Nonprofit leaders often have questions about their organizations’ supporters: Who are they, what resonates with them, and what attracted them to the group? What are the best ways to communicate with them and raise awareness of a charity’s work? The American Friends Service Committee has a secret weapon to answer those questions: a cultural anthropologist on staff.
Beth Hallowell is director of communications research for the peace and social-justice organization. She started working there as a media research analyst when she was finishing up her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied how the Affordable Care Act affected maternity care in Philadelphia.
“Talking to people and listening to what they have to say is the most important skill for anthropologists,” says Hallowell. “And it’s a really important skill for any good communicator or any nonprofit fundraiser.”
Hallowell recently called on those research skills to answer a question that had long flummoxed American Friends: Are the organization’s advocates and donors separate groups of people?
“It was an open debate,” says Hallowell. Some staff members were convinced donors and advocates were largely the same people. Others were equally certain the groups were distinct. Each camp planned its communications and activities accordingly, she says.
After she took a deep dive into the charity’s database and conducted focus groups with supporters, it became clear that donors and activists were, for the most part, the same people.
With the long-running question finally answered, American Friends is now working to make sure its appeals to contributors have the same look and feel as appeals to advocates. For example, the group revamped its donor magazine, offering readers information about how they can get more involved in the group’s activism. And news of advocacy successes has become a regular part of fundraising thank-you letters.
Hallowell also conducts communications research to advance the work of American Friends and the broader peace-building community. She analyzed more than 600 news articles on violent extremism and laid out her findings in “Mixed Messages: How the Media Covers ‘Violent Extremism’ and What You Can Do About It.” The report also offers recommendations on how advocates and journalists can counter patterns of news coverage that frame all Muslims as a “monolithic, homogenous group of potential extremists.”
One suggestion in the report: Tell individual stories that emphasize the humanity of people, such as Muslims, who are part of marginalized groups.
Making Decisions Based on Solid Research
Several years ago, American Friends embarked on a strategic plan that set lofty goals. The charity set out to defuse militarism by challenging the stories that society tells in the news media and in academia that make violence more likely, whether in military conflict or in opposition to people such as immigrants and Muslims.
“I started asking the question, ‘Well, if we changed this narrative, how would we know?’ " says Mark Graham, the nonprofit’s director of communications and chief development officer. “People were like, ‘I don’t know.’ "
Graham came up with the idea to hire Hallowell and create her current position. He says her “research chops” won him over.
“You can do some pretty sloppy research without thinking about it too much,” Graham says. “Beth has really helped us make sure that we’re actually learning things and applying the lessons in ways that are not totally overstating something based on asking five people a question.”
Persuading management to create the new position wasn’t hard because the charity had a real desire for more analysis to inform decisions, Graham says. The bigger problem, he says, was managing expectations. The more staff members got used to the idea of the new position, the longer their wish list of research projects grew.
“By the time Beth showed up,” Graham says. “I was, like, ‘OK, you’re going to hear a lot of people with a lot of requests that are all over the map. You don’t have to do all of them.’ "
Seeking Feedback and Applying It
Early this year, Hallowell conducted a survey to get a better sense of what supporters think of the organization. Some of the biggest findings that emerged: Supporters like that American Friends is principled and trustworthy, and they want more updates on the organization’s work.
Having that kind of information is invaluable, Graham says. It helps writers and designers draw readers into a story, for example by choosing the best photographs and quotes for communications.
Hallowell says her job at American Friends is gratifying because it lets her apply her skills to “real-world problem-solving.”
For example, during the last presidential campaign, American Friends volunteers followed primary candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire, asking them questions about immigration, nuclear weapons, and other peace and justice issues. One of Hallowell’s first projects entailed analyzing the related social-media campaign. She found that posts involving local news coverage of the volunteers’ efforts were far more powerful than the posts written by American Friends itself. That analysis led the group to step up its efforts to win news coverage.
Hallowell hopes that her work inspires other nonprofits to embrace the role of research.
“You can take the guesswork out of a lot of the decision making when it comes to things like how to engage people better, what do people really want, what do they say they want versus what they actually do,” Hallowell says. “These are all answerable questions.”
