The Surprisingly Easy Steps to Receiving Robust Community Support

By Joanne Oppelt

Are you tired of your nonprofit being the community's best-kept secret? Do you want to influence community perceptions about your agency? Do you know where to find durable community support? Are you trying to leverage your resources more fully? Then read The Surprisingly Easy Steps to Receiving Robust Community Support

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joanne Oppelt Consulting, LLC
• Release date: Jul 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781951978204

Joanne Oppelt

During Joanne Oppelt's 30+ years working in the nonprofit arena, she has held positions from volunteer to executive director in both small and large organizations. Integrating fundraising with strategic planning, marketing, operations, and financial systems, she builds up organizational revenue streams, creating sustainable funding structures. Her extensive background puts her in a unique position to understand the challenges nonprofit leaders face-both internally and externally. As principal of Joanne Oppelt Consulting, LLC, she specializes in helping nonprofits improve their ROI and realize continuous net surpluses. She currently provides consulting services, multi-module online courses with private coaching, person-to-person fundraising advice, annual summits, virtual get-togethers, and weekly newsletters.The creator of The Sustainable High ROI Fundraising System and co-creator of the Nonprofit Quick Guide series, Joanne is the author of six books and coauthor of fourteen. She has taught at Kean University and is a highly sought-after speaker and presenter. She holds a master's degree in health administration and a bachelor's degree in education, with a minor in psychology. She can be reached at [e-mail] or through her website www.joanneoppeltcourses.com.

Book preview

Chapter One

The Community Contract

Nonprofit organizations exist to meet community needs, are governed by community members, and are funded through community contributions. Nonprofit agencies leverage their scarce resources by fostering community relationships. Nonprofits even receive a special tax-exempt status based on their involvement with the community. In the nonprofit world, survival is defined by how much community support they receive, financially and otherwise. Knowing how to procure strong community backing is crucial to your nonprofit’s success.

Yet the number-one question we hear is, How do I get the community to support my organization? Often the question is related to finding new donors. Many times the question is related to creating organizational awareness and gaining public visibility. Other times, the question refers to finding the paid and unpaid staff needed to carry out operations. Sometimes nonprofits need the community to refer potential clients to them. Yet, again and again, we see nonprofits struggle to be widely known as premiere social entities worthy of tremendous community support.

What is Your Starting Point?

To understand how to build strong community support, you need to know where your starting point is: what the community thinks now. So often, community members think of nonprofits as do-good organizations that are poor and unsophisticated, always asking for money. Where people do the work of saints on a shoestring budget. Where there is never enough money to meet all the needs. It’s a sad situation. Bless them, trying to beat the odds.

Well, if those are the prevailing stereotypes, no wonder nonprofits have trouble garnering robust and widespread community support. Who wants to support a losing battle?

Come from a Position of Strength

To realize pervasive, robust community support, you need to position yourself as a winner. You start improving your organization’s position by clearly communicating, through all your communication channels—even your internal ones—what your organization is and what it stands for. Moreover, you do it in a way that reflects your agency’s personality.

You need to communicate a consistent image throughout your organization to steadfastly project that image to the community. You want control over your messaging so that you may influence the community to give you its generous