Rootid is thrilled to announce our renewed partnership with Full Circle Fund in 2019!

Since 2016, the partnership between Full Circle Fund and Rootid has focused on accelerating nonprofit impact to make the Bay Area a more diverse, equitable and economically robust place for all to live and work.

In addition to Rootid’s ongoing membership and sponsorship of Full Circle Fund, our organizations have aligned around our belief that education plays a critical role in the strength and growth of nonprofits. This vision has been brought to life by our work together growing the the impact of Rootid’s brandUP workshop—a free two-day communications bootcamp for nonprofits.

BrandUP was started by Rootid in 2014 as a way to give back to the nonprofit community and help nonprofits at a critical moment in their growth. Through an advisory panel of nonprofit leaders, Rootid selected one nonprofit each year to provide pro bono communications strategy services that helps them overcome their biggest communications challenges.

The concept has continued to grow, and beginning in 2018, with the partnership of Full Circle Fund, brandUP has reached new heights.

Last year, Rootid and Full Circle Fund teamed up to hold the largest brandUP yet, including the participation of 15 nonprofits and over 60 skilled volunteers in one room for the two-day communications bootcamp.

Unlike most conferences and workshops, brandUP is information packed and hands-on; organizations walk away with actionable strategies they can implement right after the event.

This year, we’re taking things even further!

First brandUP, Now a Full Capacity Building Workshop Series

Instead of just one event, Rootid is co-designing a more cohesive capacity building workshop series for nonprofits in partnership with Full Circle Fund.

Nonprofits can attend five free workshops throughout the year that address the five key pillars of a healthy nonprofit:

1. Understanding how your business model functions
2. Understanding your target audiences and how to motivate them
3. Creating a clear brand position
4. How to build sustainability and governance in your business
5. How to measure and communicate impact based on data

For those organizations that are not able to attend these events in-person, online opportunities are available that will include all workshop materials, resources and tools after the live events. Nonprofits that need extra support can also reach out to our team for help in completing the work.

But, don’t miss out on the live events. The events provide more than just structured learning opportunities. They also facilitate great working partnerships between nonprofits, skilled volunteers and industry thought leaders. You won’t want to miss it!

Attending the Capacity Building Workshop Series

Nonprofits interested in attending the workshop series, and individuals interested in volunteering as an adviser at one of the Capacity Building Workshops should attend the Changemaker Happy Hour on February 28th to learn more about how to get engaged. Or, sign-up to stay up-to-date by email. Rootid will continue to keep you informed.

The Capacity Building Workshop series schedule will be:

1. May 7th, 2019 - Theory of Change Workshop, facilitated by Guidelight Strategies.
2. May 31st through June 1st, 2019 - brandUp 2-day Communications Training, facilitated by Rootid   
3. November 13th, 2019 - Measurement & Evaluation Workshop

All of the workshops are open to nonprofits interested in learning. Unfortunately, due to limited space and volunteer resources, nonprofits must submit an application to attend brandUP.

Nonprofits that are not invited to attend brandUP in person will have access to a live webinar series that covers the same materials as the live event. Your team will also have access to the learning materials covered during the 2-day workshop.

How to Attend the brandUP 2-day Intensive

Nonprofits can apply for brandUP directly on Rootid’s website!  

The application process includes just 3 simple questions for us to get to know your organization and your goals.

Please note that when you invite a nonprofit to apply, Rootid will reach out to a point of contact at that organization to confirm they are interested.

Although we’d like all nonprofits to apply, historically, not all invited nonprofits follow through with an application. Your best option as a supporter is to advocate to the nonprofit contact the value of this work!

Finalists will be asked to hop on a 30-minute phone call with us to answer a few additional questions.

Read our interview with 2018 brandUP attendee Frailty Myths Co-Founder, Erinn Carter.

The History of the Capacity Building Workshop Series

Rootid Co-founder, Valerie, had been a Full Circle Fund member for 3 years, when Full Circle Fund approached Rootid to help with their communications strategy. Their goal was to expand their membership and rebrand the organization to position it in the marketplace as a convener and connector (learn about the project here).

After a short period working together, it quickly became clear that the two organizations were kindred spirits and had aligned values that could lead to much larger impact.

Before the conversations started in 2016, Rootid and Full Circle Fund had been seeing similar patterns: a growing number of nonprofits that needed support with communications strategy, but a lack of education opportunities that were available.

