How do we deliver help as an organization?

Listening. Helping. Learning.

Engaging these behaviors as an organization is at the heart of being a vibrant and transformational organization. In this series of blogs, we are taking a deep dive into a story of how one client organization, a nationally recognized nature center, embraced these behaviors to transform itself and how its surrounding community helped to lead the way.

Delivering help to someone, let alone a large and diverse community serving hundreds of thousands of people, can be easier said than done. When someone asks us for help, our natural tendency is to think in terms of ourselves. Such as, what would I find helpful in this situation? What would I do if I were in their situation? Unfortunately, this may not actually deliver the help needed or desired.

This is why we must first listen.

As we learned in last month’s blog, as the impact of COVID-19 was taking its toll in mid-2020, a nationally recognized nature center decided to ask some really hard questions of its constituency and to listen to what they had to say.

By doing so, they could center their thinking and planning in terms of what their constituency needed and was focused on. Not on what they were providing. By listening to their constituents, the nature center learned that what their community really wanted was a place to go and experience nature. A place where they could go to unwind, to walk in nature, and at the end of the day to rejuvenate.

As a result, the nature center began co-creating with their community what would be helpful to deliver on these desires. Some rather extraordinary things began to happen, new volunteer opportunities emerged, such as clearing brush from trails, weeding invasive species from the forest floor, and improving trail signage. New communications also emerged, such as what to be on the lookout for during your walk in the woods, what footprints in the snow come from which animal, and what wildlife you will find as you journey the property. A new partnership with a major local health system began to take shape as the health benefits of access to nature became more prominent.

The story doesn’t end there. Not only did this pivot save the organization valuable financial resources, but it also saved them valuable staff time and set the organization up for future revenue opportunities; time to reengage the community, develop new communications to meet what the community actually wanted, and engage donors in the process further.

All in all, trail usage soared threefold, as did the community’s care for the land, forest, and property. The nature center also ended the year in the black! Not bad in the midst of a global pandemic.

If you would like to schedule a high-value 30-minute discovery call to learn more about how you can co-create help with your constituency, I’d be honored to walk alongside you. As always, please feel free to call me at 616.516.9870 or e-mail me at lons@designgroupintl.com.

Walking alongside you,

Lon L. Swartzentruber
CEO, Design Group International
Senior Design Partner