What are the various levels of involvement individuals can have with a nonprofit? Using an ‘I Care Scale’ to assess engagement. It highlights the challenges faced by nonprofits in maintaining interest amid competing distractions and emphasizes the importance of targeting marketing efforts to potential volunteers and donors effectively.

1. I Don’t Care!
2. The Increasing ‘I’ in Society
3. The ‘I’ Care Scale
4. Using the I Care Scale
5. Further Reading

The Passionate Few. There are about 18,000 nonprofit societies in Alberta [1]. Each one of these has a group of passionate individuals who serve on the board, act as volunteers, or are employed by them. This number both speaks to the interest in civil society and the impossibility to be passionate (e.g. ‘care’) about more than a handful of causes.

I Don’t Care!

Don’t Know – Don’t Care. Not-caring is healthy. Trying to name 18,000 entities would exhaust you let alone understand what they do and are they of interest to you. At the other extreme, I have seen individuals who were overly invested in an organization – until they were not. Such a change often comes about dramatically, and the person may go from Caring to Indifferent or even antagonistic in a flash.

Caring About Profit. While this blog is focused on nonprofits, it could just as easily be applied to a small business. In a way the underlying question is the same, does a donor, volunteer, or customer know about and care about the organization – and if so, to what degree?

The Increasing ‘I’ in Society

Alberta has almost 5M people. Probably most are involved with some sort of organization supporting an interest, social need, etc. Friends of schools, hockey clubs, churches, or stamp collecting – to name a few.

COVID and Candy Crush. Pre-internet and cell phones, the rate of involvement was higher. Now those same organizations compete for the hearts, minds, interest, and attention of individuals against YouTube, Netflix, and computer games. Add the lingering effects of COVID and other social impacts and volunteers are becoming increasingly rare.

The ‘I’ Care Scale

Noting the above challenges, the following scale attempts to contextualize existing, past, and potential volunteers and donors relative to their interest in an organization. The operative word is context. Most people are ignorant of nearly all nonprofits. A nonprofit should not try to make everyone aware but may want to focus its limited marketing efforts on sub-populations that are most likely to yield new volunteers, donors, or community partners.

An individual or organization is….

1. Ignorant: … unaware of the existence of the nonprofit.
2. Indifferent: … aware but not interested in the organization.
   • General indifference (e.g. not into stamp collecting, community gardens, or youth sports)
   • Specific indifference (I would like to act but the drama-club only does musicals), or
   • Past indifference (I was passionate but now don’t care about…).
3. Interest: … aware and potentially willing to be involved but not at this point.
   • An unwillingness to be further involved maybe due to capacity (… when I finish college),
   • Ineligibility (when I turn 18….),
   • Geography (If I lived closer…, don’t drive..), etc.
4. Involved: … a current participant to some degree.
   • They may be a casual (… I volunteer a few hours a year with…) or
   • An active volunteer (I work 2-shifts a week at the food bank…).
   • These individuals are often organizational stalwarts who consistently donate and volunteer.
5. Invested: … primary focused on this one cause to full or partial exclusion to all others.
   • A monk who has taken a vow of poverty is an extreme example or the person who floods the local hockey rink every night in memory of his youth.
   • While these individuals are passionate, there is a dark side; they may be using the organization to back fill some critical need lacking in their life.
   • An explosive exit is a risk for those who are over-invested – or they remain a stalwart.

Using the I Care Scale

Beyond a thought exercise, this is also a method for nonprofits to channel and focus marketing efforts. Do you know who is interested but not yet involved? How do you convert interested into involved? How about talking about volunteer burn out or over investment by individuals? Let me know your thought!

Further Reading

1. See Two Out of Three SNPs are Gone!
2. According to Wikipedia, Candy Crush is the world’s all time most popular phone game with 0.5 billion players List of most-played mobile games by player count | Wikipedia