Since 2014, Rootid had been holding the brandUP event - providing pro bono communications services to small and growing nonprofits. But, Rootid was only able to serve one nonprofit at a time. In 2016, Rootid received over 80 applications to participate. The need was great, but bandwidth was an issue.

At the same time, Full Circle Fund was looking for ways to provide more flexible and meaningful engagements to members. They also saw the same pattern of communications needs across all the organizations with whom they worked, and the lack of available resources.

Conversations started in 2016 about how we could work together to address this need. The conversations quickly evolved into a series of 3-hour seminars/workshops. The workshops filled three important needs:

1. They provided Full Circle Fund members meaningful and flexible engagements with nonprofits.
2. They served more nonprofits and provided access to Full Circle Fund’s amazing membership pool.
3. They provided nonprofits an opportunity to work with Full Circle Fund outside of the normal grant cycle.

It was a win-win!

Read about our project with 2015 BrandUP Awardee, Root & Rebound.

In 2018, the first brandUP collaboration was born. The 2-day communications bootcamp included 15 San Francisco Bay Area nonprofits and over 60 skilled volunteers.  Over the two days, Rootid facilitated four, 3-hour long communications focused workshops covering nonprofit logic models, target audience and persona building, messaging, and campaign development.

Nonprofits were partnered with teams of 4-6 skilled volunteers that guided them through the brandUP framework—a series that developed a comprehensive communications plan that organizations could implement soon after the event was completed.

In addition to the work accomplished during the event, nonprofits commented that one of the most valuable aspects of the event was the ability to build a stronger network of nonprofit professionals and leverage their relationships with the skilled volunteers to help them further their mission.

If you’re frustrated with trying to increase your donor base, strategic partnerships and membership, we have a proven tool that we use with our clients that can help.

It’s called a nonprofit logic model.

Building a nonprofit logic model will help your team target the outcomes that your mission needs to succeed (think donations, volunteers, etc.). It will also help you prioritize your work plan, and understand what you can say “no” to on a day-to-day basis.

Logic models are commonly thought of as nonprofit operations tools, but that’s not all they should be used for.

We’ll talk more about how logic models are foundational to a great communications strategy, help you generate more powerful messaging, and target the right audiences at the right time.

In this post, we’ll take you step-by-step on how to create your nonprofit logic model, and provide you the tools we use to do this with our clients.

What is a Nonprofit Fundraising Logic Model?

At the simplest level, a logic model is a way to map out your organization’s inputs (we’re going to call them activities), outputs and outcomes that are associated with your business.

Great! So what does that even mean?  

Simply put, think about what your organization needs to do its work. This could be money, volunteers, supplies, etc. These are inputs/activities.

After you complete you work, you are left with outputs and outcomes. These are the results of your work. There is a really critical difference between these two, even though they sound similar. We’ll get into that later in this post.

Before you go any further, copy our example Realtime Board nonprofit logic model template.

-- OR --

Download our Print Logic Model Template

Use this template to build your own nonprofit logic model as you go through this guide.

Defining Your Inputs/Activities

For this exercise, I created a fictitious organization that we can use as an example.

I’m calling my fictious organization “Clean-up And Restoration Team” - or CART for short.

EXAMPLE ORGANIZATION: CART is  a volunteer-driven environmental clean-up and restoration organization that uses volunteer labor to clean-up locations that have been left polluted by industrial companies. With volunteer crews they clean-up these locations and restore them using native species of plants.  

Inputs or activities are the things that we do everyday to make our mission run.  

In the case of CART (our fictitious example nonprofit), here are some example inputs:

1. Volunteer Recruitment - The organization needs volunteer to participate in the clean-up and restoration process.

2. Clean-up Site Acquisition & Scouting - These sites aren’t just coming out of nowhere.  Someone needs to find the abandoned sites, get permission to work on them, and then setup the logistics to actually do the work

3. Volunteer Crew Leader Training - CART can’t just rely on a group of volunteers to run themselves. Crew leaders are vital to creating a safe, enjoyable and productive atmosphere for volunteers.

4. Volunteer-driven Plant Nursery for Native Plant Species - CART has elected to raise their own native plant species so they can supply their teams with the plants that they need.

Realize that we’ve drastically simplified this for the sake of this post. Every organization is different, so if you have more than this, that’s normal.

Outputs vs. Outcomes

Before we talk about outputs, it’s important to understand how outputs are different from outcomes. This can be a bit confusing, so it’s worth taking time to clarify.

