Engagement audit lays ground work for United Way flagship organization to make even greater impact in Detroit and southeastern Michigan.

Here at grassroots solutions, our clients often ask us to bring our expertise and muscle to planning and executing or evaluating their grassroots campaigns. These are intense, time-bounded assignments, which definitely feed our adrenaline habits and add great stories and data to our bank of best practices.

Sometimes, though, our clients will ask us to burrow a little deeper into their organizational lives, and we become their consulting partner on major organization-wide initiatives that pivot around engagement. These initiatives might include, for example:

• Figuring out whether or how to engage with residents in their communities
• Re-imagining the transactional way they engage with their donors
• Thinking about how to engage their volunteers in small circle self-organizing
• Creating more two-way engagement within their affiliate or field structure

It’s exciting to be at the nerve center of that kind of organizational conversation, and to see the transformational effects that bringing a hard core, creative, and strategic engagement lens can have on an organization’s mission and core practice.

Moving from Volunteerism to Engagement at United Way

United Way is one of the country’s best-known brands dedicated to building stronger communities, and whose work is synonymous with community volunteerism. One of its flagship organizations – United Way for Southeastern Michigan (UWSEM), headquartered in Detroit – has been methodically moving towards deeper and bigger social change outcomes in the suburbs and major urban centers that define the region. At the same time, the organization’s advocacy and community-building work is raising questions about whether its traditional approach to volunteerism will be sufficient to achieve its goals.

The leadership team at UWSEM came to grassroots solutions for guidance on how to deepen and sustain United Way’s relationships with its many volunteers, and how to build a broader base of support for its social change agenda. Historically, these volunteers have been tapped only episodically through annual days of service. UWSEM’s leadership team was also eager to learn how to create other meaningful connection points for the many residents who may not have time to volunteer, but feel an affinity with the community concerns and solutions that UWSEM represents.

Over nine months, grassroots solutions dug into the UWSEM organization and worked with their team to:

• Shape a framework and key principles for engagement that reflect UWSEM’s internal thinking about and commitment to engagement as an anchor for the organization’s mission.
• Conduct a thorough audit of UWSEM’s three major program areas, identifying opportunities and barriers to putting engagement at the center of program design and the organization’s scorecard of social change outcomes.
• Assess the strategies and infrastructure of departments critical to the organization’s engagement apparatus, such as new media, volunteer services and field office structures, employee donor relations, community hotline services, etc.

The many reports, strategy memos, and thought leadership that grassroots solutions generated in the course of this assignment delivered a detailed picture of UWSEM’s current resources and readiness regarding its engagement ambitions, and outlined recommendations on a suite of challenges to address and rich opportunities to build upon.

Some of grassroots solutions’ work process has been shared within the wider United Way system, in broader conversations about the central role of community engagement and advocacy in the changing landscape of community life. Given the enormous reach of United Way’s brand and the importance of its community investments in many towns and major urban areas around the country, it’s exciting to contemplate the possibility of a wider ripple effect from the visionary team at UWSEM.