The nonprofit promotion should not seem like a waiting room when you stroll in. Yet many a time, visitors—potential donors, volunteers, and members of the community—walk right through the doors of these environments not knowing where to go, what to do, or actually how to engage with the mission they came to support. Engagement doesn’t begin when somebody signs up and donates money or signs up for a volunteer slot; engagement begins when the valet is parking the car.
Some charities define engaging visitors as a process of transforming an inactive spectator into one of active involvement with a cause. Once visitors feel welcome and grounded emotionally in your work, they have a greater chance of becoming long-term sympathizers. So then, how could a charity use its physical spaces and interactions as toolkits of engagement?
Create Your Perfect Entry Experience with Interactive Technology
First impressions do count—the lobby or reception area is the handshake with the rest of the world. Maybe technology could lend itself to a more colorful welcome experience than dull brochures or bulletin boards? Modern touchscreen lobby software lets your visitors browse through your programs, watch impact videos, or check out events happening around them with a casual air. Productive curiosity will blossom from such interactions, giving visitors worthwhile engagement that will occupy their spirits as they wait.
Regarding their attributes, the digital displays are primarily flexible. You can share newly updated information regarding your current campaigns, promote volunteer opportunities, or present stories that really matter to the people whom you serve. By tapping through content that catches their fancy, visitors are already making their first steps toward further involvement in your mission.
Create Immersive Storytelling Spaces
While numbers inspire logic, stories touch the hearts. One could dedicate a wall or corner in a given facility to life-sized impact-stories art. For example, it may be a photo-wall with pictures, names, and voices of people who have been impacted by the organization and QR codes linking to video testimonials, or it could be a timeline-installation which takes visitors famously through the journey of the organization, charting the major moments and the people who witnessed the realization of those moments.
An especially effective technique is to put together a “day in the life” scenario showing visitors what their support concretely provides for people. If one can see that a gift equals meals served to eat, books given out for study, or hours of counseling, it becomes strongly felt; it turns, metaphorically speaking, from an abstract into a real thing.
The donors require their contributions or energies to count, hence awarding dual purposes of acknowledgement. It awards those who have given while motivating others to join. Yet, standard donor recognition walls with plaques or an engraved plate feel a bit dry and quickly become dated. Think farther than a brass plate.
These digital recognition displays provide an opportunity to mark the supporter’s contribution in real-time, being updated with every new donation or volunteer milestone. You’ll want to build a “Wall of Impact” that identifies not only names but also the shared difference that the community of supporters is making. If visitors perceive that they belong to a community working toward change, more will be willing to add their name to that list.
The more basic the human engagement, the shorter it needs to be. Giving stations should be built, enabling the visitor to give immediately via multiple means. The means could include a tablet, digital donations, a coin funnel making charity visually satisfying, or other imaginative physical media, such as “voting with dollars,” where people drop dollars in jars that correspond to the program areas in which they wish to invest.
Others are using incentive boards milling between the set goal and its next phase, asking visitors to sponsor this next phase. If a person can see where exactly his or her donation fits into a larger goal, it becomes a more active experience of giving rather than a passive one.
Offer Behind-the-Scenes Access
Curiosity has immense engaging potential. When the opportunity arises, offer the visitors a sneak peek into what is happening in the back of the reception area. Regular mini-tours are a wonderful thing, as would be having view windows into some of the program spaces or special open-house events where people would interact with staff and program participants. Transparency fosters trust, while trust fosters commitment.
Should your work not lend itself to physical tours on account of client confidentiality or perhaps programming being done off-site, then go for a virtual option instead. Set up a video wall showing ongoing projects or a live feed from the community garden you maintain—it’ll help keep your mission alive even when visitors can’t be there in person.
Turn Waiting Areas into Learning Centers
Every moment a visitor stays with you is a potential moment of connection, opening up the entire premise for engagement. Give that waiting space a purpose: fill it with meaningful activities. Provide tablets featuring interactive content on your cause, establish interactive educational displays about the issues you tackle, or create an inviting reading nook with books and magazines on your mission.
Research shows that changing displays with a particular thematic focus intensively on a separate aspect of your work keeps the environment fresh, offering a new perspective to a repeat visitor.
Make Every Visit Count
The whole purpose of engaging a visitor cannot be left to chance and must not be an ode to a windblown fireworks show. It entails conscious and purposeful experiences that help the audience understand your mission, feel an attachment to your impact, and consider themselves a key collaborator in the labor. Whether it is in the form of interactivity, embedded storytelling, recognition, or backstage access, again, everything in the physical environment should cater to nurturing a community of ardent supporters.
Which creative engagement strategy will be tried first? Share ideas and insights with fellow nonprofit leaders so that all of us may learn from one another in this shared endeavor of making our causes so loud they cannot be ignored and hardly eligible to be passed up.