Put simply, outputs tell the story of what your organization produces. Outputs do not address the value or impact of your services.

On the other hand, an outcome is the level of performance or achievement that occurred because of the activity or services your organization provided.

Here’s an example for CART: 

Output = The volunteer leader training program generated 5 new volunteer crew leads. 

Outcome = CART is expanding its clean-up program to 2 new regions, doubling the number of acres that are being cleaned-up and restored. 

Here’s another way to look at it. This is really important to understand:

Outcomes communicate the impact of your organization and how it impacts your clients or those you serve.

Outputs are direct results of your activities.

Logic Model Outputs

Now that we understand the difference between outputs and outcomes, here are the examples we created for CART, examples of outputs can be:

1. Volunteer Recruitment Outputs Volunteers

2. Site Scouting Outputs Clean-up Sites - CART has a pipeline of abandoned industrial sites that it can work on with volunteer leaders.

3. Crew Leader Training outputs Volunteer Crew Leaders - The CART crew leader training program will directly output competent crew leaders that keep volunteers motivated, empowered and efficient at their work.

4. Native Plant Nursery outputs Native Plants - The nursery program pumps out a lot plants that can be used at the clean-up locations

Is this making sense?  From this you can start to see how outputs are directly related to activities.

Digging into Logic Model Outcomes

One thing that’s important to note about outcomes, is that often, multiple outputs can lead to a single outcome.  There doesn’t have to be a one-to-one connection.

For CART, examples of outcomes might be:

1. Restored native habitat and ecosystems leads to clean drinking water sources for nearby population centers.

2. Community members feel empowered to take a leading role in cleaning up and advocating for their local ecosystems.

Outcomes focus on impact to your clients or communities

This is a really important distinction.  

There are two other important elements to outcomes:

First, logic model outcomes are closely related to generating marketing messaging, which produces better marketing campaigns. We’ll dig into this shortly, but we’re starting to get closer to connecting the model with our marketing.

Secondly, logic model outcomes should always, always, always be measured so you can use those measurements in your marketing messaging.

Here’s an example of using outcomes to create better marketing messaging.

Consider two impact statements that you might find in a fundraising letter, or impact report:

“In 2018, CART empowered community volunteers to restore abandoned industrial waste sites and helped restore the quality of our drinking water.”

- Versus -

“In 2018, CART empowered 20,000 community volunteers to restore more than 1,200 square miles of abandoned industrial waste sites (that’s the size of Rhode Island!) and helped restore the quality of our drinking water to over a million people!”

Using a Logic Model For Nonprofit Communications Strategies

One of the things that makes Rootid’s logic model unique is the focus on strategies. 

This is important because it takes the logic model, which is often thought to be a nonprofit operations tool, and makes it a powerful communications tool.

Now that we know our inputs/activities, we can build communications strategies around them, and most importantly prioritize them.

When building strategies, it’s important to think about the audiences that you’re talking to and group them into nonprofit personas based upon their motivations.  

Who are they? What messages work for them? Where can we find them?

If you don’t know immediately, consider using stakeholder interviews or surveys to better define your audiences.

For example, the way CART recruits volunteers may be very different than the way you scout and acquire clean-up sites.  

When acquiring clean-up sites, CART may be interfacing with local governments officials or industrial business leaders to get permission to clean-up the site.

On the other hand, volunteer recruitment may target college kids at nearby schools.

Not only are these very different audiences requiring very different messaging, but the way that you find and communicate with these audiences require very different communications strategies.

Let’s continue with our audience assumptions for a second.  What would be a strategy for volunteer recruitment, knowing that you’re main demographic is college kids?

What about something like utilizing social media advertising targeting younger adults. So, a strategy may be digital advertising and online sign-ups.

In contrast, let’s talk about the strategy for industrial site scouting. Local government officials would require a one-to-one outreach and presentation. This could be at a local town hall meeting, or concerted lobbying to individual members, or perhaps using your network to make connections with these leaders.

You can see how these strategies differ drastically based on the activity, right?

Formulating a Blue Sky Statement To Connect the “Why”

How does this model make us better at nonprofit communications?

Remember, Outcomes help us formulate impact statements and messaging. Impact statements can help us communicate big ideas to our audiences.

We can continue to build on those impact statements by building what we call our blue sky statement. The blue sky statement sets out the vision for the organization.

As communication professionals you know how important vision statements can be. They help connect audiences to the “why.”

Meaning “why do you exist as an organization?”

