[Cgfc] On the Question of Outreach

[amy clay]

I was perusing the board meeting notes from Wednesday
and wanted to offer something on the subject of
outreach. 

Traditionally, there are two ways I have seen outreach
go in my work with non-profits for the past five years
or so. The first is to be more of a publicity based
approach that spends time attracting members of the
community to join the efforts of the particular
non-profit (in this case, to sign up as co-op member).
The other is simply to establish a core set of
ideals/principles that the non-profit would like to
share with the community and then to enter into a
process of educating the community on those issues.
For us, I guess that would be the importance of
local/organic agriculture and processing/products, the
use of environmentally friendly products and fair
trade for the products that we consume. 

My experience tells me that when you provide the
community with a service--education--you get a more
receptive audience. they want to listen to the ideas
that you have because they come from a more
educational standpoint. Regardless of whether said
community member decide whether to join, they have
information about the positives of consuming the sort
of products that we carry. 

I do know a lot of organizations that went the
"advertising" route and were equally successful
because they reached out quite specifically to a
target audience who they thought would be most likely
to join in their efforts. 

The downfall of the educational route is that you
don't target your audience quite so much, so you may
have less return for your efforts. On the upside, you
will be providing the community with a service. In
this time of poor health in our society, the more
people who know about the pluses of eating organic
foods, the better. 

I don't know so much about the sort of outreach other
co-ops have done as i do about other community based
non-profits, but maybe this helps a little. 

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