Our Population is Changing

It doesn’t matter where you are, the population around you is changing, therefore your donor catchment is also changing; are you changing with your catchment?

If you aren’t changing with your catchment you are likely to be missing out on gaining new support, new opportunities to grow your organisation.

Often I hear people in organisations say that a certain “new” segment of the area won’t support them, that they won’t understand what it is the organisation is aiming to do.

This can be changed quite simply – communicate with, introduce yourself  and get to know them and in turn they’ll get to know you.

Growing new support from a new immigrant community needed be any harder than growing support from any other sector of the community.

If we take a look at Auckland, a population of 1.3 million – of that there’s a mix made up of … (the data below is from Statistic NZ – Census Map 2013)

It’s not hard to see that if your organisation is only tailoring your marketing, donor support, donor acquisition communication to the ‘population’ you are used to – that you are missing out.

Take for example those who identified as Asian in the last census – 23.1 percent, if your organisation is not attempting to, or isn’t communicating effectively with this sector of the population; you are missing out and need to change your strategy.

If it means having your communications translated, explore it, perhaps there are people in the community who would be willing to help with translation services as a way of supporting your work.

When it comes to face-to-face or phone based communication, look at the possibility of employing on a fixed term contract people to do this for you, again, you may find you already have supporters who will assist in these areas.

Are you tapping into new communities, new segments of the population? If so, how have you gone about this? Please share you experiences in the comments below.