Kretzmann and McKnight’s Community Building Workbook provides a thorough guide with which to analyze the extent in what manners and the extent to which an organization is involved in the local community. I went through the survey questions using our project as the organization to try to discover where our strengths and our weaknesses lie. It is clear that our project’s greatest strength lies in its objective of having a direct economic impact on the community by mobilizing resources (volunteering) specifically within the local community. However, going through the questions, one weakness of our project that struck me is the extent to which we are engaged with institutions and organizations of Somerville. We are building this networking map on a fairly large scale, and yet the organizations we are hoping to connect have little (if any) knowledge of the project. Considering that the launch of our map is coming up, I think our project’s prospects for success could be greatly increased by outreach aimed specifically at getting organizational and institutional participation. The easiest and most cost efficient way would be to draft a newsletter type email to be sent to the organizations that are already on the map (or maybe send out hard copies—but this would cost money) announcing our launching, goals, and ways to participate. However we approach this, our launching presents an excellent opportunity to contact these organizations and get them excited about the map, being more tangible and useful to the organizations than when we were simply contacting them for information.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Outreach Opportunity - Launch
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i completely agree! i think this was something i was saying from the beginning. to me, it doesn't make sense to anonymously contact organizations to speak with them for about 30 min to get information on their group to post a node. Although we've got their information, the group is not actually invested in our project, unless they were specifically told about it and showed some enthusiasm. Therefore, I think that it would be an important step to send them all an email/newsletter, whatever, so that we can gauge their interest by their responses. I am assuming that at least 50% of the organizations will a)not respond b)be confused and not remember being interviewed or c)actually not have been interviewed (since some students got information just from websites). For the future, it would be important to make sure we fully inform groups about our mission/goal so that only IF they're interested, we can put them on the map and get them involved.
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