Howto:Engage the hard to engage

In an ideal world, every New Yorker would play an active role in their community. Every parent would serve on their child’s Parent-Teacher Association. Every tenant would join their Tenant Association. Every neighbor would organize a block association. Community forums would generate such interest that they would have to be held in Madison Square Garden.

Of course, that isn’t the world we live in. Between work and children and life’s dizzying distractions, many New Yorkers simply don’t have the time to become fully engaged in the community. For others, cynicism breeds apathy -- they just don’t see the point in civic engagement. Still others are intimidated into silence by our city’s alphabet soup of agencies and layers of government – they don’t feel as if they know government well enough to productively contribute.

This How To guide is a brief attempt to answer the most difficult question in political organizing: how do you engage people who – through apathy, or over exhaustion, or simply out of habit – do not respond to conventional outreach?

Defining the Hard to Reach
Who are the “hard to reach?” To arrive at a useful definition, it is helpful to think about traditional community engagement tactics and why those strategies fail with some constituencies.

One of the most common and important ways of galvanizing community action on a local issue is to work with Community Boards. But the hard to engage are – by definition – not the people who sit on a Community Board or frequent its meetings.

By the same token, if someone seeks to generate local interest in, for instance, a housing issue, they will seek out community organizations explicitly committed to housing issues, or organizations with a history of working on housing. But the “hard to engage” are precisely the people who don’t belong to issue-based community organizations. An email blast to self-identified “housing activists” will not reach the people we’re discussing.

Moreover, the hard-to-reach aren’t the people who regularly read local blogs and never miss an edition of the local paper. Generating press attention to your issue, while helpful, is not likely to grab their attention.

The hard to reach aren’t hooked in to issue-based community organizations, don’t devour local news, and aren’t intimately involved in their Community Board. Unfortunately, that’s about all they have in common. Reasons for disengagement are varied. There is no single tactic – no silver bullet – for organizing the hard to reach. Instead, the best one can do is provide a framework for thinking through the question of how to engage the disengaged.

1. Organize around issues
A successful organizing effort will usually begin around a specific community issue, rather than a general community concern. For instance, an effort to organize a block association will be far more effective if it begins as an attempt to address a specific common challenge, such as cleaning up a vacant lot or addressing street noise, than as a general attempt to “improve” the block. While many organizations will naturally evolve to focus on such broader issues, they usually begin with a specific campaign.

2. Articulate a clear strategy
Once a specific community problem is identified, organizers should try as best as they can to articulate a plan to address the problem. Members of your community will be more likely to participate in an effort to tackle a problem if they understand a clear link between their participation and the achievement of a solution. When talking to community members and distributing materials promoting your effort, be sure to drill home the importance of the specific issue you have identified and your strategy for addressing the concern.

3. Organize the organized
While your target audience may not be involved in an effort to address the specific issue you want to tackle, chances are that most of the people you’re trying to reach are civically or socially active in some way. While some of us are more civically engaged than others, very few of us are totally socially isolated. Whether it’s simply sending a child to a local school, or attending a local house of worship, or frequenting the neighborhood bowling alley, most of us belong – if loosely – to some community within a community.

When organizing around an issue, it always makes sense to think about the connections between people that already exist and attempt to leverage those connections to address the concern in question. If you want to organize to refurbish a neighborhood park, for instance, it might make sense to reach out to a local basketball league that practices in the park. A basketball league isn’t usually a political entity, but it is an organization whose members might be interested in joining your effort

1. Community members find it difficult to attend meetings

 * 1) Try and find a meeting time that will work best for your community. If you’re organizing in a building with an elderly population, early meetings – even daytime meetings – might make sense. On the other hand, if you’re trying to engage young professionals, evening meetings – perhaps later than you’d expect – might be ideal. Sometimes, you might need to try a little experimentation during the early stages of an organizing effort to find the right meeting time. You may even consider organizing multiple meetings in the early stages of an effort in order to engage different groups.
 * 2) Don’t make meeting attendance the only way to participate. No matter what time you hold an in-person meeting, there are some people that won’t make it, even if they care deeply about your cause. That’s why it’s important to provide multiple mediums for participation in your effort. If your group has a listserv, discussion and planning can continue outside of meetings and at members’ personal convenience. Services like Google’s “Google Groups” provide an easy way to create an email listserv that can help expand your group’s participation.

2. Community members are apathetic or cynical about the prospects of change

 * 1) Articulate a clear plan of action. As mentioned above, one reason people do not get involved in community activism is that they don’t see a clear relationship between their potential participation and change. Developing a cogent plan – and one that can be articulated in a few brief sentences in an email or flier – can help to dispel those concerns. In your plan, emphasize the need for participation, the concrete and realistic steps that your group will take to tackle the community issue, and a vision of success.
 * 2) Friends trust friends, neighbors trust neighbors. An appeal to get involved in a community group will always be more effective when delivered by a trusted friend or neighbor than by a stranger. If you are trying to organize your building, try asking other interest parties that you know in building to reach out to their friends and neighbors about getting involved. The stronger the personal connection, the more likely an appeal to participate will succeed.
 * 3) Community engagement isn’t all hard work and sacrifice. It’s easy to forget, but the reason people become deeply involved in the civic life of their community isn’t just because they care deeply about issues. Community engagement also provides social fulfillment, including opportunities to get out of the apartment, meet new friends, and feel the satisfaction of taking up common cause with one’s fellow community members. Think about offering food and beverages at your community meetings and organizing social gatherings after meetings and events. Also, do your best to keep the mood of meetings collegial – even fun. No matter how deeply people care about a community issue, few people want to spend time at a meeting where their opinion isn’t respected, or where the mood is severe.

3. How do I advertise an initial organizing effort?

 * 1) The value of face-to-face. When possible, a personal appeal to join an effort is most effective. If you have an opportunity to speak about your cause to another community group, or have the capacity to, for instance, go door-to-door in a building when organizing tenants, take that opportunity. A face-to-face encounter will always be more effective than a flier, or email, or phone conversation.
 * 2) . Fliers. Developing a flier that articulates the cause and advertises an organizing effort can be an important step in engaging in outreach. Try to post the flier in places where your target audience visits or congregates – building lobbies, supermarkets, church bulletin boards, local coffee shops, etc. If you have the capacity, try handing out fliers at large community events or at locations – like outside the local supermarket – where large numbers of potentially-interested community members visit. But remember your target audience when considering how to perform outreach – if you’re organizing a tenants association, it may not make sense to stand outside at a local concert and hand out fliers.
 * 3) Online organizing. By using online tools and social media like Facebook, MeetUp.com or others, you will be able to create and tap into an online community that might otherwise not be engaged with your organization.

4. Venue Accessibility
One last thing to consider is will there be barriers to hard-to-reach groups who may want to attend? Is the venue ADA compliant? Do you need a sign language translator for the meeting?

Consider whether the venue is centrally located for your target population and easily accessible or whether alternatives can be provided for people that cannot get to the venue i.e. conference calls. Another alternative is to “take the show on the road” moving your meetings and forums to different points within community/district to attract new participants.

For people whom English is not their first language, consider providing translation services at your meetings as well as translating corresponding documentations as a general practice.