March 18, 2021
Established in 1982, Community Impact North Carolina, Inc. (CINC) is a community-based nonprofit organization that promotes and enables community-centered substance misuse prevention through education, prevention initiatives and programs, and policy advocacy. Since 2002, CINC has provided education and other support to community-based coalitions across North Carolina.
The Opportunity
A critical support that CINC provides is training to community coalitions throughout North Carolina. In 2020, CINC saw those community coalitions needed to build internal capabilities to ensure sustainability. CINC wanted to provide a three-day training session to develop such capabilities and sought to collaborate with an organization specializing in this training.
Goals
Leveraging Atrómitos’ expertise in organizational management, CINC contracted with Atrómitos to develop and deliver business and marketing training content, build a tool kit, and provide coalitions one-on-one technical assistance after the training session.
“I have been and continue to be very pleased with the business practices and products produced by Atrómitos. The Atrómitos team took the time required to understand the unique requests made by our organization, and their attention to detail in the product creation process was exceptional. The final product reflected their desire to meet our organizational needs with an attitude of excellence.”
Approach
Atrómitos designed a three-day training that addressed business planning (Day 1), budgeting and fund development (Day 2), and marketing and communications (Day 3). In doing so, we focused on the following:
- Aligning with frameworks and processes already familiar to the community coalitions, such as the SAMHSA Strategic Prevention Framework, and
- Small teams can make planning approaches with extremely limited resources.
Through a collaborative process that included sharing outlines and drafts of the training decks with CINC, we ensured that the training incorporated all the topics important to CINC, but more importantly, appropriately messaged CINC’s primary goal: adopting an entrepreneurial mindset and practices is not counter to a nonprofit or community coalition culture but will in fact enable mission achievement.
Based on the topics covered in training, we created four tool kits for attendees:
- Business Planning
- Budgeting
- Fund Development
- Marketing and Communications
The toolkits contained 36 electronically downloadable documents designed to support participants in taking actionable steps toward building capabilities in the focus areas of the training. These documents included usable templates such as budgets, SWOTs, business plans, and additional educational materials.
As a result of COVID, Atrómitos had to work with CINC to convert a planned in-person training to an all-virtual training. To accommodate this, we revised the agendas to introduce more breaks and shortened the days. We also used polling questions throughout the training sessions to query attendees about topics covered and evaluate attendees’ understanding and retention of the material covered. To ensure that attendees could receive the full benefit of the training, we made available 30-minute follow-up calls with Atrómitos team members to address any questions that attendees may have or talk through. This would address any challenges the attendee’s organization was experiencing and how the training could be used to manage them.
Conclusion
Despite the training happening during COVID, using a virtual training model rather than in person, we had an average of 20 attendees per day from throughout North Carolina. Attendees remained engaged for the entire training session each day, asking questions and providing examples. A survey of attendees after the training sessions found that:
- All or the vast majority of attendees found the material very or highly relevant to them
- All attendees found the tool kit materials easy to access and practical
- All attendees would attend another training provided by Atrómitos
