The Promise You Make at the Folding Table
For three years I directed community outreach for a medical group. Much of outreach starts at a folding table: the banner, the flyers, the sign-up sheet, and the person who stops because a parent needs help and they are not sure where to begin. Outreach is where an organization makes a promise. Whether that promise is kept gets decided later and somewhere else, often on a phone line the outreach team has no control over.
Social services programs often sit on the receiving end of promises that other organizations made at their own tables. That vantage point shows things attendance figures never do.
Awareness is the less expensive part
Programs put a great deal of effort into first contact, meaning the event, the message, the materials, and the turnout. Much less attention goes to what happens after someone says they are interested. Can they schedule before they walk away from the table? Is eligibility explained in a way they can understand that evening? Is there someone available who speaks their language? Will they need a document they do not have? Will their call be returned? Does the outreach team ever learn whether the connection was made?
Each of those questions marks a point where interest can fade without anyone noticing. People in that position seldom complain. They simply do not come in.
Plan the event backward from the service
One change would help most outreach plans: begin planning at the end. If the goal is a completed health assessment, walk through every step between the conversation at the table and that appointment, and ask who is responsible for each one. If the goal is enrollment, the plan needs to cover eligibility assistance, documents, the application itself, and a person whose job includes following up on whatever is missing.
That exercise raises a question organizations do not always want to ask, which is whether the service can absorb the people outreach is about to send. It is possible for outreach to outpace capacity. The event goes well, the phone line cannot keep up, and the community learns to be skeptical of the next flyer. The cost also falls on partners, since the community organizations that vouched for the program lose some of their own credibility.
Offer a next step you can name
A flyer that says to call for more information leaves all of the remaining work to the person who has the least influence over the outcome. There are better options. Staff can schedule or screen the person on the spot, introduce them to the navigator standing nearby, ask how they prefer to be contacted, arrange an interpreter, or agree on a specific time when the program will call them. None of this is meant to pressure anyone. The purpose is to shorten the distance between a good conversation and an actual appointment.
The third edition of Principles of Community Engagement describes engagement as a relationship built with a community, which is different from messaging directed at one. In operational terms, that means what people tell staff at the table has to be able to change how the program works, including its hours, locations, forms, and documentation requirements. It also means going back to tell people what changed, what could not change, and why. When that return conversation never happens, people reasonably conclude that their input was collected and set aside.
Measure the journey as well as the reach
Reach still matters, because a program needs to know whether the people it intended to serve were at the event. Alongside reach, I would add a short set of measures that follow the person’s path: how many asked for a next step, how many started an appointment or application, how many completed it, how long it took, where people dropped off, and whether completion differed by language or by referring partner. ATSDR’s guidance on evaluating community engagement asks for this kind of information, including how people experienced the follow-up and not only the event.
An outreach effort succeeds when a person who stopped at the table ends up in an exam room, enrolled in a program, or connected to a service. Every step between those two points belongs to the organization’s operations, whether or not anyone designed it deliberately. The flyer makes a promise on the organization’s behalf, and the follow-up process is how the organization keeps it.
Sources
- ATSDR, CDC, NIH, and collaborators: Principles of Community Engagement, Third Edition
- ATSDR: Evaluation of Community Engagement Activities
About the author
Sherry Sayari, MPH, is an Operational Standards Evaluator who has led population health, community outreach, and social services programs. More on the About page.
