being isolated and joining a campaign remotely can get boring real fast. The group energy and camaraderie shared in a typical phone-banking campaign can be hard to replicate virtually.

The best way to overcome this would be to improve communication. Form a Slack channel (or group) with your volunteers and encourage them to share how their calls went.

They could reach out for help, ask questions, or simply give an update of the conversations they have had thus far.

(Remember to have a moderator for the channel — to set the tone for the conversation and lay down some ground rules).

If you do not have Slack yet, using Google Meet, Hangouts, or even a closed FB group chat will do the trick!

You can also have regular meetings with your team via Google, Skype, or even Zoom to keep them engaged.

To be honest, both of these methods have worked remarkably well for us.

Since we started working remotely, our teams have two meetings a day (one in the morning and one in the evening) to discuss how the day went.

We also have an exclusive slack-channel #remote-work to discuss the boons and banes of the current work environment.

Having such extensive communication across channels has helped us maintain a semblance of teamwork, and has also improved our productivity.

We sincerely hope they help you too!

The coronavirus (Covid-19) can actually spread through surfaces. So licking stamps or even touching mails can spread the infection.

A sensible tip here would be to not ‘lick’ the stamps.

However, you can also go one step further and limit your communication to emails (at least temporarily).

Newsletters, fundraising requests, and even event invitations can be sent via emails.

If you are transitioning a lot of your fundraising requests to an online form, ensure that you make it easier for your donors to make the payment.

The inherent advantage of a direct-mail — of it being a personal touch, will be lost. A lot of your valued donors would be getting an email, instead of a warm letter by post.

If they are not expecting this transition, then there is a good chance that most of your emails would go unread.

So ensure that you give your audience a heads-up about this change. You can send them a quick text to look for an email from you, instead of a letter in the post box.

You can also use SMS to follow up with them and see if they have indeed read their emails. To keep it engaging, see if you can frame the message as a conversation, rather than a reminder.

E.g. “Hi Jon, what did you think of our ‘Spring project’ that helped 500 families get access to water and essentials. Would love to know your thoughts on it.”

Typically, you would not have such nuanced conversations over texts. They would be reserved for in-person meetings and phone calls.

However, we live in different times. The current situation calls for some out-of-the-box ideas to encourage conversations.

Though a lot of these ideas seem ‘common-place’ advice, the challenges in implementing it will be real.

For us, we struggle to reach the same levels of productivity as we did before when we worked together. For you, it could be encouraging conversions, without live interactions.

Conversations, one to one interactions, and frequent communication helped us adjust better to this new lifestyle. Hopefully, the above ideas can help you do the same.

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