Learn about how our consultants are conducting research and providing strategies that can be implemented immediately to help CCNP streamline their financial and organizational operations as well as grow their online presence through cohesive marketing designs and tactics.
Problem Statement
After working with CCNP in the fall of 2019, the pandemic and quick adaptation to serve their community to the best of their ability under difficult circumstances, hindered CCNP from implementing the past project team's recommendations. Prior to the pandemic and to this day, CCNP struggles with having a significant donor base from which they can fundraise. The past project team outlined potential target demographics and branding recommendations to help CCNP with outreach, but CCNP needed our team to highlight specific groups, organizations, and corporations that they could reach out to as well as create appropriate outreach materials to do so. CCNP leadership also requested a yearly calendar, which they could follow that organizes touch-points to send to specific donor groups throughout the year to maintain their donor base as it grows.
Additionally, CCNP grew significantly during the pandemic as they sought to meet the needs of the community they serve to the best of their ability. CCNP requested that we analyze and assess their growth and where they should could continue to grow in the future.
Finally, CCNP gets a lot of their funding from grants for several of their distinct programs, which requires demographic data relevant to who they serve in each program. However, CCNP did not have a single location where they could collect data on how many people they serve as an entire organization rather than just per program. CCNP tasked us with creating a Client Intake Form and linked Database to help them collect demographic data on everyone they serve, which will help them with their annual reporting as well as in future grant applications that require this data.
About Central City Neighborhood Partners
In 1992, after civil unrest in Los Angeles, a group of community leaders convened and discussed the effects the riots were having on their community and what they could do to improve poverty, crime, unemployment, drugs, gangs, and violence. These community leaders created a "one-stop" concept where families could come to one location to have all of their basic needs met. Eventually, the City of Los Angeles implemented this concept through the Youth Fair Chance Program. The legacy of this program now continues as Central City Neighborhood Partners (CCNP), a nonprofit that coordinates and operates the "one-stop" model to include a variety of family and youth centered services.
CCNP focuses on providing essential services and resources regarding housing, food, health, transportation, education, financial security education and career development, free tax preparation, academic support, youth leadership, civic engagement, and youth workforce development. CCNP focuses their efforts on the Westlake/Pico Union area, but serves anyone and everyone who walks through their doors, even if they come from outside of Los Angeles county.
Problem Description
CCNP tasked our team with helping them implement the previous recommendations from the Fall 2019 Project Team regarding outreach, fundraising, and creating a donor base. CCNP has a history of getting most of their funding through government and private grants, but have always lacked private donations. As they continue to grow, having financial support from secure individuals to fund their operations is imperative to their continual success.
During our project, CCNP leadership also requested a yearly calendar marked with important dates and intervals on when and with what to reach out to their current stakeholders to maintain the relationships they've already created and ones they hope to create. We also conducted a Social Media Audit and created recommendations as well as a branding guidelines document to ensure cohesiveness throughout all of CCNP's marketing and outreach materials. CCNP also tasked our team with analyzing their growth since the 2019 project, as their staff and funding grew substantially during and after the pandemic.
Finally, CCNP tasked us with creating a Client Intake Database to have a single location where all of their clients' demographic data is stored for annual reporting and grant application uses. (See details above)
Project Agenda & Objectives
The project goal was for CCNP to gain a wider donor base, which can be easily maintained with consistent and cohesive marketing efforts and touch points designed to engage and maintain relationships with important stakeholders, donors, and partners as well as analyze their growth, gauge potential future growth, and create a system to collect all of their clients' demographic data to show CCNP's total impact.
The first step of this project was to review current outreach materials, research and select with groups, organizations, and corporations to begin targeting as well as which types of research materials are most appropriate for each group, and then create an outreach letter with the necessary information for CCNP to send out. Later in the project, this developed into recommending future types of outreach and touch points to target each group in the form of a yearly calendar to ensure consistency.
The second step of this project was to review several financial and organizational structure documents to analyze CCNP's growth since 2019. This information was then crafted into charts and graphs to easily display the most important takeaways as well as to highlight where CCNP has the potential to continue growing. The third step of this project was to expand upon the outreach objective by conducting a Social Media Audit on all of CCNP's accounts across platforms.
Then, we researched appropriate social media recommendations and applied them where we saw they were most necessary. This step also included creating a branding guidelines document, which included the appropriate, logos, language, fonts, and color scheme for all of CCNP marketing material to use, ensuring cohesiveness.
Finally, the fourth step of this project was to create a Client Intake Form and Database that CCNP employees could easily fill out and collect basic demographic data such as family household size, household income, race, zipcode, etc. to better assess CCNP's impact on the community they serve as a whole and per program, all in one place.
1) Outreach, In More Depth
Because CCNP had difficulty implementing these recommendation, our goal for this workstream and for the entire project was to create as many tangible documents as we could for them to implement immediately at the end of the project. The first workstream, regarding outreach, began with reviewing the past Project Team's final deliverable to essentially pick up where they left off. From there, we researched specific groups within those that the past team recommended as well as several contact points for each group. Then, we researched what an appropriate outreach email/letter would look like coming from and organization of CCNP's type. Using the appropriate information and branding and design styles, we created a blank template document that CCNP could use in the future when information has changed as a baseline that they can fill on their own, as well as a formalized, currently up-to-date Canva letter that is ready to be sent out to potential donors and partners. With this, CCNP has the contact information of several groups, all organized in a spreadsheet, and the "ask" letter ready so that all they have to do is address an email and send it, requiring very little effort on their end.
2) Financial and Organizational Analysis, In More Depth
The main findings of this analysis is that CCNP has diversified their funding, increased funding as a whole, and roughly tripled their staff since 2019. We saw the main area for potential and necessary growth to be within the fundraising and development branches of their organizational structure where the Executive Director and Associate Executive Director are currently handling matters in both of these branches with little help from other staff members. Towards the end of our project, we began to see that hiring a Director of Marketing could be crucial to increasing CCNP's donor base, increasing partnerships, and maintaining relationships with all of CCNP's stakeholders through email outreach, marketing, and social media.
3) Outreach Expansion, In More Depth
The third workstream approach was to expand upon the first outreach workstream as much as possible by creating a yearly calendar of touch points to send to different stakeholder groups as well as conducting a Social Media Audit and recommending improvements. We saw this expansion of the first workstream as a way to maintain the current and new donors and partners we anticipate CCNP to gain through the initial outreach method in workstream one. This step included creating a branding guideline document to ensure cohesiveness across all outreach materials and social media posts. This will help CCNP ensure consistent funding from donors and partners in the long run.
4) Client Intake Database, In More Depth
The final workstream was to create the Client Intake Database, explained in full above. This step didn't require much research, rather it required collaboration between our team and CCNP leadership to design something of the easiest use for their purposes. We anticipate this to help with impact analysis and annual reporting as well as securing future funding and grants.
The Impact of 180DC's Work
Because our team created several complete and tangible documents and templates for CCNP's use, we expect them to be able to implement our recommendations and materials rather quickly. Overall, we anticipate CCNP's donor base and funding to increase, their marketing and outreach to be more targeted and consistent in maintaining relationships with all stakeholders, and their impact to be analyzed in full, which can be used to continue increasing funding, partnerships, and community support.
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