How Can We Help?
Nonprofit organizations in the milieu of food systems and hunger relief have a lot in common in terms of their development practices in goals. Unfortunately, the work tends to be quite busy on a day-to-day basis, hindering the prospects for internal reflection as well as resource and knowledge sharing amongst organizations. A fruitful project for an AmeriCorps VISTA can be to conduct such research to give their organization insight on practices for other organizations.
A project was conducted to evaluate individual donor relationship practices in US food access and gleaning nonprofits by City Fruit. These steps were taken:
- A spreadsheet was compiled of Washington State and US food access/gleaning organizations that had certain key similarities to City Fruit: similar missions and budget sizes.
- Going through 1090 documents as well as annual reports, the proportion of individual giving for each budget size was calculated.
- Since City Fruit’s individual giving sits at 9% of its total revenue, a list of 10 organizations with large individual giving proportions was compiled.
- The VISTA created a list of contact information for each development manager (or person most closely related to fundraising) and an email template to reach out to folks.
- Emails were sent requesting an informal interview of 30-60 minutes.
- Google Meets interviews were then organized in addition to a loose, semi-structured interview guide of questions developed by the VISTA, and reviewed by the City Fruit Development Manager.
- Notes were taken during the interviews.
- Notes were organized into thematic areas, and then compiled into a research report. This research report was shared with CF staff, as well as the interviewees to steward knowledge sharing.
Food access/gleaning nonprofits, of course, have their many specificities, but they share many of the same experiences as well. A qualitative study can be a fantastic way to explore both differences and similarities to be used to improve one’s organization’s functioning as well as facilitate knowledge sharing between organizations with similar practices and missions.
Find an example of a final report here.