Case History - Volunteers of America – Engaging Local Community Partners

Volunteers of America LogoVolunteers of America is a national, nonprofit, faith-based organization dedicated to helping those in need live healthy, safe and productive lives since 1896. Its ministry of service has supported and empowered America's most vulnerable groups, including the frail elderly, people with disabilities, at risk youth, men and women returning from prison, homeless individuals and families, those recovering from addictions and many others. Through hundreds of human service programs, including housing and health care, Volunteers of America helps more than 2 million people in over 400 communities. They offer a variety of services for older Americans, in particular, that allow them to maintain their independence and quality of life – everything from an occasional helping hand to full-time care.
Volunteers of America nurtures, supports and uplifts the human spirit and empowers the people it serves to reach their full potential.

In 1997, Goodwill Communications was retained by Volunteers of America as its first PSA distributor when the organization moved its headquarters from New York to Alexandria, VA. Due to our extensive military recruiting experience, as well as working with major non-profit organizations, one of our specialties is to develop strategies for communicating with local community partners. In fact we have written articles on how to bridge the gap between national and local outreach efforts, and how to place PSAs in local communities. Go to: http://www.psaresearch.com/gap.html and http://www.psaresearch.com/psaprimer.html.

As we have said so many times in our PSA strategic counseling efforts, having an active force of outreach specialists at the community level is perhaps the most effective tool to ensure that PSAs actually get placed. Accordingly, we spent a considerable amount of time and resources helping Volunteers of America coordinate its national PSA campaigns with its 38 offices covering 44 states around the country. We tapped into this resource by:

  • Developing software to correlate our media lists with each Volunteers of America local office and posting the lists to a portal created for the organization

  • Sending media lists for each type of media - TV, radio and print to local offices for review and updating our media lists with their changes

  • Creating an online system for tagging PSAs for local Affiliates (see online template below)

  • Developing an online system for local affiliates to make changes to lists in real time such as shown below. By clicking on the call letters for the station, a template comes up on screen for them to change the information shown on the report. Those changes then update the distribution report and when they refresh the screen, the updated information is reflected.



  • Developing actionable distribution reports that correlate evaluation data with distribution reports showing which media outlets used Volunteers of America PSAs and the Previous Usage Index for that station. In the above example, the station where the red arrow is pointing used other client PSAs 7 times but is not a Volunteers of America PSA user.

    By examining each station’s usage history, local affiliates could sort their distribution reports by previous usage and then use this information to make follow-up calls to encourage non-users to use Volunteers of America PSAs.


 

 

  • Developing software to correlate tagged PSAs with those that actually aired so national management staff could see the effectiveness of their tagging program.

Compelling Packaging

The other factor that we believe contributed to the overall success of the Volunteer of America PSA campaigns was superb creative packaging designs which were designed internally.

Compelling packaging such as that shown here cannot be underestimated in terms of their importance to gatekeepers. If the designs are functionally useful (not taking too much time to absorb the information) and graphically compelling they help break through the clutter of all the other PSAs a public service director is considering at any given time.

Actionable Evaluation Reports

We have often said in our evaluation workshops that doing evaluation just for the sake of compiling numbers is a meaningless exercise. It is what you do with the data that can make a real difference between an average level of PSA usage or one that exceeds the benchmark.

For the first year of our work for Volunteers of America, we concentrated on broadcast only, (TV and radio). The first release generated $8.3MM in ad value with the TV PSA 22% above our TV PSA benchmark value.

In 1998 we added cable TV and print PSAs to the media mix. The print PSAs put a human face on Volunteers of America and showed the diverse community that benefits from their services.

Since budgets are always tight for any non-profit, we used our shared-reel distribution service called CablePAK™ to distribute Volunteers of America TV PSAs to 500 major cable systems at a greatly reduced cost. CablePAK contributed about ten percent of total values.

Follow-Up

One of the biggest mistakes we experience with client campaigns is that they leave loose ends at the end of the campaign. By “loose ends” we mean thanking the media outlets that supported your cause and trying to convert non-users to users. For Volunteers of America, after each campaign ended, we sent personalized thank you letters to local affiliates for hand delivery to those media outlets that used their PSAs and solicitation letters to non-using media.

In summary, a great cause backed by great creative, compelling packaging, solid distribution plans and maximum involvement by their local affiliates contributed to one of the most successful PSA campaign cases we have experienced in our 25 years of business, generating just over $70 million in verified advertising support.