Your partner in outreach

The way people get information – and what they do with it once they have it – has fundamentally and permanently shifted. Instead of passively reading newspapers and magazines, or watching broadcast television, people now gather information from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats – and then interact with it, aggregate it, and distribute it themselves.

Whether you need to reach academics, researchers, professionals, or a targeted general public demographic, it can be challenging to stay abreast of and implement the most effective mechanisms for reaching your stakeholders.

Luckily, the Internet and mobile is making it possible to do exponentially more with less. Organizations can communicate with their audiences with various forms of online outreach. You can inexpensively create new online and mobile services for your members and supporters to communicate and share information. Browse IDEA’s blog for fresh ideas on outreach. Check out articles about strategy, communication, learning & access, or browse the archive for tags and older posts.

More results, lower cost

Partnering with an outside organization like IDEA can be a cost effective alternative to hiring a single staff person or bringing in freelancers and consultants. Most online outreach requires a mixture of creative and technical work, which means you need the expertise of several people — strategy, writing, programming, and technical support — which can rapidly escalate to a cost of over $250,000 a year. IDEA has these resources in-house for our own projects, and we are a nonprofit, not a commercial consultancy.

We can help build your online audience, grow your followers on Facebook or Twitter, draw on the power of crowds to have content created by your volunteers (e.g., a blog network or guest blog posts), create additional online content, and develop other online or mobile services.

The result can help you stand out from a sea of nonprofits. There are 190 thousand nonprofit organizations in the U.S. reporting assets over $100,000, of which 79 thousand have assets over $1 million. These organizations are competing for grants, donations, and other income to accomplish their missions. Those that thrive in the next decade must have cost-effective ways to reach the public via the Internet and mobile devices. And IDEA can help you do it.

If you would like to explore a partnership that can flesh out your online outreach, let’s talk.