An engagement ladder. An engagement pyramid. A people mover. Whatever you choose to call it, the key to successful engagement is offering your supporters ways to connect with your organization that meet them where they are and provide them with a meaningful experience – customizing your communications and engagement opportunities to reflect their differing levels of commitment and what you need different people to do.

The Engagement Pyramid

At grassroots solutions, we use a framework called the “engagement pyramid” to help organizations large and small systematically engage their most important resource: people. We’ve adapted this framework from our friends at Groundwire, who develop customized CRM databases that automate engagement tracking using the pyramid.

We find that the pyramid is an incredible teaching and planning tool, helping organizations to think about segmenting their universe of constituents or supporters in four steps:

1. What are the big buckets of people that are affiliated with your organization – donors, community partners, grantees, activists, board members, etc.? Given what you know about their affiliation with you to date, where do you think each constituency group should be mapped on the pyramid?
2. Given your program goals, what kinds of engagement tactics (communications and actions) should be associated with each level of the pyramid?
3. What kinds of listening activities (surveys, spot phone interviews, online idea contests, etc.) can you do at each level of the pyramid to test your assumptions about where each constituency bucket belongs?
4. Given your organization’s benchmarks for engagement success, what kinds of triggers should you set at each level to move individuals up the pyramid? Ultimately, most organizations want to both continually build loose ties with their base and also strengthen stronger ties and action toward the top of the pyramid.

The Engagement Pyramid Exercise

The engagement pyramid is deeply embedded in the work we do at grassroots solutions – so much so that we recently developed and presented a workshop about it at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits’ Annual Conference for over 60 nonprofit leaders and staff. During the workshop, presenters Rosy Kalfus and Dana Montgomery walked attendees through a worksheet exercise that helped them think about how to map their constituencies on the engagement pyramid and what types of customized engagement tactics might be appropriate at each level. Click here to download a PDF of this worksheet and bring the engagement pyramid to your organization today!