About two weeks ago I
attended a film seminar held by the Building a Better Wilmington Campaign
(BBWC), which is a nonprofit organization focused on encouraging students and
their ilk to volunteer here in Wilmington in order to foster a sense of
community. I thought that they would be a great topic
considering my interest in their cause; after all, I have always been one to
value the importance of community in… well… communities. It’s very easy to
forget in our increasingly globalized internet world that there’s also a world
right out our front door that has its own problems. So in an effort to lend a
hand to those who are busy lending hands, I’ve decided to research the most
effective rhetorical techniques for small nonprofit organizations. With
any luck I might be able to find some useful Rhetorical techniques the BBWC can
use.
First off, I was going to start off
by analyze the rhetoric used in the BBWC’s website. Unfortunately the BBWC, doesn’t
have its own website, at least not one that I could locate. They do however
have a Facebook page and a volunteer page on the main UNCW website. Here they
have links and tabs devoted to the specific aspects of their organization. Such
as their head organizer Dr. Jeffrey L. Brudney, the inaugural
holder of the Betty and Dan Cameron Family Distinguished Professorship of
Innovation in the Nonprofit Sector at UNCW. He is also the Editor in chief of Nonprofit and Volunteer Sector Quarterly,
“the premiere journal in nonprofit studies worldwide” (BBWC).
The fact that their leader is so experienced and respected In his field no
doubt adds a great deal of credibility to their campaign. In addition to
general information they present, they also have tabs for things you’d expect
from a program such as this, such as information on how to volunteer with them.
One draw back to their lack of a webpage would no doubt be that their design
opportunities are limited to pictures and logos along with the already uniform
UNCW theme. What they do have they
display well however, such as their volunteering resources page which displays
strong images of volunteering in America along with statistics. At first, I
thought their lack of a website might be detrimental to their cause, but it
actually might be a smart move. Because all their information is located on a
site with a decent amount of traffic it saves them a little time trying to
build their own audience. I’ll have to look more into this.
Chao Guo and Gregory
Saxon in their article for the Nonprofit
and Voluntary Sector Quarterly Journal did a study around social media
based advocacy and the steps a nonprofit would take to attract and get results
from an audience. Here they narrowed the steps of advocacy down to three, for
which they made a pyramid diagram. The three steps were reaching out to people,
keeping the flame alive and stepping up to action( Guo, Saxon 70). For good
measure, here is the diagram:
(Guo, Saxon 70)
 |
| (Guo, Saxon 70) |
According to Guo and
Saxon, These are the minimum number of steps, or “stages,” an organization uses
to mold their rhetoric. Though I’m sure this isn’t the only way to go about
making a marketing strategy. It’s also very vague. I imagine that when coupled
with specific examples from my readings such as social proof an organization
might actually be able to effective marketing strategy.
The next source I
found really interesting was Funding Source, Board Involvement Techniques, and
Financial Vulnerability in Nonprofit Organizations by Matthew M. Hodge and
Ronald F. Piccolo. In this excerpt the authors focus on the vulnerability of
resources for nonprofit organizations. Because the funding they receive is
typically from donations instead of revenue from sales, nonprofits are often at
the mercy of the laws that regulate their nonprofit status. To cope with these
problems, many nonprofits use something called resource dependence theory. A
relatively simple practice, “resource dependence theory explains how an
organizations survival and strategy depends on its relationship with foreign
institutions” (Hodge, Piccolo 172). At its simplest form, it could be said
resources affect a company’s plan of action. It seems rather obvious, but when
you consider much of nonprofit resources stem from private contributions and
government grants it becomes easier to see how these external factors might be
of significant importance to a nonprofit.
Works
cited
"Building a Better Wilmington
Campaign." Campaign Leadership: BBWC: UNCW. N.p., n.d. Web. 24
Sept. 2015.
Guo,
Chao, and Gregory D. Saxton. "Tweeting Social Change: How Social Media are
Changing Nonprofit Advocacy." Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly
43.1 (2014): 57. ProQuest. Web. 24 Sep. 2015
Hodge,
Matthew M., and Ronald F. Piccolo. "Funding Source, Board Involvement
Techniques, and Financial Vulnerability in Nonprofit Organizations: A Test of
Resource Dependence." Nonprofit Management and Leadership 16.2
(2005): 171-90. ProQuest. Web. 24 Sep. 2015.
No comments:
Post a Comment