The biggest thing to make families show up to stuff is let them plan it, because they are so excited about the planning process. They tell their neighbors, they tell their other friends, and we max out and we can’t even get any more people in the door because so many people are showing up.
—Family Resource Center on the importance of co-designing with families
From January to March 2025, the Prevention Learning Collaborative, funded by the Doris Duke Foundation, embarked on a project to identify effective strategies for reaching and engaging people in voluntary prevention services. By sharing these takeaways, we hope to inspire child welfare agencies with ideas to improve engagement with families, to strengthen engagement efforts, and to prevent the need for child welfare system involvement.
We developed discussion cards to facilitate conversation and inspire new ideas among child welfare professionals. Each card has an overview of an organization and an effective practice they used to drive engagement, followed by prompting questions. These can be used for personal review and reflection or in a group discussion with team members.
Through conversations with community-based organizations and health providers serving families, immigrants, veterans, first responders, and individuals facing food and housing insecurity, we learned about outreach and engagement practices that organizations identified as effective for reaching the populations they serve. Our research confirmed that outreach and engagement efforts should center the needs of the people being served, and needs to start with these foundational strategies. These key takeaways, along with practical examples of how to implement these strategies, highlight why:
A strong track record is the foundation for successful engagement
Our research highlighted the importance of building a foundation of trust to effectively use any engagement strategy. There is no “silver bullet” to engagement - all the agencies we spoke to are using a combination of approaches, iterating, and building relationships over time in order to do engagement well. Some organizations we spoke to had been doing this work for as long as 50 years. Word of mouth is a powerful tool once organizations have built a strong reputation of delivering quality services and a referral network with partners and service users.
Practical example: hosting community forums
A social services organization we spoke to has been running housing and food access programs in an urban neighborhood for 50 years. They created a series of social justice oriented community forums. The events raise funds and awareness and are well attended by different stakeholders and people with lived experience including community members, lived experts, partner organizations, and government agencies. This organization reflected that they can usually get someone to services with just 1 to 2 follow-ups since people are familiar with them and need their services. They also receive calls from community partners because of their strong network, where they might not know the client, but community leaders speak on their behalf to refer them.
Shared lived experience between teams and community is critical to success
Staff with shared lived experience may know better how, where, and when to deliver outreach and engagement messages, because of a shared understanding of service users needs. Participation and engagement is improved by allowing staff to build authentic connections and by sharing decision-making power with service users through advisory groups or councils.
Practical example: developing and hiring outreach providers
A family-centered social services organization we spoke to has been serving a neighborhood in an urban center for 45+ years. Through a business development program, this organization incubated a women-, worker-owned business cooperative. They lead outreach and engagement initiatives including: conducting surveys, running focus groups with people with lived experience, hosting events, and entering shelter spaces to recruit people for services. This organization had received a contract in which they had to enroll 200 families in a program in a short period of time, and this group of 3 women were able to sign people and recruit for them.
Center the needs of service users
Interactions with service users prioritize people’s humanity. Learning about individual needs, addressing barriers, following up and supporting emotional needs and safety is part of meeting each person on their individual journey.
Practical example: coffee chats
An immigrant-centered social services organization we spoke to has been serving the community in urban centers for 40+ years. Many of the families using their services are from a specific region of the world. A staff member at this organization created their own contact list of local undocumented people, an understandably hard-to-reach group that they are still able to get a response from 3 out of 10 times. They call them to check-in or invite them to the office for a coffee chat. During these check-ins they ask what they need, now and in the future, to plan how they can best support them. Through these conversations, they hear about family or friends that might find their services useful, and are able to continue to grow their list. Building these contact lists is important, because they can lean back on these contacts when running events or campaigning initiatives.
Meet people where they are
Organizations go in-person to find service users, and provide services and material needs in one place. Flexible scheduling and low commitment touchpoints provide multiple ways to engage, and lower the barriers to access.
Practical example: QR-code flyers in the bathroom
A licensed mental health provider we spoke to provides support to first responders, who often experience shame and embarrassment in seeking mental health support, and often only get help when they are in a state of crisis. They provide traditional therapy and created early-intervention training to help prevent people from entering crisis or burnout. This mental health provider posted fliers in bathroom stalls in bars during the winter holidays with QR codes to self-led and anonymous 5 minute mental health trainings. Though only 2-3 bars agreed to put it up, they received 50 scans. By acknowledging the need for privacy in the help-seeking behaviors of first responders, she used this approach to meet them where they are.
Work in partnership with trusted organizations
Strong partnerships allow organizations to expand their reach. This includes showing up to community events, sharing information, and planning programs with advisory boards or councils.
Practical example: tabling at oath ceremonies
The immigrant-centered social services organization we spoke to also created a partnership with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Through this partnership, this organization does tabling and outreach at oath ceremonies, with participants much more interested in their services than the average person they’d meet on the street. At these events, they make an announcement at the start of the citizenship ceremony, and afterwards offer to register new citizens to vote.
Deliver messaging through multiple channels and touchpoints
Service users aren’t always ready to participate in programs. They may need to hear messaging multiple times through different online and offline channels like: newsletters, social media, google ads, local newspapers, radio station ads, billboards, bulletin boards, business cards, etc.
Practical example: play areas in laundromats
A Family Resource Center, open for 2 years in a rural area, has been working to facilitate cross-stakeholder collaboration on programs and services for children under 5 in their county for 15 years. This center posts fliers on local community bulletin boards, grocery stores, and church bulletins, as well as in 4 local laundromats. In the laundromats, they set up a corner with a rug, books, family resources, and a small play area for children. Through their previous work in the community for 15 years and collaborative approaches, they have had 2000 families in their county visit the center, in a county where there are only 3000 families with children under the age of 5.
We’ll continue our research on preventing child welfare involvement, so check back for future blog posts.
We’d love to hear from you! Send us a message at prevention@bloomworks.digital with any thoughts or questions.
The Prevention section is generously supported by the Doris Duke Foundation as part of the OPT-In for Families Initiative.