Helping charities appeal to new audiences

Last week we played host to 11 charities who all wanted to better communicate with their audiences old and new. Charities large and small came to our HQ in Whitechapel and explored what is involved in great communication and what the barriers are to people engaging with their work.

What did we learn?

The top three things to draw on when talking about your work are:

• Passion
• An emotional connection to the work
• An ability to evoke empathy in the listener

In contrast, some common mistakes are:

• limiting your communications to a narrow audience
• assuming that the people you are speaking with know what your theory of change is
• reeling off the official version of what you do at the expense of passion and heart

Some great themes in the messages emerged. Some of the ones that we liked were when someone who had worked with Sight Savers implied that blindness was 'avoidable' and therefore reducing it was achievable. Avoidable so achievable? That gives us hope.

Another message that resonated was anchored in the nuts and bolts of what we do; spelling out the theory of change. A sense of ambition and vision was brilliant and a common sense of injustice and unfairness also served as a motivator.

Having pulled out some themes around what does and doesn't work, we then looked specifically at the barriers to engagement with each of the issues the charities were working on. These ranged from child abuse to animal welfare, stroke awareness, campaigning, housing, mental health and literacy. So there were a range of different barriers that we became aware of in discussion with each other.

Perceptions that may limit engagement:

Housing isn't an issue - my house and the area around me isn't bad

- Here there was a lack of engagement with the wider impact of poor housing: e.g how it can  affect your health.

I don't understand what this organisation does

- Where there is a lack of clarity in how an organisation communicates, it is up to the organisation not the supporter to clarify that

Aid is useless because it's all spent by corrupt politicians

- The idea of a simplified solution structure - in this case, where return on investment and transparency trumps the provision of a service.

Child abuse is a fact of life.

- The idea that something is embedded in society and so can't be prevented and/or eradicated. Therefore, there is no point in trying as it feels useless.

Strokes only happen to old people

- Here there was a lack of knowledge about the issue.

These were just some of the perceptions that came up which held wider themes for all of us. Once we had established what these were and stretched our minds to consider what others felt about our work, we set about developing campaign ideas embedded in these insights. Watch out for our next two workshops in which we flesh these out and discover how to share them with the wider world...

You can check out our Masterclass Series here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/makerble-4452209827