If you’ve ever heard of Simon Sinek’s TedTalk, “The Power of Why” you know this.

Answering “why” is actually one of the most important things that you can do as a nonprofit communications professional.  If individuals can connect with why you exist as an organization, they are far more likely to get behind the “how you operate” part of the organization.

Our blue sky statement is a critical part of our elevator pitch as an organization, and a key to connecting with our audiences.

How Do Logic Models Help Prioritize Communications Work?

I said at the beginning this model will allow you to prioritize your work, and stop running around with your hair on fire, right?

Here’s how!

Because we know the relationship between inputs and outcomes, we know what strategies and inputs are priority based on the organization's strategic goals.

OK - there’s a lot going on there….

Imagine a situation where our fictitious organization, CART, has a goal to increase the number of acres cleaned up in 2 years. To do this, they need to double the number of clean-up sites in their pipeline.

Now that we understand our organizational logic model, we know that we need to ramp up the outreach work with local government officials. We also know that we need to implement campaign strategies and generate communications tools that our site recruitment team can use during their big push to acquire more sites.

We can do this with confidence based on our logic model.

How does the Logic Model Help Us Measure Impact

Making data-driven decisions with your communications strategies is a must!

We saw earlier how measuring outcomes creates more effective marketing messaging. 

Knowing that, commiting to measuring outputs and outcomes is critical at an organizational level. Not only will they help in your marketing process, but they will also help generate better impact messaging.

So how do we do that?

Here are some steps to help you measure impact better:

1. Describe the outcomes you want to achieve (why do you perform the process or service in the first place?).

2. Turn the identified outcomes into a quantitative measure (i.e. % of clients demonstrating new behavior, % of clients coming back into treatment, etc.).

3. Confirm that your desired outcomes are actually linked to your outputs or activities.  In other words, ensure that it is reasonable to expect your desired outcomes to be achieved based on your activities.

4. Implement these measures and track them over time.

5. Demonstrate and increase your success because you have the data to confidently and appropriately communicate your impact and value.

How does the logic model make us a better nonprofit communications professional?

By now you should see how the logic model helps make you a better nonprofit communications professional.

At a basic level, it creates clarity for you, and for your marketing strategy.mca 

Let’s summarize:

1. Prioritizing our marketing campaigns to generate the inputs inline with our organizational goals - we talked about prioritizing and focusing campaign based on the order of inputs you need to succeed. We also talked about focusing on specific tools and strategies based on the audiences we need to generate the inputs that we need.

2. Outcomes generate better messaging - we talked about how outcomes should be measured to generate better messaging. We also talked about how outcomes focus on impact, and impact is going to be what gets audiences excited about supporting your work.

3. Blue sky statements acquire & build a loyal supporters - we talked about how blue sky statements answer the question “why.” Why do you exist? Why should people care? Once an individual gets behind the vision, they can become a loyal advocate.

Nominations and applications are now open for the 2018 brandUP, a free 2-day intensive marketing and communication workshop co-presented with Full Circle Fund. Last year's Awardee Root & Rebound has now had some time to reflect on the experience, so we sat down to chat with them to provide helpful tips to this year's participants.

1. What is Root & Rebound currently focused on as an organization?

Founded in 2013, Root & Rebound (R&R) is a California-based reentry advocacy center that creates leading-edge solutions to one of the most pressing challenges of our time - mass incarceration - working to help people break out of poverty into freedom and economic opportunity, and alleviating the heavy personal and societal costs of our bloated and broken justice system. 

Leveraging lessons learned from our California long-term work & our growing national collaborations & projects, our core initiatives have grown over the last year to include expanding to 2 additional sites with California; deepening our direct services work, expanding our legal clinics & hotline services; running employment clinics & educating employers, pushing for occupational licensing reform, & building a statewide prison/jail based curriculum.

Nationally, we are growing our footprint and initiatives, with 7 state-specific toolkits & beginning a national expansion strategy that will bring our model to key, high-need states in the coming years. 

2. Through a communications lens, what have you been focused on over the last year and how is that supporting your overall organizational goals?

R&R has invested heavily in our PR and Communications strategy on both national and community levels to raise awareness about second chance opportunities through partnership and coalition building, educating employers, policy makers and journalists, and engaging corporations like Facebook to support this work as we explore our model for scale.

We are also in the process of building the first ever reentry legal wiki and sharing it across the country.

