halo

EP52: How To Measure How “Enriching” Your Community Is w/ Team RWB

Episode Summary

Team RWB knew tracking impact was critical so they created a metric for “enrichment”. This is a 40-question survey used to measure physical health, mental health, supportive relationships, sense of purpose and other valuable information. Team RWB has learned that engagement is the best way to bring people up on the enrichment scale, and it allows them to identify points in the member journey where events would be impactful for the community.

Episode Notes

Team RWB knew tracking impact was critical so they created a metric for “enrichment”. This is a 40-question survey used to measure physical health, mental health, supportive relationships, sense of purpose and other valuable information. Team RWB has learned that engagement is the best way to bring people up on the enrichment scale, and it allows them to identify points in the member journey where events would be impactful for the community."

 

Who is this episode great for?

Non-profit, Scaling, In-person Communities

What’s the biggest takeaway?

Dan knew tracking success was important so he created a metric for “enrichment”. This is a 40-question survey is used to measure physical health, mental health, supportive relationships, sense of purpose and other valuable information. Dan learned that events is the best way to bring people up on the enrichment scale and tries to find points in the member journey where events would be useful for the community.

Episode Transcription

Derek:
Can you describe what Team Red, White & Blue is, and what you do in your role there?

Dan: 
Team Red, White & Blue, or Team RWB as we call it, is a national veterans nonprofit. We were founded in 2010. Our mission is to enrich the lives of America's veterans by connecting them to their community through physical and social activities. To date, we've got just over 210,000 registered members, mainly in the US. But we also support active duty guard reserve, so we've got folks that are deployed overseas that are also a part of the organization.

Dan:
We've got just about 1,800 volunteer leaders, which are the lifeblood of the organization. Those are the ones that are putting on the tens of thousands of physical, social service oriented events and activities in a couple hundred communities across the country each year.

Dan: 
I came to the organization in 2015, so I'm an Army veteran myself. I was an artillery officer. I spent about 15 years after the military working in corporate America in an agency, and then I wanted to move into a different role and give back to the community. I came over to Team Red, White & Blue at the early days as a marketing and comms person, but as I quickly realized, when you're in an organization of our size, you do a lot more than that.

Dan: 
I've been involved in branding and tech, business intelligence, pretty much our whole digital experience, since I've been here. More specifically, over the last six months, really heads down on all things digital, in terms of what the experience looks like for our member and our volunteer leaders across all of our digital assets. Digital is a means by which a lot of people connect to us, both online as well as the in real life events. So we're really pushing the envelope with how we can create an omnipresent experience for our veterans, and digital is a huge component of that.

Derek: 
Well, thank you for, first of all, your personal service, and what you all do for so many great people out there. We talk to so many great communities and great causes, but if there's not a better group to support and to help than what you all are doing, then I don't know what it is. We really appreciate that.

Derek: 
One of the things I love about your community is ... Well, not every community, but a lot of communities have these terms that they create for their community leaders. I think yours is the best. Yours are called Eagles, or your members, excuse me. I wondered if you could just share where that name came from and how it came to be.

Dan: 
Sure. When the organization was founded back in 2010, they created the initial brand identity, and at the heart of our brand identity was an eagle as our logo mark. It's at the centerpiece also of our token red shirt that most people will say that they've seen us at various races or events across the country, so having the eagle be pretty much on everything that we do and a part of all of our gear, members have just become known as eagles, and then that's pretty much led to a whole community lexicon in the last probably six to seven years.

Dan: 
Our events are called Eagle something, like Eagle Namaste for yoga. We talk about our members by Eagle, we use inspirational sayings and phrases like "eagle up", which is get going, get after it. Eagle fire for people that are showing that level of motivation or inspiration in their local communities. Yeah, we use Eagle pretty much everywhere where we speak. Even our volunteer leaders are called Eagle leaders, so Eagle is omnipresent across pretty much our entire experience.

Derek: 
You have about 200 chapters today, and I wonder, did they just begin organically? Did you all plan them? How did they get launched?

Dan: 
Yeah. It wasn't like that in the first couple years. It was really around us trying to identify veterans in need, and try to support them. What we realized is that the veterans that we thought needed the service were like, I don't need help. I want to help somebody. So in 2012 is when they had a big planning session with the early volunteer leaders in the organization, and they sat together and they essentially said, hey. We are coming up with a new model here. The belief was that the team and the community needed to become one. We opened up the aperture in terms of inclusivity. At that point in time, it wasn't just a focus on veterans. It was a focus on veterans, active duty, guard, reserve, but also military family members and civilians. We're probably one of the only veteran service organizations out there that have a significant portion of our membership that's actually civilians. It's about 20% of that 210,000.

Dan:
Our belief is if you're going to integrate a veteran back into the community, a vast majority of people in their communities are civilians. They're not other veterans. So for us to be successful, these chapters that we were creating would need to allow for this connection, as opposed to what you may have see for some of the first generation VSOs, like the VFW and the Legion, where it's veterans getting together with veterans in bricks and mortar locations. We do that as well, but the goal is really to be very inclusive. That became the centerpiece of the new operating model, which is a chapter based operating model, volunteer leaders leading some key roles with the playbook, in terms of how they would stand up these various chapters across the country.

Dan: 
Once that template was created, it was a matter of identifying the key people who were interested in the organization to be able to take it and grow it organically within their community, but they had a good template to work off of.

Derek: 
I know a lot of brands just struggle to get their communities to get together once a quarter, and your chapters, you have some of them that are literally doing engagements multiple times a month. How are you able to do that? How are you able to instill that and get people excited about being so engaged?

