DignityUSA

DignityUSA

• 2 full-time staff, 2 part-time staff
• 14 board members
• $490,000 annual budget (FY 2012)
• Supports 42 chapters across the U.S., and four active interest groups

With some 42 active chapters located predominantly in metropolitan areas, DignityUSA had been struggling with how to better provide services and a sense of community to members who don’t have access to a local chapter. As an organization that works to achieve respect and justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in the Catholic Church and the world at large, that sense of community is critical.

“Part of what LGBT Catholics lack is a sense of spiritual community where they can be fully who they are,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, DignityUSA’s executive director. “All engagement in our organization has traditionally proceeded from that sense of community. While people also support the advocacy side of what we do, providing a welcoming and affirming spiritual home is a big part of our unique work.

“Whether it might be communicating in a more timely fashion or starting online publications, we were asking ourselves how to do things that foster a greater sense of connection for and among our membership—that was the mission-driven challenge we were facing,” said Duddy-Burke.

The answers don’t come easy when you’re a self-described “very lean” organization of just two full-time and two part-time staff. DignityUSA’s part-time webminister, Logan Bear, learned about the NTEN Technology Leadership Academy, and he and Duddy-Burke enrolled despite their concerns: the time commitment that would be required and trepidation that, although “doing pretty well for organization of our size and resources, we’d be at the bottom of the barrel in terms of our tech knowledge, resources, and strategy,” she said.

Since the DignityUSA staff comprises a virtual team—Duddy-Burke is based on Massachusetts; Bear in Ohio—the two would chat online or be on the phone together during the Tech Leadership Academy’s weekly sessions. They also involved their tech committee, which includes both staff and volunteers. When one of the Academy’s homework assignments--setting priorities and a tech budget for the next 18 months-- dovetailed with the timing of a tech committee meeting, Duddy-Burke and Bear brought the question to the team and worked through it together.

Duddy-Burke began seeing an impact almost immediately. “Logan is brilliant on the technology side of things, and the Tech Leadership Academy helped further connect him to the business side of DignityUSA,” she said. Prior to participating in the Academy, Bear’s presentations to the board were more technology-driven; during and following the Academy, “it was great to see how he put everything into the context of our work and resources and how tech supports our strategic approach and direction,” she said. Similarly, she gained a greater facility with tech language and concepts. “The Academy was a really good platform for us to share our perspectives.”

The session on contact management was especially timely and relevant to DignityUSA, since it already had been planning to implement a contact management solution, CiviCRM. “That session really showed us how you can see the totality of individuals’ engagement with the organization--services they’re getting, contributions, e-blasts opened, which committees they’re on--versus a bunch of screen notes.” The Academy validated DignityUSA’s decision and gave Bear and Duddy-Burke the confidence to move ahead with implementation.

To bolster its community-engagement work, the group also is about to launch a monthly videoconferencing series, Queer Catholic Faith, geared toward members and supporters who live outside major geographic areas.

“Before the Tech Leadership Academy, I’m not sure this is something we would have felt confident enough to do,” said Duddy-Burke, who subsequently learned “there are some pretty accessible platforms to use.” The Academy helped the organization compile its list of requirements, search for the right tools, and integrate participant information with particular CiviCRM screens. “We already have other organizations that want to help us publicize the series, which will help not only provide that sense of community we want for our current members, but we’re going to reach a lot of new people,” she said.

The Academy session on social media also hit home. “I realized Facebook wasn’t about just announcing events, but that it’s a platform for dialogue and building engagement and having people participate in the work you’re doing,” said Duddy-Burke. “We’re much more consistent, and we have much more of a two-way presence in all of our social media.”

In addition, DignityUSA now has a blog on its website and also hosts blogs for different member constituencies. One of the most popular communications from DignityUSA has long been a weekly reflection on Catholic scripture from an LGBT perspective. “We used to just post it on our website. Now we post it on Facebook, Twitter, our blog—and we pose questions and engage in conversation,” said Duddy-Burke.

The organization has added another part-time staff person with social media experience and has been building its Facebook and Twitter presence: Facebook followers have grown six-fold; an all-but-dead Twitter account now gains new followers daily.

Better yet, the new followers are people who were previously unknown to DignityUSA, including many who are located in cities without chapters and younger, which is important in terms of sustainability to an organization whose followers had tended to be older and concentrated in urban centers. The increased reach also is prompting the group to take a long hard look at what “membership” entails.

“As our reach broadens, we’re thinking about how to mobilize people in different ways than we used to; we’re shifting how we think about who we are and how we deliver services,” Duddy-Burke explained.

The conversion to CiviCRM, which is still in the testing phases, has been met with increased enthusiasm and buy-in from the board, tech committee, and a small group of testers comprised of both members and chapter leaders. One of the first applications was online registration for DignityUSA’s next national convention. “People loved the instant acknowledgement they received. We were able to improve our customer service, and now we have all the contact information in one place,” said Duddy-Burke, “things we didn’t have the capacity to do before.”

Perhaps the most significant impact of the Academy is a shift in organizational culture. “We’re really concentrating on seeing tech resources as a truly integral part of how we deliver services,” she said.

To that end, the group has expanded the tech committee from “mostly techies” to users and even technophobes. “That has been an amazing outcome for us,” she said. “Getting immediate feedback on how our technology interfaces will be received from people who represent our ‘typical’ member/donor has helped us roll out things that exceeded their expectations. The non-techies raise questions that we know we need to address up front.” And that has meant chapters now are more likely to use the technology services DignityUSA offers, such as redesigning and hosting chapter websites. In turn, relationships with individual chapters have improved, and more consistent websites across chapters have solidified branding.

Of her initial concern about time, Duddy-Burke says, “It’s definitely true that you have to commit the time. This is not a program where you can just skate by.” As for her worries that her group would be the small fish in a large tech pond, “no matter where you’re starting from,” she said, “there is the possibility to make great moves forward.”