3. How did your experience with Rootid and our BrandUP Award inform your communications strategy? 

Our experience with Rootid allowed us to think critically and holistically about the ways in which we communicate with our key stakeholders - donors, partners, and people directly impacted by incarceration. It allowed us to strip back our assumptions and dive into the way these people live their lives and how we could engage with them on a journey of discovery about Root & Rebound.

Now, we go much deeper and we have concrete engagement strategies for our key stakeholders whereas before we would keep a more broad and sporadic approach to our communications and PR and community connection. 

4. Did anything change in your communications and processes from before to after your brandUP experience?

Our communications strategy has definitely expanded to include larger views of our audience and the ways we can help them to understand and see the value our work. Additionally, having realized the importance and potential in our communications, we have now made it a priority to align both the programs and development team in our communications strategy. Now our communications strategies are wider-spanning and effective for both teams. 

We have also more deeply understood the impact of storytelling by launching a 48,000 barriers campaign in conjunction with Valerie at Rootid at our first ever Empowerment Summit in Spring 2017, which allowed us to gather quotes and stories that we can use going forward. This has deeply informed our social media communications on an ongoing basis 

5. How have you integrated the work into your marketing materials and planning?

On the programs side, we have:

Leveraged Rootid’s design support to streamline our programs materials with new hotline cards, updated program flyers, and the ongoing creation of partnerships packets. With the hotline cards, we can easily pass out digestible information to the people we serve, at clinics, trainings, etc. As we ramp up our direct services across the state, this level of synthesised information is more critical than ever.

We are also re-creating the R&R website to more strongly reflect our growing programs and make sure that information is easy to read, digestible, and clear in how users can engage with our services.

We have also heavily leveraged Rootid’s consulting advice to promote our paid services to partnerships across the Bay Area and have secured three new long term contracts to date.

On the fundraising side, we have:

Committed to engaging more deeply with our existing individual donors and increasing our network even further, by creating a Circle of Friends to support R&R either through donations, leveraging their platform, or their skills. Over time, we hope to build a key initiative that draws people into the organization and creates long-term ambassadors for our work. 

More heavily focused on sharing our stories of success to our wider audience via newsletters and social media to show the work we are doing and the impact it is having.

Finally, we have streamlined our communications strategy between the programs and the development team so there is a cohesive calendar and content strategy between them. We have also hired two Americorps VISTAs - one Development and Communications VISTA and one Community Partnerships VISTA to execute on this strategy and build our communications content.

6. Was there anything that was unexpected or surprised you that came out of the work we did together?

I think it’s easy to come into a consulting project saying you have an urgent need for concrete materials and plans and you need your online website hits to increase by X%, but the biggest value add for us was the thought partnership and the focus on approach of listening, hearing, and sharing of experiences. Rootid showed us ways to go beyond a communications strategy, printed or web content, and instead get to the heart of our mission and impact which lies directly in human experiences of reentry and the daily barriers they face.

By focusing squarely on elevating those experiences, we were able to come up with a thoughtful and strategic communications strategy that aligned with our mission and that brought the organization’s development and programs team together to streamline our work, elevate the voices of those we serve, and really demonstrate what really matters to the wider public  - which is breaking down barriers to opportunity for all Americans with criminal records.

7. In what ways do you think we can use this process to help organizations like yours further their missions?

I think the most valuable piece for our team was having strategic thought partners that could dig into our model and where we were and where we were trying to go and help figure out simple steps and best practices to achieving those goals. E.g. focus on your stakeholders journey before thinking about creating materials tailored to them. 

A helpful way to approach it might be to focus on some big questions upfront that might be even higher level than communications strategies necessarily and then spend time digging into ideas and resources on a macro level. A lot of Rootid’s value add can be the ability to see above the micro day-to-day of a nonprofit professional’s workload and allow them the space and support to engage critically and thoughtfully with the challenges they are facing and how they can get to the end result in new ways.

8. Since we are changing the format of BrandUP to now be a 2-day intensive covering the material we did but with 12 nonprofits, what advice would you give to this next co-hort so that they can be prepared for and get the most out of their experience?

Ask as many questions as possible! Don’t be afraid to share the small and big questions and the real challenges, time and capacity constraints you face in communicating with your stakeholders. Chances are Rootid will be able to draw on experiences with other nonprofits that have wrestled with the same challenges and draw on their own expertise and experiences to bring solutions to life. 

Be ambitious! Talk about where you want to be as an organization and what you’re trying to achieve in the next 5 -10 years, every step you take now with your communications is a step further to making that impact a reality.