Community Engagement the Right Way with Outreach Skills

Four essential outreach skills for putting a community engagement plan into action.

After months—maybe years—of planning, research, building, and even growing a few extra gray hairs, your program is ready for your community. You’re certain that you’ve trained your community health team to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, keep people out of emergency rooms, lower their high blood pressure, control their diabetes, keep them safe from skin cancer. You’ve met all your grant objectives, you’re confident what you’ve created will help, and your community is…silent.

What did you miss?

It could be outreach.

Even the best programs can fail if no one knows about them. Keeping communities in better health begins with an outreach effort. All community health worker (CHW), care coordination or other health promotion teams should understand what outreach is and why it helps, so it pays to train them with the right skills to spread word about your programs and services.  Outreach is an important element of any core competencies training plan. Don’t forget to download our free guide to state requirements for CHW certifications.

What Is Community Outreach?

Community outreach is the practice of offering education, planning, and support activities to community members.

In terms of health, community outreach means connecting with community members to educate them about ways they can improve their health and the health of their family.

This might mean talking to local groups or using local and social media to discuss healthy habits. Or it might mean appearing at community events to do health demonstrations and build linkages.

Outreach is important for connecting people to healthcare and services. It helps to delivers evidence-based information and minimizes communication gaps among providers and the public.

For example, many communities are kicking off COVID-19 vaccination engagement programs. The problem is that COVID-19 hits communities of color especially hard. However, many people distrust government-run medical programs because of a history of medical racism and health inequalities.

Careful vaccination strategies that are focused on vulnerable communities—the ones where CHWs work—are working to break down misinformation and build trust. You can read more about some successful community engagement programs here.

Photo: COVID-19 immunizations begin on Flickr

Community outreach and engagement is a process that happens over and over again.

Research shows that people won’t act on something until they’ve heard or seen it seven times, on average. The rule of seven is an old marketing rule that happens to still be true.

Successful outreach is definitely and art, but also a science. Skills can be learned, and many of them most CHWs already have through working with other health care practitioners and working with clients.

Safe Community Outreach During COVID-19

Community outreach programs can range in size and scale, but in 2019, they usually involved sending representatives to places like health fairs, farmers markets, and other local events to get personal with community members. “Personal” could range from shaking hands to taking blood pressure readings.

Here in 2020 amid the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19), those practices are restricted–if they’re even possible at all. Many events are virtual or canceled. Your staff needs to follow social distancing guidelines to keep everyone healthy and limit the spread of the disease.

However, now is exactly the time your agency might need to do more outreach. People need to know about wearing face coverings, staying home, staying apart, and getting vaccinations. Check out our COVID resources for CHWs.

Your agency will likely have to decide which outreach campaigns take a back seat for now, and which you will have to continue carefully. Some ways to do outreach without spreading the disease could be:

• Care coordination or service coordination with telehealth
• Making phone calls to community members for check-ins and reminders of important appointments

Increase training for CHWs in simple and effective practices they can do during a brief home visit. They might learn how to do first aid or brief screenings, such as for COVID-19 symptoms.  Online training platforms are a good solution for keeping your team up-to-date on outreach skills without gathering together in a room. Try a learning subscription from CHWTraining for year-round training or offer sessions on web meeting platforms like Zoom.

4 Top Outreach Skills

No matter if your outreach program is happening during the pandemic or later, here are four essential outreach skills to share with your team that they can start using right away.

1. Build organizational skills.
2. Tell a story—and feel free to make it personal.
3. Make sure the right people hear it.
4. Repeat and repeat again.

1) Build organizational skills.

Taking on an outreach project needs organization. If you’re a program manager, you’ll have to make sure your team members can control their own job duties and work well with others. It also means building skills in capturing information, conducting research. A good base in organizational skills will form a base of successful outreach projects.

2) Tell a story—and feel free to make it personal.

Our culture is built on connecting with others in society, and we make connections better through stories. Keeping hypertension under control might boil down to blood pressure readings, but it’s so much more engaging to know how and why it matters in real life. If you need help phrasing a story, the Acrobatant blog has a great article Three Ways to Tell Your Story in Healthcare Marketing.

ReThink Health also has a Public Narrative Toolkit for outreach skills that includes short videos, worksheets, meeting agendas, and coaching tips for telling stories.

When doing any kind of outreach, ask your team to think about their own experience or those of others and how it relates. This is what sparks excitement and engagement.

3) Make sure the right people hear it.

Part of being organized is identifying your target audience, or the people who you need to communicate with. Even the most compelling story and useful program or service will fall flat if you skip this step. Spend time carefully identifying who you need to reach with your outreach project.

For example, you might target mothers with small children with a sunscreen use outreach project. What places do they visit around town? Do they use social media? Do health fairs work for your clients? Can you partner with schools or businesses? Learn your audience and support system so you can connect meaningfully.

4) Repeat, and repeat again.

Once is never enough. After you’ve done the research, drafted the your story, and found a target audience, deploy the outreach plan. And then do it again. People need to be reminded, because they forget, get distracted, the information isn’t relevant—whatever the reason is, hearing a message multiple times makes it click.

Outreach skills are only one part of the most important skills to build a CHW training program that will guarantee the success of your program. Have a look at some of our skill-building training courses to think about how they fit into your initiative.

Originally published Sep 26, 2019, updated April 9, 2021.