Living at the Intersection of Technology and Advocacy

Posted on 08/07/2020 @ 02:46 PM

The “constituent” is a slippery entity. With every passing year, technological advancement, and social medium, and a constantly shifting zeitgeist—it gets harder and harder to get in touch with your constituents, or even find them. Their attention is diffuse. The economy has crippled younger generations, who are laden with debt, fighting eviction, and who lack the time or energy to devote to advocacy, to fighting for the things they believe in. That’s why it is more important than ever that advocacy come to them; that the organizations that seek to empower their constituents help them take the first step. The best — and perhaps only — way to do this is through technology. Bring the action to the constituent.

So how does this happen? Most nonprofits exist in a constant state of fundraising. They need an approach to engagement that spans a wide array of tactics. They need to bombard their constituents and potential constituents with emails, texts, social media posts. They need to toe the balance between too much and not enough. If you oversaturate an inbox, you may lose that user; if you don’t communicate enough, you’ll never be thought of at all. And once a user has participated, they need use analytics to better understand constituents. What pages on your website are your users being driven to? What is grabbing their attention? What percentage of them are making contributions—and what can you learn about that percentage? Are your emails being read? Are they being opened at all?

The question becomes: how does a nonprofit use technology to increase participation? In addition to a multipronged strategy that uses email, text, phone, video, and social media as communication tools, a nonprofit organization needs to be transparent. Right now there is a reckoning with long-held power structures all across America. Multinational corporations are being urged to look inward, to examine the racial, gender, and economic imbalances in their ladders, and to make changes. Corporations are slowly electing more Black, indigenous, and other people of color to their boards of directors, allowing for a wider array of representative voices. This matters for nonprofit organizations just as much as it does for corporate America. It matters to your constituents. They want to know how you are using their donations; they want to feel included in the decision-making process. You need a website tailormade for nonprofits—clear, clever, and beautiful.

Plus Three lives at the intersection of technology and advocacy. We help nonprofits toreach as many people as possible; we take technological constraint out of the picture. We work only with nonprofit organizations whose goals are aimed at making a better world through activism, volunteering, and economic relief.

Technology should never impede your plans — instead, it should show you the way.