Even though you are operating an organization that is not concerned with making a profit and resources may not be as bountiful as those in the private sector. However, this is no excuse for not putting the time and effort into cultivating a good reputation as with many good causes competing for people’s time, attention and money it will pay dividends to be portrayed in a positive light.
Be Aware Of Your Aims With Regards To People
For a non-profit there are often different stakeholders and groups with an interest, you have the actual service users in cases where you provide a service, it is key that they are taken care of and are satisfied with the service. But you may also have donors and general members of the public who you have an aim to raise awareness of your cause. So you can see that the aims of what you are achieving is important in both these regards and differs very much to the private sector where shareholders and customers are your key groups.
Report What You Have Done & How You Achieved It
Being that you are taking people’s money, or spending grants and awards from other public bodies or charities in the name of a good cause you need to be acutely aware of accountability of where those funds are going and how they are being spent. It is important to publish financials and operational successes and challenges in reports made available to the public. In contrast to a private enterprise where the goal would be to report the bare legal minimum, we want to go far beyond and be as transparent as possible.
Use Online Methods To Get Your Message Out There
These days using the massive power of online marketing and, in particular, social media. The first place people look for info or an organization these days is online and it’s also where they go to complain when unhappy. So in two ways getting your online marketing right is key to both getting people interested and keeping them happy and informed. You should seriously look into employing a specialist such as Phase 5 Analytics to do this for you as the money spent will be recouped for sure with increased interest and custom.
Respond To Enquiries In A Quick Timescale
You should have a system in place to deal with public inquiries in an efficient and timely manner. One of the main drawbacks of running a non-profit or charity is resources and it’s common for you, as a specialist or expert to be trying to wear too many hats, doing your job, admin, promotion and even answering the phones. We can see through the example of how the charity Kids Company failed, partly due to poor admin.
Keep The Public Interested With Events
It’s easy to get bogged down in the day to day running of the organization but the best non-profits and charities stage regular public events to keep themselves in the spotlight and also raise some much-needed funds.