Dan: 
Yeah, I think part of it's tied to our mission. The heart of it is physical and social activity, so that lends itself nicely to not only doing some bigger events possibly on a monthly basis, like maybe a big race or something of that nature, but we are big believers in a low barrier to entry and local consistent behavior. So keeping connections going on a continuous basis is critical. We know our volunteer leaders live busy lives, they give us a lot of their free time, so the goal is to find, what is the right mix of diversity of events, locations, timeframes that will work for the folks in that area?

Dan: 
Some people register and go out for a [ruck 00:06:19]. Some people like to do yoga. It's the ability to say, hey, right, maybe only two or three people showing up at an event. Every event does not need to be a mega event. Micro events are where relationships start and connections happen. The goal is to create the consistency around if. If I know every week I've got two to three opportunities to possibly get together with some fellow Eagles, that's what right looks like. It varies, once again, depending on areas.

Dan: 
I live in Bend, Oregon. We've got about 150 members and a subset of that that come out on a fairly frequent basis, whereas if I go down to some of the chapters in Texas and Houston, you got 50+ leaders. They've got a big geography that they need to cover down on, so they're putting on events all around the city, because that's the only way geographically people might be able to get to it during a certain point in time during the week.

Derek: 
What qualities make the best organizers, from your perspective?

Dan: 
For us, the best volunteer leaders that we've seen are ones that have the passion for veterans and our mission. They really believe in what we're trying to do. It's very core. They give a ton of their time and personal resources to support us. I would say that's the biggest thing.

Dan: 
Back to the chapter based model, though, that we've created, there are different roles. Some are being the chapter captain, which is a leader role, versus maybe a veteran engagement director where you're creating relationships with local veterans in the community, athletic coordinator. I would suggest that depending on what role a volunteer leader takes, their skillsets and experience are what allow them to be successful. If you're a yoga teacher and you want to be an athletic coordinator, that's awesome. You can put on yoga classes for us, or somebody who's super into crossfit may have a box or a gym that they're affiliated with. They can help get veterans in and actually help them learn how to do crossfit or functional fitness workouts.

Dan: 
I think it really depends, but at the top of that list is truly a passion for veterans and their families.

Derek: 
You're obviously doing a lot of good in the veteran community, and for their families. How do the events support Team RWB? Does it help drive donations or some other type of engagement that helps fuel your mission and your team?

Dan: 
Our goal, our mission, is to enrich lives. We've done a fair amount of research over the last six to seven years that suggests engagement, higher levels of engagement, lead to enrichment. The events are that gateway to enrichment. It's the ability to create these local connections and to create consistent opportunities for people to engage with one another that shows that we can increase enrichment in our veteran population.

Dan: 
We spent a fair amount of time doing research. We created our own research instrument. We call it the Enriched Life Scale. It's got a few different dimensions to it around physical health, mental health, supportive relationships, sense of purpose, and engaged citizenship. We can begin to analyze through a member onboarding process and periodic points in the year where somebody is on that enrichment scale. If we find opportunities to enrich people, we know the pathway there is through events, is to get people engaged. Whether, once again, it's one of these micro events where it's only a few people getting together, or if it's a big national event that we may put on a handful of times a year.

Dan:
I think the key thing is a lot of veterans isolate themselves, so they're not real apt to go out and meet with 10 people. They have anxiety, they don't want to do that. The ability to get together maybe with one or two other people and go for a hike could be the catalyst to get them to come out on a consistent basis.

Derek: 
What are the metrics, whether it's growth or just generally tracking, that you think matter most for your community?

Dan: 
Multiple factors at play here. For me, I'm focused a ton on creating opportunities for connection and engagement. When I think about growth, I'm thinking about active users and engaged members. How many people are touching our community, whether it's offline or online, every day, every week, every month? That allows us to create opportunities for them to become enriched, to create these relationships and to get in shape. At the end of the day, I think the two that I would probably focus the most on would be consistency and relevance. Are we relevant to them, and how often can we keep them consistently engaged with the organization?

Derek:
We see more and more companies adopting the customer to customer model. Do you think that more cause based organizations like Team RWB are going to start adopting that, or do you think this is a smaller trend that's good for some but not others?

Dan: 
I think it probably depends on business models. But I do think it's going to continue to grow. I think that's where you create loyalty and retention with your stakeholders and your user base, so we don't call anybody a customer within our terminology. For us, it's members, and the answer would be absolutely. This has been our approach for the past decade, is to have a member to member model or community. It's pretty much at the heart of what we do, in terms of creating connections both offline and online. We're a team. We truly are a team. When people leave the service, they leave their branches and their affiliations behind, and we're essentially saying, this is the shirt that you now put on. This is your uniform. You put on the eagle and you're still part of a team again.

Dan: 
Community is in our mission statement. We have six different pillars that form our Eagle Ethos and community is one of those. At the end of the day, it's pretty much who we are.

Derek: 
I love that idea, the member to member. That's maybe the next podcast, maybe you should run that podcast. That's a great way to look at it.

Derek: 
As we wrap up, tell us about a community that you love, and why do you love it?

Dan: 
There's probably a couple. I'm a lacrosse coach when I'm not doing the veteran thing, so there's a whole great lacrosse community that I've been a part of since I was a kid playing, and now coaching at the high school level, which I love. But the one unique community that I've gotten involved with over the past 12 years or so is the ultrarunning community, which is a really cool tribe of crazy people that are really inspiring.

Dan: 
To me, it's one of those awesome communities, because people aren't competing with one another. They are in it to push themselves and everybody else understands the challenges that you face when you're running a 50, 100, 200 mile race. They all look at you like they're one of their own. The crews are like your family, even if it's somebody else's crew. I've loved to be a part of that subculture ever since I joined, and it's probably why I'm still around even though my knees and my hips are shot. Just, I really find them a fun and interesting bunch.