Four essential outreach skills for putting a community engagement plan into action.
You’ve invested countless hours and resources into developing a program that can make a real difference in your community’s health. But despite your best efforts, you’re met with silence.
What did you miss?
It could be outreach.
This is where outreach and community engagement come in. They make it possible to improve health outcomes in underserved communities. It helps your team to build trust, promote health programs, and ultimately, save lives.
However, many community health initiatives struggle to reach their target audience, leading to low participation rates and limited impact.
If you’ve invested time, resources and effort into developing a program that can make a real difference in your community’s health, but you’re not seeing the results you expected, it’s likely that outreach is the missing piece of the puzzle. Even the most well-designed programs can fail if no one knows about them.
All community health worker (CHW), care coordination or other health promotion teams should understand what outreach is and why it helps. They need to be able to connect with their communities, promote health programs, and provide education and support to those who need it most.
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.
Virtual Outreach
In the past, community outreach programs often depended on in-person events like health fairs, farmers markets and local gatherings to connect with community members. They’re still happening, but less than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these events became virtual or were canceled.
Community outreach doesn’t have to be limited by the physical world. Virtual outreach offers a powerful way to connect with community members, boost awareness of health programs, and provide education and support from a distance.
Virtual outreach allows your team to reach a wider audience, increase engagement and reduce costs connected with in-person events. Plus, it’s a safer way to connect with community members who may be vulnerable to COVID-19 or have mobility issues.
Here are some helpful virtual outreach strategies:
- Host webinars, online workshops and social media live sessions to educate community members about health topics and programs
- Use video conferencing tools to do virtual home visits, check-ins and conversations with community members
- Use online training platforms such as CHWTraining to provide CHWs with the skills and knowledge they need to support virtual outreach efforts
- Use social media and online channels to promote health programs, share resources and engage with community members in real-time
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.
- Build organizational skills.
- Tell a story—and feel free to make it personal.
- Make sure the right people hear it.
- Repeat and repeat again.
Roles And Boundaries Of CHWs
This 45-minute on-demand training includes topics like the differences between CHWs and other health staff, common roles, and boundaries for supervisors and managers who want to add CHWs to their team.
4 Top Outreach Skills
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.
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Originally published Sep 26, 2019, updated July 30, 2024.