In Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, Crutchfield and Grant argue that high-impact nonprofits excel at engaging outsiders, always drawing new individuals into their community of “believers” and “change makers.” They build a community of ever-growing evangelists who become connected, inspired, and transformed in the process of working for a cause. To move outsiders to committed insiders, high-impact nonprofits advocate Four Rules of Engagement–all of which build on each other.
1. Communicate Your Mission, Vision, and Values
The power of a clear and compelling expression of an organization’s mission, vision and values can’t be underestimated. Mission, visions and values leak, so leaders must always tell the story, connect the work with something worth sacrificing for, and inspire others to join a community that’s making a difference. At the heart of each story is a “value-shared” reality that leaders tap into to create the emotional hooks to engage outsiders.
Habitat for Humanity, one of these high-impact nonprofits is a great example. They are not about merely building houses for the poor, but about “eliminating housing and homelessness from the face of the earth.” Their mission, vision, values statements state that “all of our words and actions are for the ultimate purpose of putting shelter on the hearts and minds of people in such a powerful way that poverty housing and homelessness become socially, politically, and religiously unacceptable in our nations and the world.” (Just a thot: Isaiah describes the Kingdom as a place where everyone will sit outside his house under the shade of his own vine. Jesus, himself, refers to building a place for us.”)
2. Create Meaningful Experiences
You can’t just express your values, however. You must give outsiders a chance to experience those values in action. Businesses call it “experiential marketing.” Jesus did it when he engaged others in “preaching, teaching and healing.” For outsiders to become insiders, they need to contribute to the cause beyond writing a check or casting a vote. They must be engaged in experiential and emotional events that allow them to actually take part in creating social change. They want to get their hands dirty.
3. Cultivate Evangelists
As outsiders have a positive experience and begin to buy into the mission, vision, values of the nonprofit, they develop a passion for the cause. They have a story of conversion to tell, they are ready to be ambassadors. High impact nonprofits cultivate these emerging evangelists and help them spread the word among their social networks. In almost every nonprofit studied, there was at least one “super-evangelist” whose influence helped create organizational momentum. High-impact nonprofits cultivate these “super-evangelists” and platform them.
4. Build a Beloved Community
Once leaders have inspired people with their values, engaged them in emotional experiences and turned them into evangelists, they work hard to build the relational connection among these emerging insiders. Leaders create a beloved community where these new members connect with one another. They use, for example, conferences to bring them together. They take advantage of various communication tools, technologies, and alumni-like programs to keep the momentum hot. As the web of relationships develop, individuals begin to bring in their own wider social networks.
Crutchfield and Grant explain why nonprofits make the effort to engage others–since it’s normally easier to just use current insiders. Habitat for Humanity, for example, realizes that ultimately this approach of “turning outsiders into insiders” ultimately creates a powerful lever for social change. One partner stated:
Habitat has not chosen the easiest way to build houses. The easiest way is letting the construction companies do it, with paid skilled labor and lots of it. Habitat does not work this way because the ultimate goal is not the house, but to transform the people who participate in the building of that house, the families who live in that house, and the society that they are part of.
Application:
Do you have a clear, compelling story about why a movement at your location will change the world? Why not?
Have you thought of ways in which to “engage outsiders” in experiential and emotional experiences which actually get their hands dirty in creating real social change?
Are you giving people opportunities to cast their newly acquired vision for the cause? Helping them tell their story of conversion to their social networks? Are you watching for “super-evangelists” who might give you even greater influence?
Are you working hard at building relational connections among these emerging insiders? Do you recognize that each person who joins a beloved community will naturally bring in others from their other social networks?
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