Engaging Your Support Base as an International Worker: Three Key Strategies
Encourage active participation in your ministry with authentic, value-driven communication.
July 12th, 2024 | Ashley Hendrickson
As a cross-cultural worker, engaging and retaining your support base is a regular challenge. Maintaining strong relationships with partners, ensuring they feel connected to your mission, and continuously inspiring their commitment can be daunting. Without a strategic approach, missionaries may find themselves unsure if they are appropriately engaging their connections, and supporters may feel either disconnected or unappreciated, leading to decreased partnership over time. This article will explore three key strategies to help you build and maintain lasting relationships, leverage effective marketing techniques, and encourage active participation from your support base, ensuring sustained and meaningful engagement.
Understand the Value You Provide
First, it is vitally important to understand the value that you provide to your supporters in your newsletters. This requires knowing your partners well and understanding what aspects of your service resonate with them. When you write your newsletters, keep those receiving them in mind as your audience. Rediscover the specific families and individuals that you are communicating with. Ask yourself questions about them. What do they care about? What do they enjoy learning about? What problems do they see in the world? What challenges do they face in living out their faith? What motivates them to action? What changes do they desire to see in the world?
From here, consider your work overseas and how it connects or provides a solution to your supporters’ interests, desires, and problems. All engaged supporters feel some sense of meaning, purpose, or connection through their missional partnerships and relationships. Without you, your supporter may feel disconnected from real impact in the world beyond their own community. They may struggle to know how to love, pray for, and care for the nations. They may wonder how to grow in God’s heart for the world and their understanding of his mission. They may lack practical or reliable ways to serve their brothers, sisters, and those who have not received the gospel around the world. Your job is to communicate to your supporters that you meet these needs and connect them to real impact in the world.
Think about why you have a team of supporters in the first place. It is not just because you need it. Missional partnerships provide genuine value to all believers by allowing the entire body to participate in God’s work around the world in a variety of different ways. Recognize that you are passing along Jesus’ own invitation to his people to join him in the life of his kingdom.
On a podcast about creating change through marketing, One Collective’s Director of Strategic Advancement, Evan Wise, shared,
“Understanding the problem that you solve and the value that your solution provides to your audience is the key to all good marketing communication. For One Collective that looks like understanding that there are a lot of people in this world who are looking for a way to become involved in global impact that doesn’t end short-term, but lasts. We provide a solution in that we are a bridge that connects them to real world impact. We’re not even the middleman. We’re a bridge that allows them to go experience it themselves and be part of it with us. With that framework in mind, the problem that our audiences have and the value that we provide to them is clear. This allows us to communicate well.”
Communicate Ethically
Second, it is important to ensure that the messages and stories communicated in your newsletters are truthful and authentic. Always strive to represent your work and those you serve accurately. This can be a challenge when the context or content of your work is complex or unfamiliar to your supporters. It is even more exacerbated by limits on your supporters’ time and attention. American society in particular is conditioned to receive information in short, headline-style fashions that leave little room for depth or nuance. This creates tensions of time and space that will interact with your desire to provide valuable content to your partners. However, you don’t have to settle for less! As you write your newsletters, remember the solutions and value that you provide, and communicate in a way that leads your supporters one step closer to that value.
In the aforementioned podcast, Evan shared a helpful tip about ethical communication:
“One of the things that I use to guide my work is the quesion, “Does this simplification lead someone to the greater truth, or does it distract them from the greater truth?” Sometimes we have to explain things that are very complicated in a very short period of time. If a simplification leads people to ask questions that will get them to the greater truth, then I think it’s more ethical. If it leads people away from greater context and truth in favor of only giving them a tiny bite-sized bit, then it’s not.”
In this way, even as you manage the length of your newsletters, you can ensure that your communication is honest and sincere. Know the value of nuance and deep reflection, yet recognize the reality of limited time. This will help your communication align with what your partners are looking for. They know real value when they see it, and they will appreciate your efforts to communicate in ways that they can reasonably digest.
Encourage Active Participation
Finally, creatively engage your partners with opportunities for ongoing participation in your ministry. Your newsletter is a powerful tool to cast vision, mobilize resources, and bring people together for the sake of the kingdom. What are ways that your supporters can be more deeply involved in the community you are serving together? This is another place where your knowledge of your context and partners comes together. Identify the interests and skills your supporters have that could be catalyzed on behalf of your community, and creatively invite them to invest those resources in missional ways. These invitations can extend well beyond short-term mission trips and prayer guides. For example, virtual events and service opportunities are an increasingly popular and valuable way to meaningfully engage partners. You may consider showing your supporters around your neighborhood, introducing prayer partners to local leaders, asking a graphic designer to create materials for a business initiative, or having an architect help design a new building you are constructing.
Listen to the Full Interview with Evan
Conclusion
Good communication has the power to unify people together around real value for greater impact. When writing to your audience of partners, be aware of their needs and desires and create content that reflects the value you provide. Connect your supporters with your ministry in ways that are meaningful to them and help them genuinely interact with what you want to share. Regularly open doors for deeper learning, investment, and participation. With these strategies in mind, your newsletters can be an influential tool for long-term transformation in the communities you serve!
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